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Like the old man in the song: "'Oh, he never got drunk and he never swore, And he never did violate the lor; And so we buried him underground, And the funeral-bell did merrily sound Ding! Dong! Dell!" Thus far Brooke had rattled on in a strange, dry fashion; but suddenly he stopped, and then exclaimed, "Good Heavens!"
The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to the wail of the De Profundis. Not always, not always; let us not be cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say, is subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and soul-subduing influences.
She threw back her head and closed her eyes to shut out the stupidity, and the mockery, and the misery of that idea. "I don't want" she spoke slowly. Her voice dropped from its high petulant pitch, and rounded to its funeral-bell note "I don't want a piano, nor a reading-stand, nor a sofa. I simply want a place that I can call my own."
The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to the wail of the De Profundis. Not always, not always; let us not be cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say, is subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and soul-subduing influences.
The funeral-bell stirred me. I looked out from the window, and saw the long procession moving slowly on. Katie startled me, coming in. "The minister's wife is down-stairs; she wants to know if she may come up," she said. "She is my sister, Katie; yes, I think she may come." I was so relieved to see Sophie; it was getting back to self again, out of which I had gone in this house.
Many a merry night had she danced with them in youth, and now in joyless age she felt that some withered partner should request her hand and all unite in a dance of death to the music of the funeral-bell.
The thought came like the sweeping boom of a funeral-bell over her heart. By and by, Mr Openshaw came to lodge with them. He had started in life as the errand-boy and sweeper-out of a warehouse; had struggled up through all the grades of employment in it, fighting his way through the hard, striving Manchester life with strong, pushing energy of character.
Soon I saw the crowd about the station begin to move, and presently the funeral-bell swung out its solemn tones of lamentation; its measured, lingering strokes, mingled with the woful shrieking of the wind and the sighing of the pine-tree overhead, made a dirge of inexpressible force and melancholy.
Yet the truth came back upon her in hideous distinctness every now and then came back suddenly and awfully, like the swift revelation of a desolate plague-stricken scene under a lightning flash. He was gone. He was lying in his coffin, in the dear old Tudor hall where they had sat so cosily. Those dismal reiterated strokes of the funeral-bell meant that his burial was at hand.
"I beg your pardon; I was thinking in words," he replied. "I am sorry that I cannot do as you wish," I said, and resumed my profession in the room above. The day went on, never pausing one moment for the sorrow and the suffering that another day had brought to this house in Redleaf. Just before the funeral-bell began to toll, Mr. Axtell came again to the sickroom door. There was no change.
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