At last they seemed to pass from darkness into partial sunshine, and Bradley found himself standing in the open air. On every side, and high as the eye could reach, rose gloomy walls with overhanging caves and buttresses, leaving only one narrow space above where the blue of heaven was dimly seen. There was a flutter of wings, and the shadows of a flight of birds passed overhead--doves which made their home in the gloomy recesses of the roofs and walls.
Beneath was a sort of quadrangle, some twenty feet square, covered with grass, which for the most part grew knee-deep, interspersed with nettles and gloomy weeds, and which was in other places stunted and decayed, as if withered by some hideous mildew or blight. Here and there there was a rude wooden cross stuck into the earth, and indicating what looked to the eye like a neglected grave.
The Sister led the way through the long undergrowth, till she reached the side of a mound on which the grass had scarcely grown at all, and on which was set one of those coarse crosses.
‘You ask me what has become of the poor penitent you seek. She died in the holy faith, and her mortal body is buried _here_.’
With a wild shriek Bradley fell on his knees, and tearing the cross from the earth read the inscription rudely carved upon it:--
That was all. Bradley gazed at the cross in utter agony and desolation; then shrieking again aloud, fell forward on his face. The faint light from the far-off blue crept down over him, and over the two black figures, who gazed in wonder upon him; and thus for a long time he lost the sense of life and time, and lay as if dead.
Lightly, gentle earth.--_The Maid’s Tragedy_.
Professor Mapleleafe speedily saw that to oppose his sister would be inopportune--might perhaps even cause her decline and death. He determined’ therefore to humour her, and to delay for a short time their proposed return to America.
‘Look here, Eustasia,’ he said to her one day, ‘I find I’ve got something to do in Paris; you shall come with me. Perhaps the change there may bring you back to your old self again. Anyhow we’ll try it; for if this goes on much longer you’ll die!’
‘No, Salem, I shan’t die till I’ve seen _him_ again!’ she answered, with a faint forced smile.