It was on the Sunday forenoon--a grim, gray morning threatening a storm--following the fatal Thursday, that we met in the court-yard of the city hospital to bury poor Reiner.
The hideous barrenness of a Flemish burial-ground, even in bright, cheerful weather, is enough to crush the most buoyant spirits; it is indescribably oppressive and soul-sickening. The awful desolation of the place in the dreariness of that day will ever remain a horrid souvenir in my mind. Nature did not seem to weep, but to frown; and in the heavy air one felt a deep and solemn reproach. The soaked and dull atmosphere was stifling in its density, like the overloaded breath from some newly opened tomb. There was an army of felt but unseen spirits lurking in the ghostly quiet of the place, which the presence of a hundred mortals did not disturb. There was no breath of wind, and the settling of the snow and a faint, faint moan of the distant rushing tide made the silence more oppressive. The drip of the water from the drenched mosses on the brick walls; the faintest rustle of the wreaths of immortelles hung on every hideous black cross; the fall of one withered flower from the forgotten offerings of some friend of the buried dead--every sound at other times and in other places quite inaudible, broke upon that unearthly quiet with startling distinctness. The sound of our footsteps, as we followed the winding path to the fresh heap of earth in a remote corner, fell heavily on the thick air, and the high brick walls, mouldy and rotting in the sunless angles, gave a deep and unwilling echo. It was like treading the dark and skull-walled passages of the Catacombs without the grateful veil of a partial darkness. All that was mortal and subject to decay, all that was to our poor human understanding immortal and indestructible, seemed buried alike in this rigid, barren enclosure. Beyond? There was no beyond; the straight, barren walls on all sides, and the impenetrable murkiness of the gray vault that covered us, barred out the material and the spiritual world. Here was the end, here all was certain and defined--a narrow ditch, a few shovelfuls of earth, and nothing more that needed or invited explanation. There was no future, no waking from that sleep: all exit from that narrow and pitiless graveyard seemed forever closed. Such thoughts as these were, until then, strangers to us. Could it be the unextinguishable influence of that nerveless body that filled the place with the dread and uncongenial presence that urged us to accept for the time, then and there, the theories and convictions of the mind which once animated that cold and motionless mass?