Twice-Told Tales Read Online Free PDF

turned away their faces; others kept a fixed and rigid
stare, and a young girl giggled hysterically and fainted with the
laughter on her lips. When the spectral procession approached the
altar, each couple separated and slowly diverged, till in the centre
appeared a form that had been worthily ushered in with all this gloomy
pomp, the death-knell and the funeral. It was the bridegroom in his
shroud.
    No garb but that of the grave could have befitted such a death-like
aspect. The eyes, indeed, had the wild gleam of a sepulchral lamp; all
else was fixed in the stern calmness which old men wear in the coffin.
The corpse stood motionless, but addressed the widow in accents that
seemed to melt into the clang of the bell, which fell heavily on the
air while he spoke.
    "Come, my bride!" said those pale lips. "The hearse is ready; the
sexton stands waiting for us at the door of the tomb. Let us be
married, and then to our coffins!"
    How shall the widow's horror be represented? It gave her the
ghastliness of a dead man's bride. Her youthful friends stood apart,
shuddering at the mourners, the shrouded bridegroom and herself; the
whole scene expressed by the strongest imagery the vain struggle of
the gilded vanities of this world when opposed to age, infirmity,
sorrow and death.
    The awestruck silence was first broken by the clergyman.
    "Mr. Ellenwood," said he, soothingly, yet with somewhat of authority,
"you are not well. Your mind has been agitated by the unusual
circumstances in which you are placed. The ceremony must be deferred.
As an old friend, let me entreat you to return home."
    "Home—yes; but not without my bride," answered he, in the same hollow
accents. "You deem this mockery—perhaps madness. Had I bedizened my
aged and broken frame with scarlet and embroidery, had I forced my
withered lips to smile at my dead heart, that might have been mockery
or madness; but now let young and old declare which of us has come
hither without a wedding-garment—the bridegroom or the bride."
    He stepped forward at a ghostly pace and stood beside the widow,
contrasting the awful simplicity of his shroud with the glare and
glitter in which she had arrayed herself for this unhappy scene. None
that beheld them could deny the terrible strength of the moral which
his disordered intellect had contrived to draw.
    "Cruel! cruel!" groaned the heartstricken bride.
    "Cruel?" repeated he; then, losing his deathlike composure in a wild
bitterness, "Heaven judge which of us has been cruel to the other! In
youth you deprived me of my happiness, my hopes, my aims; you took
away all the substance of my life and made it a dream without reality
enough even to grieve at—with only a pervading gloom, through which I
walked wearily and cared not whither. But after forty years, when I
have built my tomb and would not give up the thought of resting
there—no, not for such a life as we once pictured—you call me to the
altar. At your summons I am here. But other husbands have enjoyed your
youth, your beauty, your warmth of heart and all that could be termed
your life. What is there for me but your decay and death? And
therefore I have bidden these funeral-friends, and bespoken the
sexton's deepest knell, and am come in my shroud to wed you as with a
burial-service, that we may join our hands at the door of the
sepulchre and enter it together."
    It was not frenzy, it was not merely the drunkenness of strong emotion
in a heart unused to it, that now wrought upon the bride. The stern
lesson of the day had done its work; her worldliness was gone. She
seized the bridegroom's hand.
    "Yes!" cried she; "let us wed even at the door of the sepulchre. My
life is gone in vanity and emptiness, but at its close there is one
true feeling. It has made me what I was in youth: it makes me worthy
of you. Time is no more for both of us. Let us wed for eternity."
    With a long and deep regard the bridegroom looked into her eyes, while
a tear was gathering in his own. How strange