Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/269

 jewels of their virginal or matronly pride, tenderly placed beside them? Who had they been, those forgotten peoples, who robbed death of half its terrors, and laid the dog beside his master, the toy beside the child, in cool, fresh, sacred chambers where the dead seemed not dead but waiting?

Ah! why was she not here!—she, who was thrust into that hole in the sand, in that box of pitch-pine, thrust out of life with unseemly haste, with a brutal eagerness to be rid of her and forget that ever she had been.

Musa could not have reasoned out the thing she felt; but the ghastly rites, the hideous selfishness, the vulgar hurrying cruelty, that mark out the Christian treatment of the dead weighed on her with their harshness and their horror as she sat in these graves of the Etruscans—made ere men had heard of Christ.

Then for the first time a few great tears rushed into her eyes and she wept bitterly, and, thus weeping, fell at the last asleep, in a merciful sleep that lasted through several hours, while the hot day throbbed itself away without, and the rays of the sun beat in vain upon her resting-place and could not enter.