Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/310

302 Back came Mr. Jack in an incredibly short time. He could not have come much quicker, had he dashed right through the pool. Jan set himself to his work, and did not leave the woman till she was better. That was the best of Jan Verner. He paid every atom as much attention to the poor as he did to the rich. Jan never considered who or what his patients were, when he was attending on them: all his object was, to get them well.

His nearest way home lay past the pool, and he took it: he did not fear poor Rachel’s ghost. It was a sharpish night, bright, somewhat of a frost. As Jan neared the pool, he turned his head towards it and half stopped, gazing on its still waters. He had been away when the catastrophe happened; but the circumstances had been detailed to him. “How it would startle Jack and a few of those timid ones,” said he, aloud, “if some night—”

“Is that you, sir?”

Some persons, with nerves less serene than Jan’s, might have started at the sudden interruption, there and then. Not so Jan. He turned round with composure, and saw Bennet, the footman from Verner’s Pride. The man had come up hastily from behind the hedge.

“I have been to your house, sir, and they told me you were at the gamekeeper’s, so I was hastening there. My mistress is taken ill, sir.”

“Is it a fit?” cried Jan, remembering his fears and prognostications, with regard to Mrs. Verner.

“It’s worse than that, sir: it’s appleplexy. Leastways, sir, my master and Mrs. Tynn’s afraid that it is. She looks like dead, sir, and there’s froth on her mouth.”

Jan waited for no more. He turned short round, and flew by the nearest path to Verner’s Pride.

The evil had come. Apoplexy it indeed was, and all Jan’s efforts to remedy it were of no avail.

“It was by the merest chance that I found it out, sir,” Mrs. Tynn said to him. “I happened to wake up, sir, and I thought how quiet my mistress was lying: mostly she might be heard ever so far off when she was asleep. I got up, sir, and took the rushlight out of the shade, and looked at her. And then I saw what had happened, and went and called Mr. Lionel.”

“Can you restore her, Jan?” whispered Lionel.

Jan made no reply. He had his own private opinion: but, whatever that may have been, he set himself to the task in right earnest.

She never rallied. She lived only till the dawn of the morning. Scarcely had the clock told eight, when the death-bell went booming over the village: the bell of that very church which had recently been so merry for the succession of Lionel. And when people came running from far and near to inquire for whom the passing bell was ringing out, they hushed their voices and their footsteps when informed that it was for Mrs. Verner.

Verily, within the last year, Death had made himself at home at Verner’s Pride!

cities have wisely decreed that their dead shall be carried outside the walls, and not pile up a mass of corruption in the heart of populous life. Every one has his wish for his grave, and many think of honouring a pretty churchyard by reposing in it, as great exiles have refused their bones to their ungrateful country. The noted noble duellist, who chose a lovely spot on the Continent, and desired to be conveyed there after death, was scarce more fanciful (pace, Elia) than the patriarch who would be buried with his fathers, and not in Egypt. And many dwellers in towns look forward to emigrating after death to a country churchyard, under the shadow of the old yew, with all the peace to be derived from quiet associations. What hope of undisturbed repose in the midst of noisy streets, with the press of business around you, and the car of Mammon thundering over your head? instead of this, the dweller in the city is now conveyed to his place without the walls, to a still, orderly cemetery. Not one of the dark, ghostly churchyards of straggling villages; no ghouls haunt here to prey upon the dead, from no dark shadows are stretched white skinny arms to seize the bridle of the belated passenger. Cheerfulness and resignation reign there, and even sorrow goes away comforted. I would devote this paper to record some of these resting-places which I have visited to honour their great dead.

Undoubtedly the first for picturesqueness and interest of association to us is the Protestant cemetery at Rome, where repose Shelley, and Keats, and the only son of Goëthe. All who have read Shelley will remember his description of it in the preface to Adonais. “The romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that city, under the pyramid of which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” Shelley himself lies close by the wall of the cemetery, in a little recessed nook under a crumbling tower, which you reach by winding walks up a slope, wandering among grassy mounds sweet with flowers and memorial stones. My remembrance of the spot is but faint, yet that tombstone survives.

Keats’ grave is not so romantically situated as Shelley’s. It is in another cemetery, more deserted, wilder looking. It does not bear his name, but only the famous inscription, which would always serve to identify it:—“Here lies one whose name was writ in water;” but the water was frozen while the name was being written. It is written on the ocean, and every wave bears his fame wider and wider, fame more durable than if carved on brass or stone, for water outlives them both. A deep moat runs round the graveyard, and Keats’ tomb is on its very verge. You might fall into it while reading the epitaph, if you wished to add another testimony to his name.

It was on a gloomy day of November fog that I wandered out of Paris to the cemetery of Père la