Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/148

 solemn sleep. An involuntary shudder gripped him. He would have thrown the thing away, but that its finding at daybreak would have led to the discovery of the violated grave, which might otherwise escape observation.

The wind blew chiller, and yet more chill. Autumn had set in with a will, and was sweeping down on the wings of the flying tempest. The boughs of the trees swept lower and lower; the rustling among them grew more audible, more pronounced. It was as if the spirits of the dead were revisiting the scene of their last resting place, crying out in horror and loathing upon the man who had ruthlessly broken in on the slumber of so many of their sad company.

Whispering and murmuring and muttering among the trees, and rushing around the tall tombstones that shone with weird whiteness from out the surrounding gloom, the wind flung itself upon the solitary figure of the man, who stood as if frozen to the spot, his gleaming eyes fixed with a stony stare on the frail, shimmering, cobwebby thing in his hands.

Paler than the dead who lay so still in their quiet rest in the churchyard; colder than the very touch of death itself; rigid as the body when the breath has gone forever; there he stood, the epitome of awful fear. With eyeballs starting from their sockets, open mouth, dilated nostrils, he seemed the very personification of incredulous horror.

The landscape swept and swirled around him. The wind sang in his ears as water sings in the ears of a drowning man. It tugged and pulled and beat at him as he stood immovable, clutched fast in the grasp of an awful fear, a horrible surmise.

In those outstretched hands lay the silken trifle, upon which his gaze was fixed with terrible intensity. The scarf was that of his promised wife. Only too well he knew it—that shimmering, lacy scarf he had so often seen about her shoulders. It was hers—hers—hers!

T SEEMED centuries that he stood there, eons of agony through which he passed in a fleeting moment. The appalling uncertainty of the thing rushed over him overwhelmingly. The scarf was hers. How, then, came it about the body of the dead? Her father had never been a strong man; perhaps an attack of heart trouble—something sudden—. The bare idea that he had profaned that grave, the grave of her father, lacerated his heart with remorse.

He dared not admit to himself, in that moment of horrible dread and uncertainty, the doubts that began to assail him. His one idea was that he must see, and that immediately, the dead whom his promised wife had covered with the scarf which he now held nervelessly in cold, stiff fingers. Yet the unwelcome belief grew ever stronger that it was indeed the body of her father, which his sacrilegious hand had desecrated unknowingly. The body of that sacred dead must at all costs be rescued from the medical students; must be returned to its resting place.

Instinctively, while his mind had not yet consciously formulated the desire, the man's limbs bore him rapidly in the wake of the wagon, which had long since disappeared in the gloom. He walked rapidly ahead, hushing the thoughts that hammered and clamored at the portal of his brains for admittance.

The road was rough, and the way long, but he walked steadily forward, as if in a trance. That the storm had already begun to batter on the trees bordering the road, he did not even notice. The rain had not yet come, but the wind had sent reinforcements to aid the vanguard which, during the earlier part of the night, had been rustling and pushing about