第41章
O'er him, whose doom thy virtues grieve, Aerial forms shall sit at eve, and bend the pensive head.
COLLINS
The monk, who had before appeared, returned in the evening to offer consolation to Emily, and brought a kind message from the lady abbess, inviting her to the convent.Emily, though she did not accept the offer, returned an answer expressive of her gratitude.
The holy conversation of the friar, whose mild benevolence of manners bore some resemblance to those of St.Aubert, soothed the violence of her grief, and lifted her heart to the Being, who, extending through all place and all eternity, looks on the events of this little world as on the shadows of a moment, and beholds equally, and in the same instant, the soul that has passed the gates of death, and that, which still lingers in the body.'In the sight of God,' said Emily, 'my dear father now exists, as truly as he yesterday existed to me; it is to me only that he is dead; to God and to himself he yet lives!'
The good monk left her more tranquil than she had been since St.
Aubert died; and, before she retired to her little cabin for the night, she trusted herself so far as to visit the corpse.Silent, and without weeping, she stood by its side.The features, placid and serene, told the nature of the last sensations, that had lingered in the now deserted frame.For a moment she turned away, in horror of the stillness in which death had fixed that countenance, never till now seen otherwise than animated; then gazed on it with a mixture of doubt and awful astonishment.Her reason could scarcely overcome an involuntary and unaccountable expectation of seeing that beloved countenance still susceptible.She continued to gaze wildly; took up the cold hand; spoke; still gazed, and then burst into a transport of grief.La Voisin, hearing her sobs, came into the room to lead her away, but she heard nothing, and only begged that he would leave her.
Again alone, she indulged her tears, and, when the gloom of evening obscured the chamber, and almost veiled from her eyes the object of her distress, she still hung over the body; till her spirits, at length, were exhausted, and she became tranquil.La Voisin again knocked at the door, and entreated that she would come to the common apartment.Before she went, she kissed the lips of St.Aubert, as she was wont to do when she bade him good night.Again she kissed them; her heart felt as if it would break, a few tears of agony started to her eyes, she looked up to heaven, then at St.Aubert, and left the room.
Retired to her lonely cabin, her melancholy thoughts still hovered round the body of her deceased parent; and, when she sunk into a kind of slumber, the images of her waking mind still haunted her fancy.
She thought she saw her father approaching her with a benign countenance; then, smiling mournfully and pointing upwards, his lips moved, but, instead of words, she heard sweet music borne on the distant air, and presently saw his features glow with the mild rapture of a superior being.The strain seemed to swell louder, and she awoke.The vision was gone, but music yet came to her ear in strains such as angels might breathe.She doubted, listened, raised herself in the bed, and again listened.It was music, and not an illusion of her imagination.After a solemn steady harmony, it paused; then rose again, in mournful sweetness, and then died, in a cadence, that seemed to bear away the listening soul to heaven.She instantly remembered the music of the preceding night, with the strange circumstances, related by La Voisin, and the affecting conversation it had led to, concerning the state of departed spirits.
All that St.Aubert had said, on that subject, now pressed upon her heart, and overwhelmed it.What a change in a few hours! He, who then could only conjecture, was now made acquainted with truth; was himself become one of the departed! As she listened, she was chilled with superstitious awe, her tears stopped; and she rose, and went to the window.All without was obscured in shade; but Emily, turning her eyes from the massy darkness of the woods, whose waving outline appeared on the horizon, saw, on the left, that effulgent planet, which the old man had pointed out, setting over the woods.She remembered what he had said concerning it, and, the music now coming at intervals on the air, she unclosed the casement to listen to the strains, that soon gradually sunk to a greater distance, and tried to discover whence they came.The obscurity prevented her from distinguishing any object on the green platform below; and the sounds became fainter and fainter, till they softened into silence.She listened, but they returned no more.Soon after, she observed the planet trembling between the fringed tops of the woods, and, in the next moment, sink behind them.Chilled with a melancholy awe, she retired once more to her bed, and, at length, forgot for a while her sorrows in sleep.
On the following morning, she was visited by a sister of the convent, who came, with kind offices and a second invitation from the lady abbess; and Emily, though she could not forsake the cottage, while the remains of her father were in it, consented, however painful such a visit must be, in the present state of her spirits, to pay her respects to the abbess, in the evening.
About an hour before sun-set, La Voisin shewed her the way through the woods to the convent, which stood in a small bay of the Mediterranean, crowned by a woody amphitheatre; and Emily, had she been less unhappy, would have admired the extensive sea view, that appeared from the green slope, in front of the edifice, and the rich shores, hung with woods and pastures, that extended on either hand.