Cruel As The Grave

Then she remembered the horrible vision of the night, and she looked

anxiously towards the door of the vault. It seemed fast as ever. She got

up and went to look at it. It was fast, the bars firmly bedded in the

solid masonry, as they had been before.

What then had been the vision? She shuddered to think of it. Her first

impulse was now to arouse her husband and tell him what had happened.

But her tenderness for him pleaded with her to forbear.

"He sleeps well, poor Lyon! let him sleep," she said, and she threw a

shawl around her shoulders, and went out of the chapel to get a breath

of the fresh morning air.

She had to pass among the gray old gravestones lying deep in the

bright-colored dew-spangled brushwood. As she picked her way past them,

she suddenly stopped and screamed.

Captain Pendleton was lying prostrate, like a dead man at the foot of an

old tree!

With a strong effort of the will, she controlled herself sufficiently to

enable her to approach and examine him. He was not dead, as she had at

first supposed; but he was in a very death-like sleep.

She arose to her feet, and clasped her forehead with both hands while

she tried to think. What could these things mean? The unnatural

exhilaration of their little party on the previous evening; the powerful

reaction that prostrated them all in heavy stupor or dreamless sleep,

that had lasted some fifteen hours; the ghastly procession she had seen

issue from the open door of the old vault, and march slowly down the

east wall of the church, past all the gothic windows, and disappear

through the front door; the spell that had so deeply bound her own

faculties, that she had neither the power nor the will to call out;

their visitor overtaken by sleep while on his way to mount his horse,

and now lying prostrate among the gravestones? What could all these

things mean?

She could not imagine.

However much she might have wished to spare her husband's rest up to

this moment, she felt that she must arouse him now. She hurried back

into the church, and went up to the little couch and looked at Lyon.

He was moving restlessly, and muttering sadly in his sleep. And now she

felt less reluctance to wake him from his troubled dream. She shook him

gently, and called him.

He opened his eyes, gazed at her, arose up in a sitting posture, and

stared around for a moment, and then seeing his wife, exclaimed: "Oh! is it you, Sybil? What is this? the chapel seems to be turned

around." And he gazed again at the western windows, where the sun was

shining, and which he mistook for the eastern, supposing the time to be

morning.