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.