Some of them had monuments of alabaster,
whereon they lay in effigy, their heads pillowed upon that of a
conquered Saracen; some had monuments of oak and brass, and some had
no monuments at all, for the Puritans had ruthlessly destroyed them.
But they were nearly all there, nearly twenty generations of the
bearers of an ancient name, for even those of them who perished on the
scaffold had been borne here for burial. The place was eloquent of the
dead and of the mournful lesson of mortality. From century to century
the bearers of that name had walked in these fields, and lived in
yonder Castle, and looked upon the familiar swell of yonder ground and
the silver flash of yonder river, and now their ashes were gathered
here and all the forgotten turmoil of their lives was lost in the
silence of those narrow tombs.
Ida loved the spot, hallowed to her not only by the altar of her
faith, but also by the human associations that clung around and
clothed it as the ivy clothed its walls. Here she had been christened,
and here among her ancestors she hoped to be buried also. Here as a
girl, when the full moon was up, she had crept in awed silence with
her brother James to look through the window at the white and solemn
figures stretched within. Here, too, she had sat on Sunday after
Sunday for more than twenty years, and stared at the quaint Latin
inscriptions cut on marble slabs, recording the almost superhuman
virtues of departed de la Molles of the eighteenth century, her own
immediate ancestors.
Pages:
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275