But the Old Lady approached it boldly.
"Don't you know me, Jooley dear?" she said, peering into the strange
eyes. There was no recognition in them for all their staring.
"Don't know _me_, m'm," said Martha soothingly; "seems all of a white
swoon, don't she?"
Martha was warming to her part. She made herself busy; she brought hot
water bottles and eau de cologne; she spent twenty minutes chafing the
hands and forehead and laying warmth to the feet, that the Old Lady might
have the comfort of knowing that everything had been done that could be
done. She shuffled off to find brandy, as if she had only thought of it
that instant; and she played out the play with the looking-glass and the
feather.
The feather fluttered to the floor, and Martha ceased bending and
peering, and looked at her mistress.
"She's gone, m'm, I do believe."
The Old Lady sank by the chair, her arms clinging to those rigid knees.
"Jooley--Jooley--don't you _know_ me?" she cried, as if in a passion of
affront.
CHAPTER XII
Epilogue.--The Man and the Woman
By daylight there is neither glamour nor beauty in the great
burying-ground of North London; you must go to it at evening, in the
first fall of the summer dusk, to feel the fascination of that labyrinth
of low graves, crosses and headstones, urns and sarcophagi, crowded in
the black-green of the grass; of marble columns, granite pyramids and
obelisks, massed and reared and piled in the grey of the air. It is
nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling
of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world,
gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion
and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and
foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips
a little from the living and death from the dead.
For these have their own way here. No priest interferes with them, and
whatever secular power ordains these matters is indulgent to its
children. If one of them would have his horse or his dog carved on his
tomb instead of an angel, or a pair of compasses instead of a cross,
there is no one to thwart his fancy. He may even be humorous if he will.
It is as if he implored us to laugh with him a little while though the
jest be feeble, and not to chill him with so many tears.
At twilight a man and a woman were threading their way through this
cemetery, and as they went they smiled faintly at the memorial caprices
of the living and the still quainter originalities of the dead. But on
the whole they seemed to be trying not to look too happy. They said
nothing to each other till they came to a mound raised somewhere in the
borderland that divides the graves of the rich from the paupers' ground.
There was just room for them to stand together on the boards that roofed
in the narrow pit dug ready for the next comer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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