Arriving near the shore, we all three stept into the water,
bore her out, and laid her on the ground beneath a tree.
"Poor child!" said Foster,--and his dry old heart, I verily believe,
vouchsafed a tear, "I'm sorry for her!"
Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader
might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame. For more than
twelve long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now
reproduce it as freshly as if it were still before my eyes. Of all
modes of death, methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed
limbs of terrible inflexibility. She was the marble image of a
death-agony. Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and
were bent before her with clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent,
and--thank God for it!--in the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity!
It is impossible to bear the terror of it. It seemed,--I must
needs impart so much of my own miserable idea,--it seemed as if her
body must keep the same position in the coffin, and that her skeleton
would keep it in the grave; and that when Zenobia rose at the day of
judgment, it would be in just the same attitude as now!
One hope I had, and that too was mingled half with fear. She knelt
as if in prayer. With the last, choking consciousness, her soul,
bubbling out through her lips, it may be, had given itself up to the
Father, reconciled and penitent. But her arms! They were bent
before her, as if she struggled against Providence in never-ending
hostility.
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