My father left the room. I looked upon the group one instant. I felt that I could have resigned the possession of worlds to be permitted the luxury of raising the load of grief from those afflicted hearts; but it could not be, and I retired to relieve my surcharged feelings in solitude.
Ere morning dawned, nature had received another instalment of her debt.
My father and I attended the funeral, and were surprised at the apparent fortitude of Mr Scanlan. We wished to bring him with us to the Hall after the sad ceremony, but he would not come. We then accompanied him to his own house. As we entered, I glanced at him: he was ghastly pale. He looked slowly round, fixed his eyes one moment on the countenance of his younger son, another on the elder, and sank upon a chair.
Since the period of which I now write, I have often witnessed the closing scene of mortality, and various are the opinions I have heard, as to which point of time, between the moment of death and the first appearance abroad of the survivors in their mourning apparel, is the saddest, the most afflicting, or the most trying--whether the moment of dissolution, the first appearance of the undertaker, the laying out in the apparel of death, the bringing of the coffin, the last frantic kiss and look, the screwing down, the carrying out, the dull thud of the clay upon the coffin lid. Oh! think not that I am coolly writing this, that I am probing with the surgeon's calmness the deep, the sensitive (with many bleeding) wounds that death has given.
I am but a young man, yet my brain reels, and my eyes burn, and my heart swells to my throat, as memory holds the mirror to my view, and I see depicted in it the scenes, and feel again the feelings, that have been more than once or twice excited at the stages which I have just recounted in order. But of all the stabs thus given to the heart, of all those moments of anguish, the keenest is that felt when the survivor re-enters the house, where the form and the voice and the cheerful laugh of the departed one had made his home a little paradise, and feels that that home is now for ever desolate! Is there a desert so deserted?
"James," said Mr Scanlan, after he had looked steadfastly at him for some time, "you were the first she brought me; and when you came into the world, I was almost beside myself with joy; and when I was allowed to enter the room where she was sitting up in bed, with you in her arms, I almost smothered you both with kisses; and I cried, and laughed, and danced about, as if I was mad. Sure I need'nt be ashamed to own it, now that she's gone. And when I told her that they said you were the image of me, she answered me, 'So he ought, for sure you were always before my eyes;' and when I said that I could'nt be 'always,' she said that 'twas the eyes of her heart she meant. So, Pat, avourneen (addressing the younger, who had been all this time crying bitterly), though you're the living image of her that's dead, and though father could'nt love son more than I do you, you're not surprised that I gave James the preference sometimes, though I never loved you the less."