THE SCARF OF THE
BELOVED
Author of "The Tortoise-Shell Cat" and "The Remorse of Professor Panebianco"
THE night was dark and gloomy, but for him it was better so; the thick darkness, the approaching storm, all made detection less probable. Lowering clouds, scurrying across the sky, dimmed the sickly rays of the pale moon. The wind, soughing in the branches of the cypresses and among the ghostly tombstones, seemed to carry indignant and mournful whisperings from those graves that had escaped the desecration the others had experienced. Ever and anon, the faint, scared chirp of some homeward fluttering bird came softly to his ear.
The night was almost breathless with expectancy of the coming storm. The lurid flash of the lightning made the dense darkness almost palpable. The fitful warning of those vivid flashes urged haste upon him; he must complete his work before the storm broke in its concentrated fury.
His spade struck heavily against a leaden coffin. He stopped digging and whistled cautiously for his assistant. In a few minutes the coffin had been pried open, and the shroud pulled out, bringing rudely with it the cold clay that lay sleeping so heavily in death's long slumber. Presently the body fell with heavy thud upon the bed of the wagon that waited just without the cemetery gates. The second man covered it with sacking, climbed upon the wagon, and drove away. The first man began to fill in the rifled grave with earth.
His task completed, he paused for a moment as he contemplated the mound rising above that hollow mockery of a grave. A sudden premonition as of evil about to fall upon him oppressed his spirit. With uncontrollable impulse, he caught up his tools and fled from the spot.
The storm was approaching apace. The muttering of the thunder could be heard more distinctly as it grew slowly in volume and then died reluctantly and threateningly away among the surrounding hills. The moon looked down from among the scurrying clouds, her pale and baleful gleams lighting the solitary scene with ghostly light.
Among the treetops the vanguards of the tempest rustled and tossed the branches with a sound as of souls sighing in durance. The usual calm night-calls of insects were hushed before the approach of the storm; only the occasional guttural croak of a bullfrog disturbed the chill hush that had fallen upon nature. A bird's timid, half-affrighted twitter came from the bushes near at hand, and the man glanced casually in that direction before turning homeward.
As he glanced, he described in the moon's fitful light a soft, fluttering thing on the ground at his feet. He leaned down and picked it up. It was a woman's silken shawl, such a thing as his sweetheart wound about her delicate shoulders when the evening breezes blew chill. Whence had it come?
Even as he asked himself, he knew: it had fallen from the body of that dead whom he had disturbed in its solemn sleep. An involuntary shudder gripped him. He would have thrown the thing away, but that its finding at daybreak would have led to the discovery of the violated grave, which might otherwise escape observation.
The wind blew chiller, and yet more chill. Autumn had set in with a will, and was sweeping down on the wings of the flying tempest. The boughs of the trees swept lower and lower; the rustling among them grew more audible, more pronounced. It was as if the spirits of the dead were revisiting the scene of their last resting place, crying out in horror and loathing upon the man who had ruthlessly broken in on the slumber of so many of their sad company.
Whispering and murmuring and muttering among the trees, and rushing around the tall tombstones that shone with weird whiteness from out the surrounding gloom, the wind flung itself upon the solitary figure of the man, who stood as if frozen to the spot, his gleaming eyes fixed with a stony stare on the frail, shimmering, cobwebby thing in his hands.
Paler than the dead who lay so still in their quiet rest in the churchyard; colder than the very touch of death itself; rigid as the body when the breath has gone forever; there he stood, the epitome of awful fear. With eyeballs starting from their sockets, open mouth, dilated nostrils, he seemed the very personification of incredulous horror.
The landscape swept and swirled around him. The wind sang in his ears as water sings in the ears of a drowning man. It tugged and pulled and beat at him as he stood immovable, clutched fast in the grasp of an awful fear, a horrible surmise.
In those outstretched hands lay the silken trifle, upon which his gaze was fixed with terrible intensity. The scarf was that of his promised wife. Only too well he knew it—that shimmering, lacy scarf he had so often seen about her shoulders. It was hers—hers—hers!
IT SEEMED centuries that he stood there, eons of agony through which he passed in a fleeting moment. The appalling uncertainty of the thing rushed over him overwhelmingly. The scarf was hers. How, then, came it about the body of the dead? Her father had never been a strong man; perhaps an attack of heart trouble—something sudden—. The bare idea that he had profaned that grave, the grave of her father, lacerated his heart with remorse.
He dared not admit to himself, in that moment of horrible dread and uncertainty, the doubts that began to assail him. His one idea was that he must see, and that immediately, the dead whom his promised wife had covered with the scarf which he now held nervelessly in cold, stiff fingers. Yet the unwelcome belief grew ever stronger that it was indeed the body of her father, which his sacrilegious hand had desecrated unknowingly. The body of that sacred dead must at all costs be rescued from the medical students; must be returned to its resting place.
Instinctively, while his mind had not yet consciously formulated the desire, the man's limbs bore him rapidly in the wake of the wagon, which had long since disappeared in the gloom. He walked rapidly ahead, hushing the thoughts that hammered and clamored at the portal of his brains for admittance.
The road was rough, and the way long, but he walked steadily forward, as if in a trance. That the storm had already begun to batter on the trees bordering the road, he did not even notice. The rain had not yet come, but the wind had sent reinforcements to aid the vanguard which, during the earlier part of the night, had been rustling and pushing about among the trees. There was a continuous dull roar, as the thunder grew in volume and came nearer. The noise of the wagon wheels had died away, but the dark figure in the road toiled painfully onward.
NOW the lights from the medical annex, dim through the gloom and the mists of blurring boughs that swept backward and forward before the night wanderer, revealed themselves. The wagon stood without. He ran to it, panting. It was empty. He hurried to the dissecting room and pushed against the door.
No one answered his low call. He pressed his face against the window in a vain attempt to see within, but the curtain had been closely drawn. At last, replying to his impatient knocks, a hand lifted it ever so slightly and a face looked into his, blanching as it looked. For a moment the man outside forgot his errand in the chilling shudder that swept through him at sight of that face gloomed over with shrinking abhorrence.
There was a murmur of lowered voices. The door opened cautiously and two or three students whom he knew emerged and closed it behind them. Portrayed on every countenance was that same look of horror and repugnance and loathing that had so startled him in the face of that man who had looked at him from the window.
He pushed his way toward the door; they shrank before him as he advanced. He demanded entrance in a voice that he scarcely knew as his own, a voice that died away, failing him at the looks of dread and frozen, horror on the faces confronting him. No one spoke. Each gazed at the others, avoiding his proximity as they might have avoided contact with a man stricken with pestilence. He thought he heard a whispered word—"Nemesis!"—but it came from as remote distance as might have come a dream voice.
Once more he made his request, but now it was in the manner of one who demands. A student pointed wordlessly, and he gathered from the gesture that the way was open to him. As he grasped the knob, the students with one accord melted away from that spot, unhallowed by its associations with robbery of the grave.
The man crossed the threshold and the wind pushed shut the door behind him with its invisible, malignant fingers. He moved across the room, still holding the silken scarf in his nerveless fingers. He paused before the table, whereon lay the dead whom he had that night dragged out of the peaceful grave.
With a quick gesture he tore away the sheet that concealed the cold and lifeless clay.
A tress of hair, rich, waving, auburn, trailed upon the floor.
One horrible, dissonant scream of bitter anguish shrilled from his lips, reverberated through the room, and wailed out on the chill night wind into the ears of the shuddering students dashing across the campus.
The body was that of his promised bride!
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1969, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 54 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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