Chapter 11

What is this secret sin, this untold tale,
That art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse?
--Her muscles hold their place;
Nor discomposed, nor formed to steadiness,
No sudden flushing, and no faltering lip.--
Mysterious Mother.

The coffin had been borne from the place where it rested. The mourners,
in regular gradation, according to their rank or their relationship to
the deceased, had filed from the cottage, while the younger male children
were led along to totter after the bier of their brother, and to view
with wonder a ceremonial which they could hardly comprehend. The female
gossips next rose to depart, and, with consideration for the situation of
the parents, carried along with them the girls of the family, to give the
unhappy pair time and opportunity to open their hearts to each other and
soften their grief by communicating it. But their kind intention was
without effect. The last of them had darkened the entrance of the
cottage, as she went out, and drawn the door softly behind her, when the
father, first ascertaining by a hasty glance that no stranger remained,
started up, clasped his hands wildly above his head, uttered a cry of the
despair which he had hitherto repressed, and, in all the impotent
impatience of grief, half rushed half staggered forward to the bed on
which the coffin had been deposited, threw himself down upon it, and
smothering, as it were, his head among the bed-clothes, gave vent to the
full passion of his sorrow. It was in vain that the wretched mother,
terrified by the vehemence of her husband's affliction--affliction still
more fearful as agitating a man of hardened manners and a robust frame--
suppressed her own sobs and tears, and, pulling him by the skirts of his
coat, implored him to rise and remember, that, though one was removed, he
had still a wife and children to comfort and support. The appeal came at
too early a period of his anguish, and was totally unattended to; he
continued to remain prostrate, indicating, by sobs so bitter and violent,
that they shook the bed and partition against which it rested, by
clenched hands which grasped the bed-clothes, and by the vehement and
convulsive motion of his legs, how deep and how terrible was the agony of
a father's sorrow.

"O, what a day is this! what a day is this!" said the poor mother, her
womanish affliction already exhausted by sobs and tears, and now almost
lost in terror for the state in which she beheld her husband--"O, what an
hour is this! and naebody to help a poor lone woman--O, gudemither, could
ye but speak a word to him!--wad ye but bid him be comforted!"

To her astonishment, and even to the increase of her fear, her husband's
mother heard and answered the