Wedding

"On my honor," replied the gentleman, "I believe the bell has the good taste to

toll of its own accord. What has she to do with weddings? If you, dearest Julia,

were approaching the altar the bell would ring out its merriest peal. It has only a

funeral knell for her."

The bride and most of her company had been too much occupied with the bustle

of entrance to hear the first boding stroke of the bell, or at least to reflect on the

singularity of such a welcome to the altar. They therefore continued to advance

with undiminished gayety. The gorgeous dresses of the time, the crimson velvet

coats, the gold-laced hats, the hoop petticoats, the silk, satin, brocade, and

embroidery, the buckles, canes, and swords, all displayed to the best advantage

on persons suited to such finery, made the group appear more like a brightcolored picture than anything real. But by what perversity of taste had the artist

represented his principal figure as so wrinkled and decayed, while yet he had

decked her out in the brightest splendor of attire, as if the loveliest maiden had

suddenly withered into age, and become a moral to the beautiful around her! On

they went, however, and had glittered along about a third of the aisle, when

another stroke of the bell seemed to fill the church with a visible gloom,

dimming and obscuring the bright pageant, till it shone forth again as from a

mist.

This time the party wavered, stopped, and huddled closer together, while a

slight scream was heard from some of the ladies, and a confused whispering

among the gentlemen. Thus tossing to and fro, they might have been fancifully

compared to a splendid bunch of flowers, suddenly shaken by a puff of wind,

which threatened to scatter the leaves of an old, brown, withered rose, on the

same stalk with two dewy buds,--such being the emblem of the widow between

her fair young bridemaids. But her heroism was admirable. She had started with

an irrepressible shudder, as if the stroke of the bell had fallen directly on her

heart; then, recovering herself, while her attendants were yet in dismay, she

took the lead, and paced calmly up the aisle. The bell continued to swing, strike,

and vibrate, with the same doleful regularity as when a corpse is on its way to

the tomb.

"My young friends here have their nerves a little shaken," said the widow, with a

smile, to the clergyman at the altar. "But so many weddings have been ushered

in with the merriest peal of the bells, and yet turned out unhappily, that I shall

hope for better fortune under such different auspices."

"Madam," answered the rector, in great perplexity, "this strange occurrence

brings to my mind a marriage sermon of the famous Bishop Taylor, wherein he

mingles so many thoughts of mortality and future woe, that, to speak somewhat

after his own rich style, he seems to hang the bridal chamber in black, and cut

the wedding garment out of a coffin pall. And it has been the custom of divers

nations to infuse something of sadness into their marriage ceremonies, so to

keep death in mind while contracting that engagement which is life's chiefest

business. Thus we may draw a sad but profitable moral from this funeral knell."

But, though the clergyman might have given his moral even a keener point, he

did not fail to dispatch an attendant to inquire into the mystery, and stop those

sounds, so dismally appropriate to such a marriage. A brief space elapsed,

during which the silence was broken only by whispers, and a few suppressed

titterings, among the wedding party and the spectators, who, after the first

shock, were disposed to draw an ill-natured merriment from the affair. The

young have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth. The

widow's glance was observed to wander, for an instant, towards a window of the

church, as if searching for the time-worn marble that she had dedicated to her

first husband; then her eyelids dropped over their faded orbs, and her thoughts

were drawn irresistibly to another grave. Two buried men, with a voice at her

ear, and a cry afar off, were calling her to lie down beside them. Perhaps, with

momentary truth of feeling, she thought how much happier had been her fate,

if, after years of bliss, the bell were now tolling for her funeral, and she were

followed to the grave by the old affection of her earliest lover, long her husband.

But why had she returned to him, when their cold hearts shrank from each

other's embrace?

Still the death-bell tolled so mournfully, that the sunshine seemed to fade in the

air. A whisper, communicated from those who stood nearest the windows, now

spread through the church; a hearse, with a train of several coaches, was

creeping along the street, conveying some dead man to the churchyard, while

the bride awaited a living one at the altar. Immediately after, the footsteps of

the bridegroom and his friends were heard at the door. The widow looked down

the aisle, and clinched the arm of one of her bridemaids in her bony hand with

such unconscious violence, that the fair girl trembled.

"You frighten me, my dear madam!" cried she. "For Heaven's sake, what is the

matter?"

"Nothing, my dear, nothing," said the widow; then, whispering close to her ear,

"There is a foolish fancy that I cannot get rid of. I am expecting my bridegroom

to come into the church, with my first two husbands for groomsmen!"

"Look, look!" screamed the bridemaid. "What is here? The funeral!"

As she spoke, a dark procession paced into the church. First came an old man

and women, like chief mourners at a funeral, attired from head to foot in the

deepest black, all but their pale features and hoary hair; he leaning on a staff,

and supporting her decrepit form with his nerveless arm. Behind appeared

another, and another pair, as aged, as black, and mournful as the first. As they

drew near, the widow recognized in every face some trait of former friends, long

forgotten, but now returning, as if from their old graves, to warn her to prepare

a shroud; or, with purpose almost as unwelcome, to exhibit their wrinkles and

infirmity, and claim her as their companion by the tokens of her own decay.

Many a merry night had she danced with them, in youth. And now, in joyless

age, she felt that some withered partner should request her hand, and all unite,

in a dance of death, to the music of the funeral bell.

While these aged mourners were passing up the aisle, it was observed that, from

pew to pew, the spectators shuddered with irrepressible awe, as some object,

hitherto concealed by the intervening figures, came full in sight. Many turned

away their faces; others kept a fixed and rigid stare; and a young girl giggled

hysterically, and fainted with the laughter on her lips. When the spectral

procession approached the altar, each couple separated, and slowly diverged,

till, in the centre, appeared a form, that had been worthily ushered in with all

this gloomy pomp, the death knell, and the funeral. It was the bridegroom in his

shroud!

No garb but that of the grave could have befitted such a deathlike aspect; the

eyes, indeed, had the wild gleam of a sepulchral lamp; all else was fixed in the

stern calmness which old men wear in the coffin. The corpse stood motionless,

but addressed the widow in accents that seemed to melt into the clang of the

bell, which fell heavily on the air while he spoke.

"Come, my bride!" said those pale lips, "the hearse is ready. The sexton stands

waiting for us at the door of the tomb. Let us be married; and then to our

coffins!"