The two dames had a restless and hideous night. Sleep came not
to their relief, for their conversation was wholly about the dead,
who seemed to be alive, and their minds were wandering and
groping in a chaos of mystery. "Did you attend to his corpse, and
know that he positively died and was buried?" said Mrs. Calvert.
"Oh, yes, from the moment that his fair but mangled corpse was
brought home, I attended it till that when it was screwed in the
coffin. I washed the long stripes of blood from his lifeless form,
on both sides of the body. I bathed the livid wound that passed
through his generous and gentle heart. There was one through the
flesh of his left side too, which had bled most outwardly of them
all. I bathed them, and bandaged them up with wax and perfumed
ointment, but still the blood oozed through all, so that when he
was laid in the coffin he was like one newly murdered. My brave,
my generous young master. He was always as a son to me, and no
son was ever more kind or more respectful to a mother. But he
was butchered--he was cut off from the earth ere he had well
reached to manhood--most barbarously and unfairly slain.
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