“It’s deep enough!”

Another voice droned.  It was soft and unctuous.  It seemed to take a pleasure in the terrible words it loosed to stray eternally through the decaying forest.

Bobby glanced at bent stones, strangled by the underbrush; at other slabs, cracked and brown, which lay prone, half covered by creeping vines.  The tones of the clergyman were no longer revolting in his ears.  He scarcely heard them.  He imagined a fantasy.  He pictured the inhabitants of these forgotten, narrow houses straying to the great dwelling where they had lived, punishing this one, bringing him to suffer with them the degradation of their neglect.  So Robinson became less important in his mind.  Through such fancies the ordeal was made bearable.

A wind sprang up, rattling through the trees and disturbing the vines on the fallen stones.  Later, he thought, it would snow, and he shivered for those left helpless to sleep in the sad forest.

The dark-clothed men strained at ropes now.  They glanced at Katherine and Bobby as at those most to be impressed by their skill.  They lowered Silas Blackburn’s grimly shaped casing into the sorrel pit.  It passed from Bobby’s sight.  The two roughly dressed labourers came from the thicket where they had hidden, and with their spades approached the grave.  The sound from whose imminence Bobby had shrunk rattled in his ears.  The yellow earth cut across the stormy twilight of the cemetery and scattered in the trench.  After a time the response lost its metallic petulance.

Katherine pulled at Bobby’s hand.  He started and glanced up.  One of the black-clothed men was speaking to him with a professional gentleness: 

“You needn’t wait, Mr. Blackburn.  Everything is finished.”

He saw now that Robinson stood across the grave still staring at him.  The professional mourner smiled sympathetically and moved away.  Katherine, Robinson, the two grave diggers, and Bobby alone were left of the little company; and Bobby, staring back at the district attorney, took a sombre pride in facing it out until even the men with the spades had gone.  The ordeal, he reflected, had lost its poignancy.  His mind was intent on the empty trappings he had witnessed.  He wondered if there was, after all, no justice against his grandfather in this unkempt burial.  The place might have something to tell him.  If it could only make him believe that beyond the inevitable fact nothing mattered.  If he were sure of that it would offer a way out at the worst; perhaps the happiest exit for Katherine’s sake.

Then Doctor Groom returned.  His huge hairy figure dominated the cemetery.  His infused eyes, beneath the thick black brows, were far-seeing.  They seemed to penetrate Bobby’s thought.  Then they glanced at the excavation, appearing to intimate that Silas Blackburn’s earthy blanket could hide nothing from the closed eyes it sheltered.  At his age he faced the near approach of that inevitable fact, and he didn’t hesitate to look beyond.  Bobby knew what Graham had meant when he had said that Groom had brought the ghosts back with him.  It was as if the cemetery had recalled the old doctor to answer his presumptuous question.