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 death-like 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!”

How shall the widow’s horror be represented?  It gave her the ghastliness of a dead man’s bride.  Her youthful friends stood apart, shuddering at the mourners, the shrouded bridegroom and herself; the whole scene expressed by the strongest imagery the vain struggle of the gilded vanities of this world when opposed to age, infirmity, sorrow and death.

The awestruck silence was first broken by the clergyman.

“Mr. Ellenwood,” said he, soothingly, yet with somewhat of authority, “you are not well.  Your mind has been agitated by the unusual circumstances in which you are placed.  The ceremony must be deferred.  As an old friend, let me entreat you to return home.”

“Home—­yes; but not without my bride,” answered he, in the same hollow accents.  “You deem this mockery—­perhaps madness.  Had I bedizened my aged and broken frame with scarlet and embroidery, had I forced my withered lips to smile at my dead heart, that might have been mockery or madness; but now let young and old declare which of us has come hither without a wedding-garment—­the bridegroom or the bride.”

He stepped forward at a ghostly pace and stood beside the widow, contrasting the awful simplicity of his shroud with the glare and glitter in which she had arrayed herself for this unhappy scene.  None that beheld them could deny the terrible strength of the moral which his disordered intellect had contrived to draw.

“Cruel! cruel!” groaned the heartstricken bride.