The Old Gravestone 老墓碑

IN a house, with a large courtyard, in a provincial town, at that
time of the year in which people say the evenings are growing
longer, a family circle were gathered together at their old home. A
lamp burned on the table, although the weather was mild and
warm, and the long curtains hung down before the open windows,
and without the moon shone brightly in the dark-blue sky.
But they were not talking of the moon, but of a large, old stone that
lay below in the courtyard not very far from the kitchen door. The
maids often laid the clean copper saucepans and kitchen vessels on
this stone, that they might dry in the sun, and the children were
fond of playing on it. It was, in fact, an old gravestone.
“Yes,” said the master of the house, “I believe the stone came from
the graveyard of the old church of the convent which was pulled
down, and the pulpit, the monuments, and the grave-stones sold.
My father bought the latter; most of them were cut in two and used
for paving-stones, but that one stone was preserved whole, and
laid in the courtyard.” “Any one can see that it is a grave-stone,”
said the eldest of the children; “the representation of an hour-glass
and part of the figure of an angel can still be traced, but the
inscription beneath is quite worn out, excepting the name ‘Preben,’
and a large ‘S’ close by it, and a little farther down the name of
‘Martha’ can be easily read. But nothing more, and even that
cannot be seen unless it has been raining, or when we have washed
the stone.” “Dear me! how singular. Why that must be the gravestone
of Preben Schwane and his wife.” The old man who said this
looked old enough to be the grandfather of all present in the room.
“Yes,” he continued, “these people were among the last who were
buried in the churchyard of the old convent. They were a very
worthy old couple, I can remember them well in the days of my
boyhood. Every one knew them, and they were esteemed by all.
They were the oldest residents in the town, and people said they
possessed a ton of gold, yet they were always very plainly dressed,
in the coarsest stuff, but with linen of the purest whiteness. Preben
and Martha were a fine old couple, and when they both sat on the
bench, at the top of the steep stone steps, in front of their house,
with the branches of the linden-tree waving above them, and
nodded in a gentle, friendly way to passers by, it really made one
feel quite happy. They were very good to the poor; they fed them
and clothed them, and in their benevolence there was judgment as
well as true Christianity. The old woman died first; that day is still
quite vividly before my eyes. I was a little boy, and had
accompanied my father to the old man’s house. Martha had fallen
into the sleep of death just as we arrived there. The corpse lay in a
bedroom, near to the one in which we sat, and the old man was in
great distress and weeping like a child. He spoke to my father, and
to a few neighbors who were there, of how lonely he should feel
now she was gone, and how good and true she, his dead wife, had
been during the number of years that they had passed through life
together, and how they had become acquainted, and learnt to love
each other. I was, as I have said, a boy, and only stood by and
listened to what the others said; but it filled me with a strange
emotion to listen to the old man, and to watch how the color rose in
his cheeks as he spoke of the days of their courtship, of how
beautiful she was, and how many little tricks he had been guilty of,
that he might meet her. And then he talked of his wedding-day;
and his eyes brightened, and he seemed to be carried back, by his
words, to that joyful time. And yet there she was, lying in the next
room, dead- an old woman, and he was an old man, speaking of
the days of hope, long passed away. Ah, well, so it is; then I was
but a child, and now I am old, as old as Preben Schwane then was.
Time passes away, and all things changed. I can remember quite
well the day on which she was buried, and how Old Preben
walked close behind the coffin.
“A few years before this time the old couple had had their gravestone
prepared, with an inscription and their names, but not the
date. In the evening the stone was taken to the churchyard, and
laid on the grave. A year later it was taken up, that Old Preben
might be laid by the side of his wife. They did not leave behind
them wealth, they left behind them far less than people had
believed they possessed; what there was went to families distantly
related to them, of whom, till then, no one had ever heard. The old
house, with its balcony of wickerwork, and the bench at the top of
the high steps, under the lime-tree, was considered, by the roadinspectors,
too old and rotten to be left standing. Afterwards, when
the same fate befell the convent church, and the graveyard was
destroyed, the grave-stone of Preben and Martha, like everything
else, was sold to whoever would buy it. And so it happened that
this stone was not cut in two as many others had been, but now lies
in the courtyard below, a scouring block for the maids, and a
playground for the children. The paved street now passes over the
resting place of Old Preben and his wife; no one thinks of them any
more now.” And the old man who had spoken of all this shook his
head mournfully, and said, “Forgotten! Ah, yes, everything will be
forgotten!” And then the conversation turned on other matters.
But the youngest child in the room, a boy, with large, earnest eyes,
mounted upon a chair behind the window curtains, and looked out
into the yard, where the moon was pouring a flood of light on the
old gravestone,- the stone that had always appeared to him so dull
and flat, but which lay there now like a great leaf out of a book of
history. All that the boy had heard of Old Preben and his wife
seemed clearly defined on the stone, and as he gazed on it, and
glanced at the clear, bright moon shining in the pure air, it was as
if the light of God’s countenance beamed over His beautiful world.
“Forgotten! Everything will be forgotten!” still echoed through the
room, and in the same moment an invisible spirit whispered to the
heart of the boy, “Preserve carefully the seed that has been
entrusted to thee, that it may grow and thrive. Guard it well.
Through thee, my child, shall the obliterated inscription on the old,
weather-beaten grave-stone go forth to future generations in clear,
golden characters. The old pair shall again wander through the
streets arm-in-arm, or sit with their fresh, healthy cheeks on the
bench under the lime-tree, and smile and nod at rich and poor. The
seed of this hour shall ripen in the course of years into a beautiful
poem. The beautiful and the good are never forgotten, they live
always in story or in song.”
THE END