`` 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 . `` Cruel ? '' repeated he ; then , losing his deathlike composure in a wild bitterness , `` Heaven judge which of us has been cruel to the other ! In youth you deprived me of my happiness , my hopes , my aims ; you took away all the substance of my life and made it a dream without reality enough even to grieve at -- with only a pervading gloom , through which I walked wearily and cared not whither . But after forty years , when I have built my tomb and would not give up the thought of resting there -- no , not for such a life as we once pictured -- you call me to the altar . At your summons I am here . But other husbands have enjoyed your youth , your beauty , your warmth of heart and all that could be termed your life . What is there for me but your decay and death ? And therefore I have bidden these funeral-friends , and bespoken the sexton 's deepest knell , and am come in my shroud to wed you as with a burial-service , that we may join our hands at the door of the sepulchre and enter it together . '' It was not frenzy , it was not merely the drunkenness of strong emotion in a heart unused to it , that now wrought upon the bride . The stern lesson of the day had done its work ; her worldliness was gone . She seized the bridegroom 's hand . `` Yes ! '' cried she ; `` let us wed even at the door of the sepulchre .
My life is gone XXXXX vanity and emptiness , but at its close there is one true feeling .
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