“Afeared o’ what?” exclaimed Miss Prime, turning on her.
“Well, you know, Miss Hester, bein’ left alone—ah—some people air funny about—”
“I’m no fool, Melissy Davis. Take the child an’ go on.”
Miss Hester was glad of the chance to be sharp. It covered the weakness to which she had almost given way at sight of the child’s grief. She bustled on about her work when Mrs. Davis was gone, but her brow was knit into a wrinkle of deep thought. “A mother is a mother, after all,” she mused aloud, “even sich a one.”
Chapter II
For haste, for unadulterated despatch, commend me to the county burying. The body politic is busy and has no time to waste on an inert human body. It does its duty to its own interest and to the pauper dead when the body is dropped with all celerity into the ground. The county is philosophical: it says, “Poor devil, the world was unkind to him: he’ll be glad to get out of it: we’ll be doing him a favour to put him at the earliest moment out of sight and sound and feeling of the things that wounded him. Then, too, the quicker the cheaper, and that will make it easier on the taxpayers.” This latter is so comforting! So the order is written, the funeral is rushed through, and the county goes home to its dinner, feeling well satisfied with itself—so potent are the consolations of philosophy at so many hundreds per year.
To this general order poor Margaret’s funeral proved no exception. The morning after her decease she was shrouded and laid in her cheap pine coffin to await those last services which, in a provincial town, are the meed of saint and sinner alike. The room in which she lay was very clean—unnaturally so—from the attention of Miss Prime. Clean muslin curtains had been put up at the windows, and the one cracked mirror which the house possessed had been covered with white cloth. The lace-like carpet had been taken off the floor, and the boards had been scrubbed white. The little stove in the corner, now cold, was no longer red with rust. In a tumbler on a little table at Margaret’s head stood the only floral offering that gave a touch of tenderness to the grim scene—a bunch of homegrown scarlet and white geraniums. Some woman had robbed her wintered room of this bit of brightness for the memory of the dead. The perfume of the flowers mingled heavily with the faint odour which pervades the chamber of death—an odour that is like the reminiscence of sorrow.
Like a spirit of order, with solemn face and quiet tread, Miss Hester moved about the room, placing one thing here, another there, but ever doing or changing something, all with maidenly neatness. What a childish fancy this is of humanity’s, tiptoeing and whispering in the presence of death, as if one by an incautious word or a hasty step might wake the sleeper from such deep repose!
The service had been set for two o’clock in the afternoon. One or two women had already come in to “sit,” but by half-past one the general congregation began to arrive and to take their places. They were mostly women. The hour of the day was partially responsible for this; but then men do not go to funerals anyway, if they can help it. They do not revel, like their sisters, in the exquisite pleasure of sorrow. Most of the women had known pain and loss themselves, and came with ready sympathy, willing, nay, anxious to be moved to tears. Some of them came dragging by one hand children, dressed stiffly, uncomfortably, and ludicrously—a medley of soiled ribbons, big collars, wide bows, and very short knickerbockers. The youngsters were mostly curious and ill-mannered, and ever and anon one had to be slapped by its mother into snivelling decorum. Mrs. Davis came in with one of her own children and leading the dead woman’s boy by the hand. At this a buzz of whispered conversation began.
“Pore little dear,” said one, as she settled the bow more securely under her own boy’s sailor collar—“pore little dear, he’s all alone in the world.”
“I never did see in all my life sich a young child look so sad,” said another.
“H’m!” put in a third; “in this world pore motherless childern has plenty o’ reason to look sad, I tell you.”
She brushed the tears off the cheek of her little son whom she had slapped a moment before. She was tender now.
One woman bent down and whispered into her child’s ear as she pointed with one cotton-gloved finger, “See, Johnny, see little Freddie, there; he ain’t got no mother no more. Pore little Freddie! ain’t you sorry fur him?” The child nodded, and gazed with open-eyed wonder at “little Freddie” as if he were of a new species.
The curtains, stirred by the blast through the loose windows, flapped dismally, and the people drew their wraps about them, for the fireless room was cold. Steadily, insistently, the hive-like drone of conversation murmured on.
“I wonder who’s a-goin’ to preach the funeral,” asked one.
“Oh, Mr. Simpson, of the Methodist Church, of course: she used to go to that church years ago, you know, before she backslid.”
“That’s jest what I’ve allus said about people that falls from grace. You know the last state o’ that man is worse than the first.”
“Ah, that’s true enough.”
“It’s a-puttin’ yore hand to the ploughshare an’ then turnin’ back.”
“I wonder what the preacher’ll have to say fur her. It’s a mighty hard case to preach about.”
“I’m wonderin’ too what he’ll say, an’ where he’ll preach her.”
“Well, it’s hard to tell. You know the Methodists believe that there’s ‘salvation to be found between the stirrup an’ the ground.’ ”
“It’s a mighty comfortin’ doctern, too.”
“An’ then they do say that she left
