Dr. Cornish made no difficulty about taking over the evening consultations, in fact he had intended to do so in any case. Accordingly, after a rather early dinner, I made my way in leisurely fashion back to Hoxton, where, after all, I arrived fully ten minutes too soon. I realized my prematureness when I halted at the corner of Market Street to look at my watch; and as ten additional minutes of Mrs. Morris’s society offered no allurement, I was about to turn back and fill up the time with a short walk when my attention was arrested by a mast which had just appeared above the wall at the end of the street. With its black-painted truck and halyard blocks and its long tricolour pennant, it looked like the mast of a Dutch schuyt or galliot, but I could hardly believe it possible that such a craft could make its appearance in the heart of London. All agog with curiosity, I hurried up the street and looked over the wall at the canal below; and there, sure enough, she was—a big Dutch sloop, broad-bosomed, massive, and medieval, just such a craft as one may see in the pictures of old Vandervelde, painted when Charles the Second was king.
I leaned on the low wall and watched her with delighted interest as she crawled forward slowly to her berth, bringing with her, as it seemed, a breath of the distant sea and the echo of the surf, murmuring on sandy beaches. I noted appreciatively her old-world air, her antique build, her gay and spotless paint, and the muslin curtains in the little windows of her deck-house, and was, in fact, so absorbed in watching her that the late Simon Bendelow had passed completely out of my mind. Suddenly, however, the chiming of a clock recalled me to my present business. With a hasty glance at my watch I tore myself away reluctantly, darted across the street, and gave a vigorous pull at the bell.
Dr. Cropper had not yet arrived, but the deceased had not been entirely neglected, for when I had spent some five minutes staring inquisitively about the drawing-room into which Mrs. Morris had shown me, that lady returned, accompanied by two other ladies, whom she introduced to me somewhat informally by the names of Miss Dewsnep and Miss Bonington respectively. I recognized the names as those of the two witnesses to the will and inspected them with furtive curiosity, though, indeed, they were quite unremarkable excepting as typical specimens of the genus elderly spinster.
“Poor Mr. Bendelow!” murmured Miss Dewsnep, shaking her head and causing an artificial cherry on her bonnet to waggle idiotically. “How beautiful he looks in his coffin!”
She looked at me as if for confirmation, so that I was fain to admit that his beauty in this new setting had not yet been revealed to me.
“So peaceful,” she added, with another shake of her head, and Miss Bonington chimed in with the comment, “Peaceful and restful.” Then they both looked at me and I mumbled indistinctly that I had no doubt he did; the fact being that the inmates of coffins are not in general much addicted to boisterous activity.
“Ah!” Miss Dewsnep resumed, “how little did I think when I first saw him, sitting up in bed so cheerful in that nice, sunny room in the house at—”
“Why not?” interrupted Mrs. Morris. “Did you think he was going to live forever?”
“No, Mrs. Morris, ma’am,” was the dignified reply, “I did not. No such idea ever entered my head. I know too well that we mortals are all born to be gathered in at last as the—er—as the—”
“Sparks fly upwards,” murmured Miss Bonington.
“As the corn is gathered in at harvest time,” Miss Dewsnep continued with slight emphasis. “But not to be cast into a burning fiery furnace. When I first saw him in the other house at—”
“I don’t see what objection you need have to cremation,” interrupted Mrs. Morris. “It was his own choice, and a good one, too. Look at those great cemeteries. What sense is there in letting the dead occupy the space that is wanted for the living?”
“Well,” said Miss Dewsnep, “I may be old-fashioned, but it does seem to me that a nice, quiet funeral with plenty of flowers and a proper, decent grave in a churchyard is the natural end to a human life. That is what I look forward to, myself.”
“Then you are not likely to be disappointed,” said Mrs. Morris; “though I don’t quite see what satisfaction you expect to get out of your own funeral.”
Miss Dewsnep made no reply, and an interval of dismal silence followed. Mrs. Morris was evidently impatient of Dr. Cropper’s unpunctuality. I could see that she was listening intently for the sound of the bell, as she had been even while the conversation was in progress; indeed, I had been dimly conscious all the while of a sense of tension and anxiety on her part. She had seemed to me to watch her two friends with a sort of uneasiness, and to give a quite uncalled-for attention to their rather trivial utterances.
At length her suspense was relieved by a loud ringing of the bell. She started up and opened the door, but she had barely crossed the threshold when she suddenly turned back and addressed me.
“That will be Dr. Cropper. Perhaps you had better come out with me and meet him.”
It struck me as an odd suggestion, but I rose without comment and followed her along the passage to the street door, which we reached just as another loud peal of the bell sounded in the house behind us. She flung the door wide open, and a small, spectacled man
