Part 9 (1/2)

”Isn't it sad,” the woman exclaimed, grasping eagerly at this chance to discuss every incident of the death and illness, with that love for detail always to be found in country districts where happenings are few and interests are strong.

”They sent for the family Tuesday when he had the stroke, but he couldn't speak to them when they got here. They said he seemed to recognise Miss Polly, and smiled when she took his hand. She seemed to be his favourite, and they say she's taking it mighty hard--harder than any of the rest. It's a pity he couldn't have left 'em all some last message. I think it's always a comfort to remember one's dying words when as good a person as Mr. Holmes goes. And it's always so nice when they happen to be appropriate, so's they can be put on the tombstone afterward. I remember my Aunt Maria worked my grandfather's last words into a sampler, with an urn and weeping-willow-tree. She had it framed in black and hung in the parlour, and everybody who came to the house admired it. It's a pity that the miller couldn't have left some last word to each of 'em.”

”I don't think it was necessary,” said the girl, turning away with a choke in her voice, as the eloquent face of the old man seemed to rise up before her. ”His whole life speaks for him.”

Mrs. Perkins looked after the retreating figure regretfully, as the jaunty sailor hat disappeared behind a tall hedge. ”I wish she hadn't been in such a hurry,” she sighed, s.h.i.+fting the baby to the other hip.

”I would have liked to ask her if she's heard who the pall-bearers are to be.”

At the turn in the road the little schoolmistress looked up to see Miss Anastasia Dill leaning over her gate. She had just heard the news, and there were tears in her pale blue eyes.

”And Polly's wedding cards were to have been sent out this next week!”

she exclaimed after their first words of greeting. ”The poor child told me so herself when she was here in August on a visit. 'Miss Anastasia,'

she said to me, 'I'm not going abroad for my honeymoon, as all my family want me to do. I'm going to bring Jack back here to the old homestead where grandfather's married life began. Somehow it was so ideal, so nearly perfect, that I have a feeling that maybe the mantle of that old romance will fall on our shoulders. Besides, Jack has never seen grandfather, and I tell him it's as much of an education to know such a grand old man as it is to go through Yale. So we're coming in October.

The woods will have on all their gala colours then, and I'll be the happiest bride the sun ever shone on, unless it was my grandmother Polly.' And now to think,” added Miss Anastasia, tearfully, ”none of those plans can come to pa.s.s. It's bad luck to put off a wedding. Oh, I feel so sorry for her!”

There is an undefined note of pathos in a country funeral that is never reached in any other. The little schoolmistress felt it as she walked up the path to the old house behind the cedars. The front porch was full of men, who, dressed in their unaccustomed best, had the uneasy appearance of having come upon a Sunday in the middle of the week. Their heavy boots tiptoed clumsily through the hall, with a painful effort to go silently, as one by one the neighbours pa.s.sed into the old sitting-room and out again. The room across the hall had been filled with rows of chairs, and the women who came first were sitting there in a deep silence, broken only by a cough now and then, a hoa.r.s.e whisper or a rustle, as some one moved to make room for a newcomer.

It was a sombre a.s.sembly, for every one wore whatever black her wardrobe afforded, and many funeral occasions had left an acc.u.mulation of mourning millinery in every house in the neighbourhood. But the limp c.r.a.pe veils and black gloves and pall-like cashmere shawls were all congregated in the dimly lighted parlour. In the old sitting-room it was as cheerful and homelike as ever, save for the still form in the centre.

Through an open window the western sun streamed into the big, hospitable room, across the bright home-made rag carpet. The old clock in the corner ticked with the placid, steady stroke that had never failed or faltered, in any vicissitude of the generations for which it had marked the changes. No fire blazed on the old hearthstone that had warmed the hearts as well as the hands of the whole countryside on many a cheerful occasion. But a great bough of dogwood, laid across the s.h.i.+ning andirons, filled the s.p.a.ce with coral berries that glowed like live embers as the sun stole athwart them.

”Oh, if the old room could only speak!” thought Miss Anastasia, when her turn came to pa.s.s reverently in for a last look at the peaceful face.

”There would be no need of man's eulogy.”

But man's eulogy was added presently, when the old minister came in and took his place beside the coffin of his lifelong friend and neighbour.