She allowed no one to touch his clothes and trinkets, or his books and pipes, or anything that he had used and cared for, but herself; and she cried over them, and kissed them, and laid them away in sacred drawers, to be treasured relics and heirlooms for her little Alfy, who was to be taught to reverence the memory of the tenderest of fathers, and to hand down to unborn generations the name and fame of the most accomplished and estimable of men.
She wandered about her great, silent house, in and out of the spacious rooms, making loving inventories of all the rich appointments, which had never had so much grace and beauty as now.
"He built this lovely place for me," she would say to herself, or perhaps say aloud to Beatrice, who was her chief companion at this time, "He had this carved dado made because I didn't like tiles; he gave me this Florentine cabinet on my twentieth birthday; he chose these hangings himself because he said they suited my complexion." Every bit of the house and its furniture was newly sanctified by some of these reminiscences.
She gathered together all his letters reverently—some had been waiting for his return from Mr. Lambert's, and were still unopened; and though many of them were addressed in the kind of handwriting that was especially calculated to arouse curiosity, she would not pry into his correspondence, nor allow anyone else to do so.
She would not read what he had evidently never intended her to read; she burnt them all without taking one of them out of its envelope, and then drove to the cemetery with a wreath of flowers for his grave.
"He was the best of husbands," she said, when to her own people she talked of him.
And Mrs. Hardy, who was truly afflicted by the family bereavement, was comforted to be able to repeat this tender formula to all the gossip of her own circle.
"He was the best of husbands. So fond of her to the last! Even when he was delirious you could see plainly his distress when she went out of the room, and his relief when she came back again. And she was so devoted! Such a thoroughly suitable marriage in every way—as if they had been made for each other! She is broken-hearted for the loss of him. And how he valued her he has plainly proved."
And here the gossips would smile decorously, and shake their heads, and say, "Yes, indeed." For they all understood what this allusion meant. It meant that Mr. Kingston had left the half of his great property absolutely at his young wife's disposal, and that she was the sole and unrestricted trustee of the rest, which was settled upon his son; which certainly did prove that he had valued her in the most conclusive manner.
But in a little while—a scandalously little while—indications that this young widow of twenty-five was not inconsolable for the loss of her elderly husband, became apparent to all but the most superficial observers.