The Honour of the Clintons

by Archibald Marshall

He mentally patted himself on the back for this masterpiece of statement, transgressing the strict truth by no more than perfectly allowable omission.

"Her settlement falls in, I suppose," said Dick. "I'm glad you were spared the worry, although the way out of it is sad enough. I've been sorry for Humphrey for some time. He had come to see that he had always played the fool about money, and was beginning to get his ideas straight; but poor Susan—well, one doesn't want to think about her in that way now—but there's no doubt she was a terrible drag on him. I'd seen it coming for some time, and when he talked to me at Christmas about settling down, I was pretty sure that he didn't know everything, and would be coming with another story soon."

"Why did you think that?" asked the Squire, with the sensation of treading on very thin ice.

"Oh, it was common talk of how she was going on—had been, I should say, for she did seem to have calmed down within the last year. Otherwise, I think I should have made up my mind to give Humphrey a hint, disagreeable as it would have been. Things were being hinted at about a year ago that made me think we might find ourselves involved in some bad scandal before we were much older."

"Oh, Dick," the Squire broke out, "we mustn't talk like this about a dead woman. Humphrey told me everything. It's all wiped out and done with now, for her, poor girl."

"Yes," said Dick. "But I'm not going to pretend that I think her death is a calamity. I don't; although any feeling one may have had against her is wiped out, as you say. In fact, if she had begun to pull herself up, as I think she had, and had got it all off her mind before she died, as I suppose she did, it's possible to feel kindly towards her. Still, I think she had made too big a mess of things. It would have come between them. As it is, he'll be able to think of her without bitterness. He'll get over the shock in time."

This was all so much what the Squire felt himself, summed up as it might have been in the comfortable phrase, "all for the best," that its effect upon him was much the same as if he had had the relief of telling Dick everything. He cheered up palpably, until he remembered what lay immediately in front of him; but faced even that with more equanimity, upheld by Dick's sympathetic support, and relieved of some doubt as to whether his thoughts about poor Susan were quite of the right colour.

The afternoon train, which in the course of these histories we have so often met at Kencote Station, brought the coffin and the mourners. Humphrey looked pale and worn, but collected. He stood with his mother's arm in his while the coffin, covered with flowers, was taken out of the purple-lined van, and lifted on to a hand bier. The church was much nearer to the station than the house, and the little procession walked there, past the cottages with blinds all drawn, and the villagers standing by them, mostly in black, which only served to heighten the bright colours of the flowers with which the gardens were full. The sky was of the purest blue, and larks trilled unseen in its translucent vapours, as if to draw the thoughts of the mourners away from the earth in which they were presently to see these mortal remains laid. The elms and chestnuts whispered of life going on and renewing itself year by year until the end. The rich springing growth of early summer in this quiet country village spoke of life and of hope; and the black line of mourners moving slowly along was not incongruous with it, if the poor clay they were escorting was really only the husk from which new life had already sprung.

The Squire, sobered to becoming gravity by the sight of the coffin, yet felt his thoughts tuned to the beauty of the sky and the familiar surroundings. It was he who had planned this walking escort. There would be carriages, and a state suitable to the occasion on the morrow. This was to be a home-coming, a token of his forgiveness of her for the trouble she had caused him, a sort of last taste of the everyday life of Kencote, into the intimacy of which she was finally to be received as a daughter of the house. It appealed also to that sense of common human life, which is the fine flower of squiredom. Death levels all; he had no feeling that the cottagers standing at their garden gates were intruding their curiosity, as was felt by Susan's mother for one, who thought this public tramp between a station and a church an outrage on her nobility. The cottagers were his friends on an occasion like this, had a right to share mourning as well as festival with the family in whose interests they were hereditarily bound up. He took comfort from seeing them there. They were his people; without them this quiet home-coming would have been incomplete.

The coffin was taken into the chancel of the ancient church, and set down over the brass of a knightly Clinton who had died and been buried there five centuries before. Almost without exception those who followed it were his direct descendants, and the same stones surrounded them as had sheltered the mourners at his funeral. So many years, so little change! Christening, marriage, burial—the renewal of life in the same stock had gone on through the centuries. This new burial was only a ripple in the steady, pauseless flow, and would have been no more if the head of the house himself had lain where this poor, foolish, erring girl, now hardly regretted, and soon to be forgotten, was laid.