The words were coarse, but as they were said they were so pathetic that they pierced me. Poor little baby, born to a tainted heritage! I must save her clean little soul somehow. Poor Julia, she certainly never had any sort of a chance.
April 24. She is in her grave at last, poor girl, and it is sad to think that nobody alive regrets her. Tom cannot, and even her dreadful mother showed no sorrow to-day. Somehow the vulgarity of the mother and her behavior took away half the sadness of the tragedy. When I think about it the very coarseness of it all makes the situation more pathetic, but this is an afterthought that can be felt only when I have beaten down my disgust. When one considers how Julia grew up with this woman, and how she had no way of learning the decencies of life except from a mother who had no conception of them, it makes the heart ache; and yet when Mrs. Brownrig broke in upon us at the graveyard this morning, disgust was the strongest feeling of which I was conscious. The violation of conventionalities always shocks a woman, I suppose, and when it comes to anything so solemn as services over the dead, the lack of decency is shocking and exasperating together, with a little suggestion besides of sacrilege.
Miss Charlotte surprised me by coming over just after breakfast to go to the funeral with me.
"I don't like to have you go alone," she said, "and I knew you would go."
I asked her in some surprise how in the world she knew when the funeral was to be, for we thought that we had kept it entirely quiet.
"Aunt Naomi told me last night," she answered. "I suppose she heard it from some familiar spirit or other,—a black cat, or a toad, or something of the kind."
I could only say that I was completely puzzled to see how Aunt Naomi had discovered the hour in any other way, and I thanked Miss Charlotte for coming, though I told the dear she should not have taken so much trouble.
"I wanted to do it, my dear," she returned cheerfully. "I am getting to be an old thing, and I find funerals rather lively and amusing. Don't you remember Maria Harmon used to say that to a pious soul a funeral was a heavenly picnic?"
Whatever a "heavenly picnic" may be, the funeral this morning was one of the most ghastly things imaginable. Tom and Mr. Thurston were in one carriage and Miss Charlotte and I in another. We went to the graveyard at the Rim, where Julia's father and brother were buried, a place half overgrown with wild-rose and alder bushes. In summer it must be a picturesque tangle of wild shrubs and blossoms, but now it is only chill, and barren, and neglected. The spring has reddened and yellowed the tips of the twigs, but not enough to make the bushes look really alive yet. The heap of clay by the grave, too, was of a hideous ochre tint, and horribly sodden and oozy.
Just as the coffin was being lowered a wild figure suddenly appeared from somewhere behind the thickets of alders and low spruces which skirt the fence on one side. It proved to be old Mrs. Brownrig, who with rags and tags, and even her disheveled gray hair fluttering as she moved, half ran down the path toward us. She must have been hiding in the woods waiting, and I found afterward that she had been seen lurking about yesterday, though for some reason she had not been to her house. Now she had evidently been drinking, and she was a dreadful thing to look at.