The words gave no chance of reply, and an audible chuckle arose from the listening throng, so obviously had her tone and manner made the other mourners outsiders. When Mattie slowly and deliberately moved around the headstone until she stood behind it, hung her wreath on its rounded top, and bowed her head upon it with her handkerchief covering her eyes, she had completely taken possession of the whole situation. As one of the young men of the town inelegantly observed, she was “boss of that grave and the others did n’t count.” As if in a carefully planned tableau vivant, she stood, a drooping figure of anguish, while the other two had become merely kneeling ministrants upon her woe.
“Well, if that ain’t the beatin’est!” chuckled old Ichabod Munson, puckering his leathery face into an ecstasy of wrinkles. “Gosh, I wish Archie Lovell could see that. He’d be ’most willin’ to get kilt for a sight o’ his three widders, an’ that Seaton girl comin’ it so over t’ others.”
“He’d think he was a Mormon or a Turk,” observed Miss Charlotte Kendall, with her deep, throaty chuckle that not even the solemnity of the graveyard could subdue. “He’d see the fun of it. Poor Archie! He did love a joke.”
The situation over the tombstone was one from which retreat to be effective must be speedy. Mattie Seaton was apparently the only one to appreciate this. But for a few moments did she remain with her forehead bent to the slab; then she kissed the cold marble feverishly; and in a voice broken, but still in tones easily audible to the listening neighbors, she said to the kneeling girls:—
“Thank you so much for your sympathy;” and before they could reply she had dropped again the cloud of crape over her face, and was moving swiftly away up the path to the gate.
Never was exit more dramatically effective. The pair left behind exchanged angry glances, then with a simultaneous impulse started to their feet, and as quickly as possible got away from the sight of their fellow townsfolk. They might be silly, but they were not so foolish as not to know how ridiculous they had been made to look that afternoon.
It was only a few days after this that the village was stirred by the news that Old Lady Andrews, who so mourned for Archie, who had adored the handsome, good-natured, selfish, flirtatious dog all his life, had gone South in the hope of recovering his remains, and of bringing them home to rest beneath the stone she had erected. The village pretty generally sympathized with the desire, but thought the chance of success in such a quest made the undertaking a piece of hopeless sentiment. The time since the news of Archie’s death was already considerable, his fate from the first had been uncertain, and the chances of the identification of his grave seemed exceedingly small.
“I figure Ol’ Lady Andrews would ’a’ done better to stay to hum,” ’Siah Appleby expressed the sentiment of the town in saying. “Like’s not ’f she finds out anythin’ certain,—which ’t ain’t all likely she will,—she’ll find Archie was just hove into a trench ’long with a lot more poor fellers, an’ no way o’ sortin’ out their bones short o’ the Day o’ Judgment. She’d sot up a stone to him, ’n’ she’d a nawful sight better let it go at that.”
The sentiment of the matter touched some, but the years of war had brought so much of grief and suffering that most had settled into a sort of dull acquiescence unless the woe were personal and immediate. The neighbors sympathized with the feeling of grief-stricken Old Lady Andrews, but so many husbands and fathers, brothers and sons and lovers, had vanished in unidentified graves that the nerves of feeling were benumbed. It would in the early years of the war have been unbearable to think of a friend as lying in an unnamed grave in the South; now it seemed simply a part of the inevitable misery of war.
The “three widows,” as the village folk unkindly dubbed them, were less in evidence after the episode in the graveyard. They avoided each other as far as possible, and were evidently not unaware that they were not taken very seriously by their neighbors. They perhaps knew that jests at their expense were in circulation, like the grim remark of Deacon Daniel Richards, that he did not see how any one of them could claim more than a “widow’s third” of Archie’s memory. They kept rather quiet, at least; and the weeks went by uneventfully until the departure of Old Lady Andrews again drew attention to the story.