As the carriage door was closed upon Margaret alone, Judge Kirtley stepped up to the undertaker.
"Does not Mr. De Jarnette ride with Mrs. De Jarnette?" he asked in a low tone.
"No, sir, he preferred to ride in the second carriage alone. The third is reserved for you, sir."
"I will trouble you to open that door," said the Judge, rather stiffly, indicating the first carriage. "You may use your third carriage for some one else or dismiss it. I shall ride with Mrs. De Jarnette."
In a green bank at Oak Hill he was laid—Oak Hill, that beautiful silent suburb which, for a century of the capital's life—the shifting, heaving, kaleidoscopic life in which men come and go, and wax and wane, and pass into obscurity in ceaseless flow—has steadily gained in population and never lost. A passionate, turbulent soul was Victor De Jarnette, not wholly bad certainly; capable of much that was generous; productive of little that was worth perpetuating; not lacking in good impulses, but casting them oftener than otherwise in a mould of wax, which melted at the first hot blast of passion,—a mixture, like most of us perhaps, of good and evil, black and white. But alas!
"The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones."
That night Margaret De Jarnette sat long before the grate fire of the lonely house to which she had come a bride,—looking into the darkening coals and seeing nothing,—looking into the embers of a dead fire within, and finding much that had burned out. She lived relentlessly over the past two years,—putting to herself searching questions and exacting an answer to every one; going down into black depths of whose existence she once had not dreamed and coming up with staring, frightened eyes from which the scales of innocence had dropped.
Then she drew a long, shuddering breath.
"That book is closed," she whispered, "never to be opened again, thank God!... My girlhood is put away with it. I am old—old!"—she threw herself on her knees beside her sleeping child— "But oh, my baby! my little one! my blessed one! I have you! I have you!"