“Not to-day, anyhow, Molly,” said he, with a sigh.
How Luttrell sorrowed for the loss of his wife was not known. It was believed that he never passed the threshold of the door where she lay—never went to take one farewell look of her. He sat moodily in his room, going out at times to give certain orders about the funeral, which was to take place on the third day. A messenger had been despatched to his late wife’s relatives, who lived about seventy miles off, down the coast of Mayo, and to invite them to attend. Of her immediate family none remained. Her father was in banishment, the commutation of a sentence of death. Of her two brothers, one had died on the scaffold, and another had escaped to America, whither her three sisters had followed him; so that except her uncle, Peter Hogan, and his family, and a half-brother of her mother’s, a certain Joe Rafter, who kept a shop at Lahinch, there were few to follow her to the grave as mourners.
Peter had four sons and several daughters, three of them married. They were of the class of small farmers, very little above the condition of the cottier; but they were, as a family, a determined, resolute, hard-headed race, not a little dreaded in the neighbourhood where they lived, and well known to be knit together by ties that made an injury to any one of them a feud that the whole family would avenge.
For years and years Luttrell had not seen nor even heard of them. He had a vague recollection of having seen Peter Hogan at his marriage, and once or twice afterwards, but preserved no recollection of him. Nothing short of an absolute necessity—for as such he felt it—would have induced him to send for them now; but he knew well how rigid were popular prejudices, and how impossible it would have been for him to live amongst a people whose most cherished feelings he would have outraged, had he omitted the accustomed honours to the dead.
He told his servant Molly to do all that was needful on the occasion—to provide for those melancholy festivities which the lower Irish adhere to with a devotion that at once blends their religious ardour with their intensely strong imaginative power.
“There is but one thing I will not bear,” said he. “They must not come in upon me. I will see them when they come, and take leave of them when they go; but they are not to expect me to take any part in their proceedings. Into this room I will suffer none to enter.”
“And Master Harry,” said the woman, wiping her eyes with her apron—“what’s to be done with him? ‘Tis two days that he’s there, and he won’t leave the corpse.”
“It’s a child’s sorrow, and will soon wear itself out.”
“Ay, but it’s killing him!” said she, tenderly—“it’s killing him in the mean while.”
“He belongs to a tough race,” said he, with a bitter smile, “that neither sorrow nor shame ever killed. Leave the boy alone, and he’ll come to himself the sooner.”