Felix shook his head decidedly, though unable to help a little inward laugh at this revival of Alda's old manoeuvre.
'By-the-by,' continued the old gentleman, 'what's become of your brother that Tom bred up?'
'We knew of him last in Australia, Sir.'
'Next to you, is he or this tall lad you have here?'
'He is older than Clement'
'Poor Tom made too much of him—eh? Well, young men will be young men,' said Mr. Underwood, too full of his own sorrows to think about Edgar; 'but they come round at last:' and therewith he fell into a talk about his own son, whose illness and death he proceeded to dwell upon, as he found he had a kind and attentive auditor; and this lasted till the butler came to wheel him off to his bed.
Felix and Clement paid an early visit to the church next morning, and found it in a course of being muffled in black. 'Seventy-five yards there allys was for every Underwood on 'em,' said Abednego Tripp, who had become much more shaky and feeble, had resigned his market-boat to Kerenhappuch's husband, and was hobbling about the church in a mixed, but on the whole a pleasant and exulting, frame of mind, by no means partaking of the intense disgust with which Clement beheld the sanctuary invaded by the paraphernalia of human woe.
Dr. May, unasked, brought Bernard over to the funeral, which was at twelve o'clock. Neither the father nor the widow attended it; but the incongruity of Edward Underwood's sons acting as chief mourners was prevented by the nearer claims of the Shaw brothers-in-law. The farmer tenants came; but the lack of neighbouring clergy and even gentry struck the brothers in contrast with the overflowing numbers who had flocked to their father's grave, so far from his ancestral home, showing how much more the man can be than the position.
Bernard was staring about him with little endeavour for appearances; and at the first moment that speech was possible, even while the hat-bands were coming off, he looked up in the face of Clement with open eyes, and said, 'My eyes! this is no end of a place! Is it what is to come to us?' Clement hushed him seriously and vigorously, but without much effect. 'Did you know 'twas like this?' he persisted, gazing round.
'I never thought about it. Hush!'