"Well, don't let any of them downstairs hear you," begged May, "because they wouldn't understand."
"It doesn't mean I'm not sorry about mother because I laugh. And I believe she'd be the first to understand. Oh, May, what a tale she'd have made of it, if she'd only been alive to see her own funeral. She'd have kept anyone in fits of laughter for a week."
Even during the slow progress of the pomp, Jenny, in the first coach with her father and May, was continually on the verge of laughter because, just as by a great effort she had managed to bring her emotions under control, Aunt Mabel had tripped over her skirt and dived head foremost into the carriage that was to hold Claude, Uncle James and his wife, and herself. Moreover, to make matters worse, her father's black kid gloves kept splitting in different places until, by the time the cemetery was reached, his hands merely looked as if they were plentifully patched with court-plaster. It was blue and white April weather, fit for cowslips and young lambs, when the somber people darkened the vivid, wet grass round the grave. During the solemnity and mournfulness of the burial service Jenny stood very rigid and pale, more conscious of the wind sighing through the yew trees than of finality and irremediable death. She was neither irritated nor moved by the sniffling of those around her. The fluttering of the priest's surplice and the tear-dabbled handkerchiefs occupied her attention less than the figure of a widow looking with sorrowful admiration at a tombstone two hundred yards away. She did not advance with the rest to stare uselessly down on the lowered coffin. The last words had been said: the ceremony was done. In the sudden silver wash of an April shower they all hurried to the shelter of the mourning coaches. Jenny looked back once, and under the arc of a rainbow saw men with gleaming spades: then she, too, lost in the dust and hangings of the heavy equipage, was jogged slowly back to Islington.
Funerals, like weddings, are commonly employed by families to weld broken links in the chain of association with comparisons of progress and the condolences or congratulations of a decade's chance and change. Jenny could not bear to see these relations cawing like rooks in a domestic parliament. She felt their presence outraged the humor of the dead woman and pictured to herself how, if her father had died, her mother would have sent them all flapping away. She did not want to hear her mother extolled by unappreciative people. She loathed the sight of her sleek cousin Claude, of Alfie glowering at Edie, of her future sister-in-law picking pieces of white cotton off her skirt, of Edie brushing currants from the side of Norman's mouth. Finally, when she was compelled to listen to her father's statement of his susceptibility to the knocks of a feather on receiving the news of his wife's death, she could bear it no longer, but went upstairs to her bedroom, whither Aunt Mabel presently followed in search.
"Ah, Jenny, this is a sad set out and no mistake," Mrs. Purkiss began.
Jenny did not deign to pay any attention, but looked coldly out of the window.
"You must feel quite lost without her," continued the aunt, "though to be sure you didn't trouble her much with your company this last year. Poor Florrie, she used to fret about it a lot. And your father wasn't much use—such an undependable sort of a man as he is. Let's all hope, now he's got two motherless girls to look after, he'll be a bit more strict."
"I wish you wouldn't keep on at me, Auntie," Jenny protested, "because I shall be most shocking rude to you in a minute, which I shouldn't like to be at such a time."
"Tut—tut, I wish you could control that temper of yours; but there, I make allowances for I know you must be feeling it all very much, especially as you must blame yourself a bit."
Jenny turned sharply round and faced her aunt.