“It’s for you to say, ma’am.”
The main business street of the little town was bustling and prosperous-looking. Where, in her childhood river-town days the farm wagons and buggies had stood hitched at the curb, she now saw rows of automobiles parked, side by side. Five-and-Ten-Cent Stores. Motion Pictures. Piggly-Wiggly. Popular magazines in the drug-store window. She had thought that everything would be the same.
Breitweiler’s Undertaking Parlours. Quite a little throng outside; and within an actual crowd, close-packed. They made way respectfully for Barnato and his party. “What is it?” whispered Magnolia. “What are all these people here for? What has happened?”
“Your ma was quite a famous person in these parts, Mrs. Ravenal. Up and down the rivers and around she was quite a character. I’ve saved the pieces for you in the paper.”
“You don’t mean these people—all these people have come here to see——”
“Yes, ma’am. In state. I hope you don’t object, ma’am. I wouldn’t want to feel I’d done something you wouldn’t like.”
She felt a little faint. “I’d like them to go away now.”
Parthenia Ann Hawks in her best black silk. Her strong black eyebrows punctuated the implacable old face with a kind of surprised resentment. She had not succumbed to the Conqueror without a battle. Magnolia, gazing down upon the stern waxen features, the competent hands crossed in unwilling submission upon her breast, could read the message of revolt that was stamped, even in death, upon that strong and terrible brow. Here! I’m mistress of this craft. You can’t do this to me! I’m Parthenia Ann Hawks! Death? Fiddlesticks and nonsense! For others, perhaps. But not for me.
Presently they were driving swiftly out along the smooth asphalt road toward Cold Spring. Elly Chipley was telling her tale with relish, palpably for the hundredth time.
“. . . seven o’clock in the evening or maybe a few minutes past and her standing in front of the looking-glass in her room doing her hair. Clyde and me, we had the room next to hers, for’ard, the last few years, on account I used to do for her, little ways. Not that she was feeble or like that. But she needed somebody younger to do for her, now and then”—with the bridling self-consciousness of a girlish seventy, as compared to Parthy’s eighty and over. “Well, I was in the next room, and just thinking I’d better be making up for the evening show when I hear a funny sound, and then a voice I didn’t hardly recognize sort of squeaks, ‘Elly! A stroke!’ And then a crash.”