Would the idea ever grow familiar to her? Could she ever live with the fact, acknowledged and yet unregarded, as she had lived with the fact of her marriage? "There never was a better man in the world," she said aloud. Here on the farm she found herself missing him with the first vague sense of loss. The insensibility which had protected her at the station disappeared when her mind dwelt on his good qualities,—his kindness, his charity, his broad tolerance of her prejudices. She knew that she should miss him more and more in all the details of the farm, and that she should begin to sorrow for him as soon as she had time to realize that she had lost him for ever. Yesterday was a void in her mind. When she thought of the long day after her return from the station, she could remember only the incredible tenderness of John Abner, and the visit in the afternoon from James Ellgood, who had told her that the news of the wreck had just travelled as far as the farms beyond Whippernock River, and that the absent minister was returning at midnight.
On this, the second day after Nathan's death, the primitive ceremonies of the funeral began. The earliest and one of the most depressing signs of mourning was the loud demoralization of the negroes, who rose to the funeral as fish to bait, and became immediately incapable of any work except lamenting the dead. As long as there was hope left in tragedy, they were able to brace themselves to Herculean exertions; but superstition enslaved them as soon as death entered the house. The cows, of course, had to be milked; but with the exception of the milking and the necessary feeding of the stock, the place was like an abandoned farm until the burial was over. Though Nathan's charred body remained at Pedlar's Mill, the pall of mourning extended to Old Farm. John Abner had even suggested sending a telegram to the hotel and the dairy in Washington and letting the milk spoil; but the thought of all the good cream that would be thrown away was too much for Dorinda's economical instincts, and she had checked the impulse with the reminder that Nathan had hated a waste. Yes, he had hated a waste, it is true, but he had also loved a funeral. She remembered her mother's death, and the completeness, the perfection, of his arrangements.
"Am I too hard?" Dorinda asked herself. "Ought I not to see that everything gets so upset? After all, as Fluvanna says, a person does not die but once." The small ironic demon of her sagacity concluded, in spite of her will: "It is a good thing, or there wouldn't be any room left for life."
Breakfast was no sooner over than she was engulfed in a continuous deluge of sympathy. She was up in the attic with Fluvanna, going over the black things which had been left from the mourning of her parents, when the coloured woman glanced out of the dormer-window and gasped breathlessly. "Thar they are, Miss Dorinda. You hurry up and get into that black bombazine befo' they catch you out of mournin'."
She held up a dingy dress which had once belonged to Mrs. Oakley, and Dorinda slipped into it with the feeling that she was preparing for her own coffin. As she was about to go down to meet her callers, Fluvanna unfolded and shook out before her the crape veil which had been worn by two generations of widows. Her grandmother had bought it in more affluent circumstances, and after her death, for she had been one of the perpetual widows of the South, it had lain packed away in camphor until Mrs. Oakley was ready for it. Now it was Dorinda's turn, and a shiver went through her heart as she inhaled the rusty smell of bereavement.
"You'll have to get a new veil after the burial," Fluvanna observed, "but I reckon you can make out with this crape until that is over. It has turned real brown, but there won't many people notice it in church."
Putting the proffered veil aside, Dorinda hastened downstairs, after reminding Fluvanna that she must make coffee in case the visitors expected something to eat.
"If only they would leave the dignity and take away the sordidness of death," she thought.
At the foot of the staircase, Miss Seena Snead was waiting for her with a black serge dress that she had borrowed from one of the neighbours.
"What in the world have you got on, Dorinda?" she asked, while the tears brimmed over her kind old eyes. "I declare it looks as if it was made befo' the Flood. I no sooner heard of po' Nathan's death than I began to study about where I could find a good black dress for you to wear to the funeral. I wasn't a bit surprised that Nathan turned out to be such a hero. I always knew there was a lot mo' in him than some folks suspected. Then, while I was in the midst of trying to recollect who had died last year, young Mrs. John Garlick drove into our yard with this dress and a widow's bonnet in her arms. She told me she's stoutened so she couldn't make the dress meet on her, and she'd be obliged if you'd do her the favour to wear it. The bonnet she sent along because it's a widow's bonnet anyway, and she can't wear it herself until she loses John. That makes her sort of superstitious about keepin' it put away as if she were saving it for a purpose. John bought it for her in New York when she lost her mother. Wasn't that like a man all over again, to go and buy his wife a bonnet with a widow's ruche when her mother died?"