“I am the resurrection and the life. He that liveth and believeth on me shall never die. And he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
When the bier, with the casket, was set down before the altar, and the chief mourners—the two sons of the deceased, who had followed it—had taken their seats in the rectory pew, then the funeral services, conducted by the curate, went on to their solemn ending.
At the close the parishoniers came out of their pews in an orderly manner, and passing on from the right to the left before the casket, took their last look at the mask of their deceased pastor.
At last the door of the crypt below the chancel was opened, and the pallbearers bore the casket down the narrow stairs and laid it in the leaden coffin and lifted it to the stone niche prepared to receive it.
Then the “dust to dust” was spoken, and the minister came up again, went to the altar, pronounced the benediction, and so dismissed the congregation.
As the two sons of the late rector came out of their pew they met and shook hands with the curate, but declined his invitation to the rectory, saying that they were about to return immediately to Cannes, to remain with their widowed mother for the few days in which they would absent themselves from their professional duties.
So they took leave of the curate and his wife and daughter, entered a carriage that was waiting, and drove off to their train.
The curate, leaving his parishioners talking together in groups in the churchyard, while the sexton was closing up the church, followed his wife and daughter through the gate in the wall that divided that cemetery from the rectory grounds.
He went directly to his study to compose himself before joining his wife and daughter in the parlor.
But what he found there did not tend to his composure. A letter, with a Paris postmark, was lying on the table. He dropped into a chair and took it. At first he thought it must be from Kightly Montgomery, whom he knew to be flourishing in Paris under the name of Randolph Hay; but a moment’s reflection assured him that the false claimant was not likely to know of the accident of James Campbell’s temporary charge of the Haymore parish.