"Six months?" the Duchess' voice was an unsteady thing.
"At the end of six months we laid her away in a pretty country churchyard, with flowers heaped all over her—and her white little hands full of them. And she hadn't—as much to contend with—as Miss Robin has."
And in the minute of dead silence which followed more tears fell. No one tried to hold them back and some of them were the tears of the old Duchess.
CHAPTER XXIII
There are old and forgotten churches in overgrown corners of London whose neglected remoteness suggests the possibility of any ecclesiastical ceremony being performed quite unobserved except by the parties concerned in it. If entries and departures were discreetly arranged, a baptismal or a marriage ceremony might take place almost as in a tomb. A dark wet day in which few pass by and such as pass are absorbed in their own discomforts beneath their umbrellas, offers a curiously entire aloofness of seclusion. In the neglected graveyards about them there is no longer any room to bury any one in the damp black earth where the ancient tombs are dark with mossy growth and mould, heavy broken slabs slant sidewise perilously, sad and thin cats prowl, and from a soot-blackened tree or so the rain drops with hollow, plashing sounds.
The rain was so plashing and streaming in rivulets among the mounds and stones of the burial ground of one of the most ancient and forgotten looking of such churches, when on a certain afternoon there came to the narrow soot-darkened Vicarage attached to it a tall, elderly man who wished to see and talk to the Vicar.
The Vicar in question was an old clergyman who had spent nearly fifty years in the silent, ecclesiastical-atmosphered small house. He was an unmarried man whose few relatives living in the far North of England were too poor and unenterprising to travel to London. His days were spent in unsatisfactory work among crowded and poverty-stricken human creatures before whom he felt helpless because he was an unpractical old Oxford bookworm. He read such services as he held in his dim church, to empty pews and echoing hollowness. He was nevertheless a deeply thinking man who was a gentleman of a scarcely remembered school; he was a peculiarly silent man and of dignified understanding. Through the long years he had existed in detached seclusion in his corner of his world around which great London roared and swept almost unheard by him in his remoteness.
When the visitor's card was brought to him where he sat in his dingy, book-packed study, he stood—after he had told his servant to announce the caller—gazing dreamily at the name upon the white surface. It was a stately name and brought back vague memories. Long ago—very long ago, he seemed to recall that he had slightly known the then bearer of it. He himself had been young then—quite young. The man he had known was dead and this one, his successor, must by this time have left youth behind him. What had led him to come?