To one person, indeed, amongst those who were carried along after the corpse, the whole was full of awe. He knew that his father had lived as if the world were all: he knew not if he had died in the hope of another; and the lessons early implanted in his heart by a mother's voice, made that consideration a terrible one for him. Then, too, the gaping crowd was painful to him. And oh, what he felt when the little village boys ran along laughing and pointing by the side of the funeral train!
They reached the gates of the churchyard, which was wide and well tenanted; and there the coffin had to be taken out, and Chandos stood side by side with his brother. Neither spoke to, neither looked at, the other. It was a terrible thing to behold that want of sympathy between two so nearly allied at the funeral of a father; but the eye that most marked it, saw that the one was full of deep and sorrowful thoughts, the other of fierce and angry passions.
The moment after, rose upon the air, pronounced by the powerful voice of the village curate, those words of bright but awful hope, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord, he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die." That solemn and impressive service, the most beautiful and appropriate, the most elevating, yet the most subduing that ever was composed--the burial office of the English church--proceeded; and Chandos Winslow lost himself completely in the ideas that it awakened. But little manifested were many of those ideas, it is true; but they were only on that account the more absorbing; and when the words, "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life," sounded in his ears, a shudder passed over him as he asked himself--"Had he such a hope?"
Most different were the feelings of the man who stood by his side. The customs of the world, the habits of good society put a restraint upon him; but, with a strange perversion of the true meaning of the words he heard, and a false application of them to his own circumstances, he fancied that he was virtuous and religious when he refrained, even there, from venting his anger in any shape upon its object; and heard the sentences of the Psalmist, as a. sort of laudation of his own forbearance. When the clergyman read aloud: "I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle, while the ungodly is in my sight," he fancied himself a second David, and reserved his wrath for the time to come.
At length all was over; the dull shovelsfull of earth rattled upon the coffin; the last "Amen" was said; and the mourners took their way back towards the carriages, leaving the sexton to finish his work. But when Sir William Winslow had entered the coach with two other gentlemen, and the servant was about to shut the door, he put down his head, and asked in a low but fierce voice, "Where is my brother? Where is Mr. Chandos Winslow?"
"He went away, Sir William, a minute ago," replied the servant. "He took the other way on foot."
Sir William Winslow cast himself back in the seat, and set his teeth hard; but he did not utter a word to any one, till he reached Elmsly Park. His demeanour, however, was courteous to those few persons who were on sufficiently intimate terms to remain for a few minutes after his return; and to one of them he even said a few words upon the absence of his "strange brother." His was the tone of an injured man; but the gentleman to whom he spoke was not without plain, straightforward good sense; and his only reply was, "Some allowance must be made, Sir William, for your brother's modification at finding that your father has left him nothing of all his large fortune; not even the portion which fell to his mother, on the death of her uncle."
"Not, Sir, when my father desired me in his will to provide for him properly," said Sir William Winslow.
"Why, I don't know," answered the other in a careless tone. "No man likes to be dependent, or to owe to favour that which he thinks he might claim of right. I have heard, too, that you and Mr. Winslow have not been on good terms for the last four or five years; but nobody can judge of such matters but the parties concerned. I must take my leave, however; for I see my carriage, and I have far to go."
Sir William Winslow made a stiff how, and the other departed.