Next day the body came home as Edie had said, and Ernest helped to lay it reverently to rest in Calcombe churchyard. Poor old Mr. Oswald, standing bowed and broken-hearted by the open grave side, looked as though he could never outlive that solemn burial of all his hopes and aspirations in a single narrow coffin. Yet it was wonderful to Ernest to see how much comfort he took, even in this terrible grief, from the leader which appeared in the ‘Times’ that morning on the subject of the Pontresina accident. It contained only a few of the stock newspaper platitudes of regret at the loss of a distinguished and rising young light of science—the ordinary glib commonplaces of obituary notices which a practised journalist knows so well how to adapt almost mechanically to the passing event of the moment; but they seemed to afford the shattered old country grocer an amount of consolation and solemn relief that no mere spoken condolences could ever possibly have carried with them. ‘See what a wonderful lot they thought of our boy up in London, Mr. Le Breton,’ he said, looking up from the paper tearfully, and wiping his big gold spectacles, dim with moisture. ‘See what the “Times” says about him: “One of the ablest among our young academical mathematicians, a man who, if his life had been spared to us, might probably have attained the highest distinction in his own department of pure science.” That’s our Harry, Mr. Le Breton; that’s what the “Times” says about our dear, dead Harry! I wish he could have lived to read it himself, Edie—“a scholar of singularly profound attainments, whose abilities had recently secured him a place upon the historic roll of the Royal Society, and whom even the French Academy of Sciences had held worthy out of all the competitors of the civilised world, to be adjudged the highest mathematical honours of the present season.” My poor boy! my poor, dear, lost boy! I wish you could have lived to hear it! We must keep the paper, Edie: we must keep all the papers; they’ll show us at least what people who are real judges of these things thought about our dear, loved, lost Harry.’
Ernest dared hardly glance towards poor Edie, with the tears trickling slowly down her face; but he felt thankful that the broken-hearted old father could derive so much incomprehensible consolation from those cold and stereotyped conventional phrases. Truly a wonderful power there is in mere printer’s ink properly daubed on plain absorbent white paper. And truly the human heart, full to bursting and just ready to break will allow itself to be cheated and cajoled in marvellous fashions by extraordinary cordials and inexplicable little social palliatives. The concentrated hopes of that old man’s life were blasted and blighted for ever; and he found a temporary relief from that stunning shock in the artificial and insincere condolences of a stock leader-writer on a daily paper!
Walking back by himself in such sad meditations to the Red Lion, and sitting there by the open window, Ernest overheard a tremulous chattering voice mumbling out a few incoherent words at the Rector’s doorway opposite. ‘Oh, yes,’ chirped out the voice in a tone of cheerful resignation, ‘it’s very sad indeed, very sad and shocking, and I’m naturally very sorry for it, of course. I always knew how it would be: I warned them of it; but they’re a pig-headed, heedless, unmannerly family, and they wouldn’t be guided by me. I said to him, “Now, Oswald, this is all very wrong and foolish of you. You go and put your son to Oxford, when he ought to be stopping at home, minding the shop and learning your business. You borrow money foolishly to send him there with. He’ll go to Oxford; he’ll fall in with a lot of wealthy young gentlemen—people above his own natural station—he’ll take up expensive, extravagant ways, and in the end he’ll completely ruin himself. He won’t pay you back a penny, you may depend upon it—these boys never do, when you make fine gentlemen of them; they think only of their cigars and their horses, and their dog-carts and so forth, and neglect their poor old fathers and mothers, that brought them up and scraped and saved to make fine gentlemen of them. You just take my advice, Oswald, and don’t send him to college.” But Oswald was always a presumptuous, high-headed, independent sort of man, and instead of listening to me, what does he do but go and send this sharp boy of his up to Oxford. Well, now the boy’s gone to Switzerland with one of the young Le Bretons—brother of the poor young man they’ve inveigled into what they call an engagement with Miss Edith, or Miss Jemima, or whatever the girl’s name is—very well-connected people, the Le Bretons, and personal friends of the Archdeacon’s—and there he’s thrown himself over a precipice or something of the sort, no doubt to avoid his money-matters and debts and difficulties. At any rate, Micklethwaite tells me the poor old father’ll have to pay up a couple of hundred pound to the insurance company: and how on earth he’s ever to do it I don’t know, for to my certain knowledge the rent of the shop is in arrears half-a-year already. But it’s no business of mine, thank goodness!—and I only hope that exposure will serve to open that poor young Le Breton’s eyes, and to warn him against having anything further to say to Miss Jemima. A designing young minx, if ever there was one! Poor young Le Breton’s come down here for the funeral, I hear, which I must say was very friendly and proper and honourable of him; but now it’s over, I hope he’ll go back again, and see Miss Jemima in her true colours.’
Ernest turned back into the stuffy little coffee-room with his face on fire and his ears tingling with mingled shame and indignation. ‘Whatever happens,’ he thought to himself, ‘I can’t permit Edie to be subjected any longer to such insolence as this! Poor, dear, guileless, sorrowing little maiden! One would have thought her childish innocence and her terrible loss would have softened the heart even of such a cantankerous, virulent old harridan as that, till a few weeks were over, at least. She spoke of the Archdeacon: it must be old Miss Luttrell! Whoever it is, though, Edie shan’t much longer be left where she can possibly come in contact with such a loathsome mass of incredible and unprovoked malice. That Edie should lose her dearly-loved brother is terrible enough; but that she should be exposed afterwards to be triumphed over in her most sacred grief by that bad old woman’s querulous “I told you so” is simply intolerable!’ And he paced up and down the room with a boiling heart, unable to keep down his righteous anger.
CHAPTER XVI. — FLAT REBELLION.
For the next fortnight Ernest remained at the Red Lion, though painfully conscious that he was sadly wasting his little reserve of funds from his late tutorship, in order to find out exactly what the Oswalds’ position would be after the loss of poor Harry. Towards the end of that time he took Edie, pale and pretty in her simple new mourning, out once more into the Bourne Close for half an hour’s quiet conversation. Very delicate and sweet and refined that tiny girlish face and figure looked in the plain unostentatious black and white of her great sorrow, and Ernest felt as he walked along by her side that she seemed to lean upon him naturally now; the loss of her main support and chief advisor in life seemed to draw her closer and closer every day to her one remaining prop and future husband.
‘Edie,’ he said to her, as they rested once more beside the old wooden bridge across the little river, ‘I think it’s time now we should begin to talk definitely over our common plans for the future. I know you’d naturally rather wait a little longer before discussing them; I wish for both our sakes we could have deferred it; but time presses, and I’m afraid from what I hear in the village that things won’t go on henceforth exactly as they used to do with your dear father and mother.’
Edie coloured slightly as she answered, ‘Then you’ve heard of all that already, Ernest’—she was learning to call him ‘Ernest’ now quite naturally. ‘The Calcombe tattle has got round to you so soon! I’m glad of it, though, for it saves me the pain of having to tell you. Yes, it’s quite true, and I’m afraid it will be a terrible, dreadful struggle for poor darling father and mother.’ And the tears came up afresh, as she spoke, into her big black eyes—too familiar with them of late to make her even try to brush them away hastily from Ernest’s sight with her little handkerchief.