So Alfred Woodruff Charles Huston was laid, not with his own, but with the forefathers of someone else in Willesden Cemetery. Poor fellow! he came from a military stock, brave men and true, who had fought and drunk and finally deposited their bones in many parts of the globe. I am not by habit a sentimental person—moonlight over water, for instance, or the whisper of the pine-trees, has a certain quieting effect upon me, though it does not make me drivel; but I see the great silent pathos of our huge graveyards. If I never pitied Alfred Huston when he was alive, I pity him now in his narrow bed—one of many—an insignificant volume in God's book-shelf. Thus the Almighty is pleased to shelve us in rows. Sometimes He classifies us, and we are labelled with a title somewhat similar to that on the stones near at hand; but nowadays we stray away from the original corner of the library, and when the end comes we find ourselves among strangers. In some country churchyard it is sad enough to see a cluster of mouldering stones all bearing the same name, but infinitely more pathetic is it to wander through the serried ranks of the dead at Brookwood, Willesden, or Brompton. It is like a 'sundry' shelf, where all odd volumes are hastily thrust and soon forgotten; for poetry is side by side with commerce, fame elbows obscurity, youth lies by age. We scan the names, and find no connection. Truly these are among strangers—they sleep not with their fathers. And the shelves fill up, showing nought but titles. The books are closed, the tale is told, and so it moulders until the leaves shall flutter again beneath the searching finger of the Almighty. Sooner be buried in the common ditch beneath a weight of red-coated humanity than amidst these unknown thousands—sooner, a thousand times sooner, lie in patient solitude on untrodden rocks beneath the wave!
Alfred Huston's name is doubtless to be found in Willesden Cemetery to-day, though I do not know of anyone who will care to seek it. His wife caused it to be recorded in imperishable letters of lead, as if, mes frères, it had not as well been writ in water. It stands, moreover, in the State archives amidst a long record of heroes who drew their pay with remarkable regularity, and did little else. It was very good of her to go to the expense of those leaden letters, considering what an enormous number of mourning garments she was absolutely compelled to buy. The thought even is worthy of praise, because her mind was fully occupied with questions of crape and caps. Let us, therefore, give full credit to this widow who, in order to do more honour to her husband's memory, sent some of her dresses back four times to the milliners because the bodice would not fit.
One December morning three ladies dressed in black (two, indeed, wore widows' weeds) left Charing Cross Station for Paris. Mrs. Wylie, in her wisdom, had decreed a short banishment.
'Let us,' she said cheerily, the day after Captain Huston's semi-surreptitious funeral—'let us get away from all this fog and cold and misery. I want sunshine. Let us go south—Nice, Biarritz, Arcachon! Which shall it be?'
'We might,' suggested Alice Huston, 'stay a few days in Paris on the way.'
Brenda was reading, and before taking note of these remarks she finished a page, which she turned slowly, as one turns the page of a thoughtful book requiring slow perusal. She looked up at the clock upon the mantelpiece, and then her pensive gaze wandered towards Mrs. Wylie's face.
'Not the Riviera,' she said persuasively. 'It is like beef-tea when one is in rude health.'
'I must say,' observed Mrs. Wylie, after a pause, 'that I prefer the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.'
'Let us stay a little time in Paris first,' said Alice eagerly, 'and go on to Arcachon, or somewhere for Christmas. We might hear in Paris of nice people going South.'
The expression of the elder widow's face was not quite so sympathetic as might have been expected upon sentimental grounds.