“Gay, Bird & Co., Colchester,” her eyes read mechanically. When he fell back and hid that inscription, his face was at peace again. That acuteness of terror—the quintessence of the morbidity of a lifetime—had stopped his heart.
She was terribly shaken by this sudden and grotesque end. She felt his pulse, but without hope. She had never seen human death before, but she had a vague idea that you closed the eyes and put pennies on them. She had no pennies with her. She remembered there were some in the sack he lay on, pennies and shillings, but she did not dare disturb him to get at them. She was obscurely glad she had not to wrestle with the problem of whether she ought to get his teapot buried with him, for the contingency of his resurrection. Her grandfather would never surrender it, she felt, and if she descended into his mysterious underground and abstracted it, that might upset his wits altogether. Besides, Uncle Lilliwhyte’s face was now taking on a strange beauty, as though his pecuniary anxieties were allayed.
But her nerves were giving way—she threw open the door and looked out eagerly, not for the lover, but for the man who seemed necessary in these rough moments. The dead must not be left alone, she knew that, or she would have set out to meet Will. Perhaps if she left him alone, his shy friend the fox would come trotting in, now he was so still. The parish authorities must doubtless be summoned to take charge of him. But ought he to have a pauper funeral—ought she not to steal back enough of his money to save him from that? But she remembered with relief that he had expressed indifference as to what became of his body—so long as it was restored to earth, its good old mother. As she moved a few paces without, in her peering for Will, she saw the blue smoke rising through the three top-hats, and in spite of the dead man’s doctrines and apprehensions, she could not help fancying it was his spirit soaring towards the abode of the Angel-Mother.
When Will returned, she was relieved to find Ravens striding beside him. That sunny-souled factotum, who had meant to hie to the Skindle wedding, now found himself transformed instead into a corpse-watcher, while Will, taking Jinny a bit of his way, went off by the shortest cuts to Chipstone Poorhouse, as probably the centre of authority for parish funerals.
“There’s the coroner, too,” Ravens called after him.
“Will there be an inquest?” Jinny asked.
“Must be,” said Will, and Jinny, alarmed for Martha’s sake, ran back on pretence of her basket, and surreptitiously wiped the bolster. As they left the clearing, they heard Ravens singing in the hut.
XI
When their roads parted, Jinny insisted on returning to her grandfather, whose excitement now recurred to her mind. She was still a little uneasy about the pauper funeral, but Will had emphatically agreed with her that the teapot could not now be recaptured. Nor could it be drawn upon, he declared: the old grabber would assuredly have counted the contents. Jinny suspected that Will was pleased rather than sympathetic at her having ceased to be an heiress. The death of Uncle Lilliwhyte, so much the junior of Daniel Quarles, could not but set both their minds on the thought of a similar cutting of their Gordian knot, but the thought—dreaded or welcome—was not allowed to appear in their conversation, finding expression only in Will’s aggrieved assumption of the Gaffer’s immortality. “Even if I was to strike a nugget as big as a prize marrow, we’d be no forrarder,” he had grumbled, and Jinny, with jangled nerves, had accused him of selfishness, when that poor old uncle was lying dead.
As she approached Blackwater Hall, a creepy conviction began to invade her that their knot was already cut: after that scene in the hut she was aquiver with presages of death and disaster. The absence of smoke—surely Gran’fer’s hearth was not already cold—added to her alarm. She remembered again his effervescence at breakfast; why should his heart not stop too? And when she saw the broad garden-gate open, and the house door ajar, her own heart nearly stopped. Her intuition, she felt, had not deceived her. Yet he was nowhere in the house. Ante-room, living-room, kitchen, all were empty of him. The fire was out. In the bedroom lay his telescope, a discarded toy. She was about to sweep the horizon with it, when she had an inspiration. The smugglers’ storehouse! He had gone down to count his gold, and the stone had rolled back—The Mistletoe Bough in another version. Tearing downstairs, she managed, after much fumbling with the poker, to make it revolve, and peered down into the dark clammy depths.