After John had gone down to the village, there limped up an old, old, half-witted drunken poet, who fiddled at regattas. He saluted Roger, who leaned on a gate, staring uphill towards the house.
"Indeed, Mr. Roger," said the old man; "there's a strong sorrow on the place this day. There was a light burning beyant. I seen the same for her da, and for her da's da. There was them beyant wanted her." He waited for Roger to speak, but getting no answer began to ramble in Irish, and then craved for maybe a sixpence, because "indeed, I knew your da, Mr. Roger. Ah, your da was a grand man, would turn the heads of all the women, and they great queens itself, having the pick of professors and prime ministers and any one they'd a mind to."
After a time, singing to himself in Irish, he limped on up the loaning to the house, to beg maybe a bit of bread, in exchange for the fact that he had seen a light burning for her, just as he had seen it for her da, her da's da, and (when the kitchen brandy had arisen in him) her da's da's da years ago.
The car came snorting up the hill, and turned in the broad expanse where the loaning joined the highway. John opened the door for Roger. "If I was a young gentleman and had the right to do it," he said, "I would go in a cyar the like of that cyar down all the craggy precipices of the world." The car shook, spat, and darted. "Will ye go by Torneymoney?" said Pat. "There's no rossers that way."
"By Torneymoney," said Roger. "Drive hard."
"Indeed," said Pat; "we will do great deeds this day. We will make a strong story by the blessing of God. Let you hold tight, your honour. There's holes in this road would give a queer twist to a sea-admiral."
The funeral was on Saturday. About a dozen men came. There were five or six Fawcetts and old Mr. Laramie, who had married Maisie Fawcett, Ottalie's aunt, one of the beauties of her time. The rest were friends from the countryside, Englishmen in faith, education, and feeling. They stood with bared heads in the little lonely Protestant graveyard, as Roman soldiers may have stood by the pyres of their mates in Britain. They were aliens there. They were part of the garrison. They were hiding under the ground something too good and beautiful to belong to that outcast country. Roger had the fancy that God would have to be very strong to hold that outpost. He had not slept for two nights. Sentiments and fancies were overwhelming him. It was one of those Irish days in which a quality or rarity in the air gives a magic, either alluring or terrible, to every bush and brook and hillock. He had often thought that Ireland was a haunted country. He thought so now, standing by Ottalie's grave. Just beyond the graveyard was the river, which was "bad," and beyond that again a hill. The hill was so "bad," that the beggarwomen, passing in the road, muttering at "the mouldy old Prots, playing at their religion, God save us," crossed themselves as they went by it. Roger prayed that that fair spirit might be at peace, among all this invisible evil. His hand went into his breast pocket from time to time to touch her letter to him. He watched Leslie Fawcett, whose face was so like hers, and old Mr. Laramie, who had won the beauty of her time, and an old uncle Fawcett, who had fought in Africa, sixty years before. The graves of other Fawcetts lay in that corner of the graveyard. He read their names, remembering them from Burke. He read the texts upon the stones. The texts had been put there in agonies of remorse and love and memory by the men and women who played croquet in an old daguerreotype in Ottalie's sitting-room. "He giveth His beloved sleep," and "It is well with the child," and one, a strange one, "Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay Thee all." They had been beautiful and noble, these Fawcetts. Not strong, not clever, but wonderful. They had had a spirit, a spiritual quality, as though for many, many centuries their women had kept themselves unspotted by anything not noble. An instinct for style running in the race of the Fawcetts for centuries had made them what they were.
A hope burned up in Roger like inspiration. All that instinct for fineness, that fastidious selection of the right and good which had worked to make Ottalie, from long before her birth, and had flowered in her, was surely eternal. She had used life to make her character beautiful and gentle, just as he had used life to discipline his mind to the expression of his imagination. "What's to come" was still unsure; but he felt sure, even as the trembling old incumbent reminded them that St. Paul had bidden them not to sorrow, that that devotion was stronger than death. Her spirit might be out in the night, he thought, as in time his would be; but what could assail that devotion? It was a strong thing, it was a holy thing. He was very sure that nothing would overcome it. Like many young men, ignorant of death, he had believed in metempsychosis. This blow of death had brought down that fancy with all the other card-houses of his mind. His nature was now, as it were, humbled to its knees, wondering, stricken, and appalled by possibilities of death undreamed of. He could not feel that Ottalie would live again, in a new body, starting afresh, in a new life-machine, with all the acquired character of the past life as a reserve of strength. He could only feel that somewhere in that great empty air, outside the precise definition of living forms, Ottalie, the little, conquered kingdom of beauty and goodness, existed still. It was something. Newman's hymn, with its lovely closing couplet, moved him and comforted him. One of the Fawcetts was crying, snuffling, with a firm mouth, as men usually cry. He himself was near to tears. He was being torn by the thought that Ottalie was lonely, very lonely and frightened, out there beyond life, beyond the order of defined live things.
He walked back with Leslie Fawcett. Agatha's mother was at the house; Leslie was stopping in the cottage with him.
"Poor little Ollie," said Leslie gently.