“I think, Andrew,” said my mother, handing this letter across the table to my father, “that I will go, and take Rosamund with me; I am quite sure Geoffrey cannot have left me anything,” she continued, a vivid pink coming into her cheek. “Indeed, I may add,” she continued, “that under the circumstances I should not wish him to leave me anything, but it would give me gratification to show him the slight respect of attending his funeral—and I own that it would also give me pleasure to see the old house and the furniture again.”
I had never heard my mother make such a long speech before, and I fully expected my father to interrupt it with a torrent of angry words. Even the boys turned pale as they listened to my mother.
To our great astonishment her words were followed by half a moment of absolute silence. Then my father said in a quiet voice:—
“You will please yourself, of course, Mary. I have not a word of advice to give on this matter.”
We buried Cousin Geoffrey in Kensal Green. After the funeral was over we all returned to the old house.
When I say “we all,” I include a very goodly company. I am almost sure that fifty people came home in mourning-coaches to Cousin Geoffrey’s desolate house.
It presented, however, anything but a desolate appearance on the day of his funeral. No one who saw that long train of mourning relatives could have said that Cousin Geoffrey had gone unsorrowed to his grave. Now, these sorrowing relatives wandered over his house, and after a cold collation, provided by the lawyers out of some of Cousin Geoffrey’s riches, they assembled to hear the will read in the magnificent drawing-room, where the Paul Veronese hung.
Mr Gray was the name of Cousin Geoffrey’s lawyer. He was a most judicious man, and extremely polite to all the relatives. Of course he knew the secret which they were most of them burning to find out, but not by voice, gesture, or expression did he betray even an inkling of the truth. He was scrupulously polite to every one, and if he said a nice thing to an excitable old lady on his right, he was careful to say quite as nice a thing to an anxious-faced gentleman on his left. Nevertheless I felt sure that he could be irascible if he liked, and I soon saw that his politeness was only skin-deep.
My mother and I did not join the group who sat round an enormous centre table. My mother looked terribly pale and sad, and she would keep me by her side, and stay herself quite in the background, rather to the disgust of some of the more distant relatives, who could not make out who my mother was, nor what brought her there.
At last Mr Gray cleared his throat, put on his glasses, and looked down at an imposing-looking parchment which lay on the table at his side.