So he had gone to Emma and, confessing everything, thrown himself upon her mercy. For five days she kept him in doubt, and terror, lest she refuse, and in the end she accepted, but only at a price ... that it should remain, as she expressed it, “a marriage in name only.”
In the end, she subdued even Moses Slade. It was in reality Emma who sat in his seat in the House of Representatives. It was Emma who cast his votes. She became, in a small way, a national figure, concerned always with moralities and reforms. She came into a full flowering as chairman or member of a dozen committees and movements against whisky and cigarettes, and for Sunday closing. She made speaking tours, when she was received by palpitating ladies who labored in vain to sap the robust vitality of their country. There were times when her progress became a marvel of triumph. She was known as a splendid speaker.
But the apotheosis of her glory was reached in the war, when she offered her services as a speaker to right and to left—to aid recruiting, or Y.M.C.A. funds, to attack Bolshevism and denounce the barbarous Huns. She had a marvelous speech which began on a quavering note: “I had a son of my own once, but he gave his life as a martyr in Africa, fighting the good fight for God and home and Christian faith, even as all our boys are fighting to-day against a whole race, a whole nation bent upon spreading murder and destruction across the face of God’s bright earth. (Cheers.) If my son were alive to-day, he would be over there, on the rim of the world (cheers), etc., etc.”
It was in making this speech that she wore herself out. The end came on a wet, chill night in Kansas City, when, speaking on behalf of the Y.M.C.A., she was taken with a chill. Moses Slade came from Washington to be at her bedside, and so was there at the end to tell her that “she’d given her life as much as any soldier who fell in Flanders Field.”
She was buried in the Town, alone, for the grave of her husband was in Australia, and that of her son beside a tepid lake in East Africa. The funeral service, in the enthusiasm of the war, became a sort of public festival, done to the titanic accompaniment of the Mills, which pounded now as they had never done before, to heap up piles of shells in the dead, abandoned park of Shane’s Castle. It was an end which she would have liked. The new preacher, more sanctimonious but less moving than the Reverend Castor, made a high-flown and flowery funeral oration. He did it skilfully, though it was a difficult thing to speak of her trials and still not raise the ghosts of Naomi and the Reverend Castor. But the ghosts were there: they troubled the minds of every member of the congregation.
In conclusion, he said in a voice rich with enthusiasm, “She never lost her faith through trials more numerous than are the lot of most. She gave her son to God and her own life to this great cause which is so near to the heart of us all. She was brave and courageous, and generous and tolerant, but she fought always for the right like a good soldier. She never had any doubts. She was, in brief, all that is meant when our hearts lead us to say of some one, ‘She was a good woman....’”
It was in the following year that the Town bought the Castle from Lily Shane who had never returned to it since the night of the riot. The Town demolished the place and even dug away the hill itself to make a site for the new railway station. When the wreckers attacked the stable they found a room whose walls were covered with pencil sketches. By the window stood a half-finished painting black with soot and dust. On the table there was a coffee-pot, several soiled plates, and a fragment of something which turned out to be bread. Nearby beneath a layer of soot lay a woman’s handkerchief of fine linen marked with the initials M.C.; one of the workmen took it home to his wife. The other things—the sketches and the painting—were thrown into a heap and burned on the very spot where eight years before there had been another fire in the snow.
THE END