CHAPTER VI.
AT EVENSONG.
The windows were darkened at Fendyke. The passing bell had tolled the years of the life that was done, sounding solemnly and slowly across the level fields, the deep narrow river, the mill-streams and pine-woods, the scattered hamlets lying far apart on the great flat, where the sunsets linger late and long. All was over, and Allan had to put aside his own sorrow in order to comfort his mother, who was heart-broken at the loss of a husband she had idolized, with a love so quiet and unobtrusive, so little given to sentimental utterances, that it might have been mistaken for indifference.
She wandered about the darkened house like some lost soul in the dim under-world, unable to think of anything, or to speak of anything but her loss. She looked to Allan for everything, asserted her authority in no detail.
"Let all be as he wished," she said to her son. "Let us think only of pleasing him. You know what he would like, Allan. You were with him so much towards the last. He talked to you so freely. Think only of him, and of his wishes."
She could not divest herself of the idea that her husband was looking on at all that happened, that this or that arrangement might be displeasing to him. She was sure that he would wish the sternest simplicity as to the funeral. His own farm-labourers were to carry him to his grave, and the burial was to be at dusk. He had himself prescribed those two conditions. He wished to be laid in his grave at set of sun, when the hireling's daily toil was over, and the humblest of his neighbours could have leisure to follow him to his last bed. And then he had quoted Parson Hawker's touching lines:—
"Sunset should be the time, they said,
To close their brother's narrow bed.
'Tis at that pleasant hour of day
The labourer treads his homeward way;