As if the brooding hush, so deadly to my childish senses; the funeral sermon, delivered in Uncle Carus’s most sepulchral chest tones, and the wild, wailing measures of
“Why should we mourn departing friends?”
sung to immemorial “China”—were not enough to rivet the scene forever upon my soul, a final and dramatic touch was superadded. Two men brought forward a long, black top, which they were about to fix in place upon the dreadful box, when a young woman in black rushed from a corner, flung herself upon her knees beside the coffin, and screamed: “Mother, mother! You sha’n’t take her away!” making as if she would push back the men.
“Harriet! Harriet!” remonstrated a deep voice, and Major Goode, the tears rolling down his cheeks, stooped and lifted the daughter by main force. “This won’t do, child!”
Fifteen years later, sitting in the calm moonlight upon the porch-steps at “Homestead,” the dwelling of my chum, Effie D., I heard from Mrs. D.’s lips the story of Mrs. O’Hara. Her cottage, subsequently our school-house, had been pulled down long ago as an eyesore to the fastidious mistress of Homestead. At least I got that section of the old lady’s life that had to do with the gray-haired Major Goode, a veteran of the War of 1812. Both the actors in the closing scene seemed, in the review of my childish impressions of the funeral, to have been too old to figure in the tale.
“You can understand why nobody in the village could visit her,” concluded the placid narrator to whom I am indebted for numberless traditions and real life-romances. “The funeral was another matter. Death puts us all upon a level.”
There was the skeleton of a chronique scandaleuse in the bit of exhumed gossip.