Queenie Hetherton

by Mary Jane Holmes

“If I had known it last night I would have gone to her,” he said, “but it’s too late now for that. All we can do is to make it as easy for her as possible. Beresford, you see to the grave in the Hetherton lot, and that the hearse is at the station to meet the body, and I’ll notify them at the house not to go on with the big dinner they are getting up, and I’ll tell grandmother that her flounced muslin and pink ribbons will not be needed to-day.”

Shocked and horrified as he was, Phil could not refrain from a little pleasantry at the expense of the dress and cap which grandma Ferguson was intending to wear “to the doin’s,” as she termed it. That she should accompany her son-in-law and granddaughter home to dinner she did not for a moment doubt, and her dress and cap and “lammy” shawl were ready when Phil came with the news, which so shocked her that for a moment she did not speak, and when at last she found her voice her first remark was wholly characteristic and like her.

“Fred Hetherton dead! Sarves him right, the stuck-up critter! But I am sorry for the girl, and we’ll give him a big funeral jest on her account.”

But Phil explained that Mr. Hetherton was to be buried from the station, as Reinette would not have the body taken to Hetherton Place.

“’Fraid of sperrits, most likely,” said Mrs. Ferguson, thinking to herself that now she should spend a great deal of time with her granddaughter who would be lonely in her great house.

Then, as her eye fell upon her muslin dress and lace cap, her thoughts took another channel. Out of respect to Reinette, who would of course be clad in the deepest mourning she could find in New York, she and her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Tom, and Anna, must at least wear black when they first met her. “Not that she cared for Fred Hetherton,” she said, “who had thought no more of her than he did of a squaw. But Margaret’s girl was different,” and in spite of Phil’s protest against the absurdity of the thing, the old lady bustled off in the hot sun to consult with Mrs. Lydia. The news of Mr. Hetherton’s death had preceded her, and she had only to plunge into business at once, and insist that a bombazine which she had never worn since she left off her widow’s weeds, and which was now much too small for her, should be let out and made longer, and fixed generally, and she talked so fast and so decidedly that Mrs. Tom, who never had any positive opinions of her own, and who liked to please her mother-in-law because of the money she was supposed to hold in store for Anna, was compelled to take her apprentice from a piece of work promised for the next day, and put her upon the bombazine which grandma had brought with her. Against mourning for herself, however, Miss Anna stoutly rebelled. She had tried the effect of the Swiss muslin the lovely lace scarf, the blush-rose and white parasol, and was not to be persuaded to abandon it, she said, for “forty dead Hethertons.” So the young lady was suffered to do as she liked, but the entire village was ransacked after shawls, and vails, and bonnets, for the two Mrs. Fergusons, who were to go up in the Rossiter carriage and appear as sorry and miserable as the deepest black could make them. Mr. Tom Ferguson, of whom scarcely anything has been said, and who was a plain, quiet, second-class grocer, and as obstinate in some matters as a mule, refused to have any thing to do with the affair.

“Fred Hetherton had never spoken to or looked at him when a boy, and he shouldn’t go after him now,” he said. “He should stay at home and mind his own business, and let Phil and the women folks run the funeral.”

This resolution Anna in her secret heart thought a very sensible one. If possible she was more ashamed of her father than of the sign in her mother’s window; and she would far rather that handsome stylish Phil should ride with her then her old-fashioned father, whom Reinette was sure to take for a peasant. But when the carriage came round for the mourning party Phil was not in it; nor did the coachman know where his young master was; his orders were to drive the ladies to the station, and that was all he knew, and Anna, always suspicious, felt like striking him because of the insolent look in his face when she bade him dismount from his box and open the carriage door for them.

“He would not dare treat her Aunt Rossiter and cousins like that; neither would Phil have left them to go up alone,” she thought, as she took her seat poutingly, wondering where Phil was, and if he would keep aloof from them at the station, just to show Reinette that he recognized the difference between himself and his relatives.

And while she thought thus jealously of Phil, he, with the perspiration standing in great drops upon his face, and with his cuffs pulled up from his white wrists, was working like a beaver in the “Hetherton lot,” which Mr. Beresford, on his return from selecting the site for the grave, had reported “a perfect swamp of briers and weeds.” It would never answer, Phil said, to let Reinette tear her dress on briers, and get her feet entangled in weeds. Something must be done, although there was but little time in which to do it, and he began to hunt about for some man to help him: but no one was to be found, while even the sexton was busy with the grave of a town pauper who was to be buried that afternoon.