“Wait till I’ve looked in the well,” Fanny replied.
She went to the well and leaning over the curb looked down, shuddering at the thought of a human body struggling there and calling for help.
“I am ready now for the grave,” she said, when her investigation of the well was finished.
“Must we go there?” Roy asked, rather dubiously.
“Yes, we must. I owe it to father. They are his people and mine,” Fanny answered, and the two retraced their steps through the village to the Prospect House, where Uncle Zach stood on the piazza and said to them, “Dotty’s getting dinner ready for you when you come back from the cemetry. Turn to your right and foller close to the wall clear down to the corner. They’re sunk in some, I guess.”
They found the graves without any difficulty, but, as Mr. Taylor had said, they were sunken and neglected. No one had cared for them since Mark went away. The grass around them was never cut and now lay in dry clumps upon them. The rose bush Mark had planted was dead and a huge burdock stood in its place. The headstones were weather-beaten and discolored, and that of ’Tina had partially fallen over. Fanny went down upon the ground and read the name “Christine Dalton.” There was nothing to tell where she was born or where she died, and in her nervous, morbid state Fanny found herself pitying the woman who had gone to her grave dishonored and despised.
“Nobody ever shed a tear for you, I dare say, but I will,” she said, and sitting upon the stone where her mother had sat with Mark Hilton when he told her the story of ’Tina, she began to cry very low to herself, so that Roy might not hear and laugh at her. “Where is he?” she said, when she had paid sufficient respect to ’Tina, and looking up, missed him from her side.
She saw him at last in the distance standing near the monument of Gen. Allen, and his loud call came to her across the rows of graves which intervened.
“I say, Fan, ar’n’t you some connection to Gen. George Allen, who served in the Revolutionary War, was wounded at Bunker Hill and Saratoga, and did a lot more things, and died regretted by friend and foe?”
She did not answer, and he continued, “Come away from that damp, lonesome place. I got chilly there myself. Come up here and visit another ancestor, who, perhaps, wasn’t any more respectable than those you are mooning over, but he has a stunner for a monument and an obituary as long as my arm.”