Roy shivered, as he thought of the three coffins landed at the station and himself superintending their interment in the angle of the wall near ’Tina.
“No, darling,” he said, kissing Fanny’s tear stained face. “I do not want you to wear black, nor is it necessary, and it is much better for your father and Inez to be among the hills of the Yosemite where they lived than to be brought here. Sometime we will go and see the graves and I will have a suitable monument erected to their memory.
“By their loving daughter and sister,” Fanny rejoined, drying the tears which were like April showers, she was so sunny and sweet.
Tom’s letter was sent to Helen, who was about starting for Narragansett Pier with a party of friends. Just how it affected her it was hard to tell. She gave up the trip to Narragansett, saying she was not feeling well and preferred to remain at home. If she cried, no one saw her. If she were sorry, no one knew it. She was too proud to show her real feelings, or talk of a past which was buried, but her eyes were very heavy and her face very pale as she sat behind the closed blinds of her house, at home to no one, and supposed by most of her friends to be out of town, as she usually was at that season. Fanny urged her coming to Ridgefield, and she replied, “Not yet. It would bring back a past I wish to forget. Your father is dead, and I have no hard feeling towards him. We were both in fault. I was self willed, and thought because I had money I must not be crossed. He was a man who could not yield quietly to be governed in every particular by a woman. But let that pass. I am glad you knew him and glad you revere his memory.”
This was quite a concession for Helen, and showed that much of her proud spirit was broken. When she heard how fast Mrs. Taylor was failing as the summer wore on she sent her little notes of remembrance, with boxes of flowers and delicacies of various kinds. These pleased Uncle Zach, but it was difficult to know whether his wife realized the attention. She always seemed glad when Fanny was with her, but nothing brought so happy a look to her face as the appearance of Uncle Zach in his wheel chair, and her eyes rested constantly upon him when he was with her, but she couldn’t speak to him or return the pressure of his hand when he laid it on hers.
“She can’t do nothin’ she wants to,” Uncle Zach said pathetically. “I’d like to kiss her, but I can’t stand alone and should tumble on to her, if I tried.”
“I’ll help you,” Fanny said, and passing her arms around him she held him, while he bent down and kissed the old wife whose quivering lips returned the kiss and tried so hard to speak.
That night she died, and no young husband ever made a bitterer moan for his bride of a few months than did Zacheus over his Dotty. “The greatest woman in the world for runnin’ a tarvern and keepin’ a feller straight,” he said amidst his tears, which fell continually, sleeping or waking. He did not think of her as old and wrinkled and grey haired, but as she had been in their early married life, when she was slight and fair, with long curls in her neck and around her face. “The prettiest girl in town as she is now the most remarkable woman. I shall get along somehow, I s’pose,” he said to Fanny, “but it is very dark with Dotty gone, and Mark, too, and Jeff, and Johnny in the cemetry goin’ on sixty year. If he had lived he might have had boys to stay with me. As ’tis, I am all alone. It isn’t pleasant to be old and helpless and all alone and cold as I am most of the time with this pesky rheumatis’.”
To this Fanny could offer no consolation. She couldn’t stay with him always, nor could she take him with her when she left Ridgefield. He was indeed alone in his old age, dependent upon hired help, who might not always be kind to him. And this he seemed to feel nearly as much as Dotty’s death.