“Alone and cold, with no one to care for me,” was Uncle Zach’s constant lament, as he sat shivering by Dotty’s coffin during the days which preceded her funeral.
Craig and Alice were both with him and this was some comfort, while the flowers sent in great profusion made him feel, he said, as if he was somebody, and he wished Dotty knew. Greatly to Fanny’s surprise and delight her mother came in the morning train, and the honor of having her there with Craig and Alice partly compensated Mr. Taylor for his loss. It was the first time Helen had been in Ridgefield since she left it twenty-four years ago, and naturally her presence aroused much interest and curiosity in those who remembered her. When she heard of Mrs. Taylor’s death a sudden impulse seized her to go to the funeral. Almost anything was better than staying at home alone as she was doing. If Roy built that cottage she must of course go there some time, and she might as well make this her opportunity. So she went and in her crape, still worn for Judge Prescott, she looked grand and handsome and dignified, and cried a little over Dotty and more over Uncle Zach in his wheel chair. He persisted in calling her Miss Hilton and talking to her of Mark, until Alice suggested to him that it might be better to give her her real name and to say nothing of Mark, as it could only bring up unpleasant memories.
“Jess so,—jess so. Yes, marm. You are right, and it shows how I am missin’ Dotty to tell me what is what,” Uncle Zach replied.
After that he laid great stress on Miss Prescott when he spoke to her, as she was brushing his hair and arranging his necktie for the funeral. She had asked to do this for him and as he felt her fingers on his forehead and about his neck, he burst out suddenly, “It brings it all back, when you was a young gal makin’ the house so bright. You ain’t a widder, nor Miss Prescott to me, and I won’t call you so.”
“Call me Helen, please. I feel more like her here than I have in years,” she replied.
She was very kind to him and arranged that he should go to the grave in the carriage with Roy and Fanny and herself. “The very best and easiest there is in town,” she said to the undertaker.
“But, but,” Uncle Zach interposed, “I could no more git into a kerridge than I could fly. I must be wheeled. Dot won’t mind. She knows how stiff I am.”
It was in vain that they urged upon him that he could be lifted into a carriage. He insisted that he couldn’t.
“If I go at all, it must be in my chair, with Sam to push me,” he said, and that settled it, and his chair was wheeled into its place in the long procession which followed Dotty to the grave.
It took some time to get all the carriages into line and ready, and while they were waiting a stranger came rapidly across the street and joined the crowd in front of the Prospect House. He was dusty and travel stained and no one recognized him but Roy and Fanny, who, with Helen, were in the carriage next to Uncle Zach’s chair.