With this opinion the room agreed. Instead of taking the direct path to Brighton, as Harriet had enjoined, she must have turned back to The Sheaf o’ Corn for more drink. And that she had wandered in a wrong direction, upon quitting it, across the waste land, there could not be any doubt; or that she had sat down, or fallen down, possibly from fatigue, in the drift where she was found. The brandy bottle lay near her, empty. Whether she died of the brandy, or of the exposure to the cold night, might be a question. The jury decided that it was the latter.
And nothing whatever had come out touching Roger.
Harriet had already given orders for a decent funeral, in the neighbouring graveyard. It took place on the afternoon of the following day, Friday. By a curious little coincidence, George Bevere was asked to take the service, the incumbent being ill with a cold. It afforded a pretext for Roger’s attending. He and I walked quietly up in the wake of George, and stood at the grave together. Harriet thanked us for it afterwards: she looked upon it as a compliment paid to herself.
“Scott shall forward to her every expense she has been put to as soon as I am back in London,” said Roger to me. “He will know how to manage it.”
“Shall you tell Mrs. Dyke?”
“To be sure I shall. She is a trustworthy, good woman.”
Our time at Prior’s Glebe was up, and we took our departure from it on the Saturday morning; another day of intense cold, of dark blue skies, and of bright sunshine. George left with us.
“My dear, you will try—you will try to keep straight, won’t you; to be what you ought to be,” whispered Lady Bevere in the bustle of starting, as she clasped Roger’s hands in the hall, tears falling from her eyes: all just as it was that other time in Gibraltar Terrace. “For my sake, dear; for my sake.”
“I shall do now, mother,” he whispered back, meeting her gaze through his wet eyelashes, his manner strangely solemn. “God has been very good to me, and I—I will try from henceforth to do my best in all ways.”
And Roger kept his word.