Her grief was genuine; and the crowd sympathised with her almost as it did with those despairing women, weeping in their new widowhood. But the neighbours had not now to learn that Madame Chattaway loved her dead brother's children, if her husband did not.
"For Heaven's sake don't make a scene here!" growled Mr. Chattaway, in impotent anger. "Have you no sense of the fitness of things?"
But his wife, however meekly submissive at other times, was not in a state for submission then. Unable to define the sensations that oppressed her, she only felt that all was over; the unhappy boy had gone from them for ever; the cruel wrongs inflicted on him throughout life were now irreparable.
"He has gone with all our unkindness on his head," she wailed, partially unconscious, no doubt, of what she said; "gone to meet his father, my poor lost brother, bearing to him the tale of his wrongs! Oh, if——"
"Be silent, will you?" shrieked Chattaway. "Are you going mad?"
Mrs. Chattaway covered her face with her hands, and leaned against the barrow on which her husband was sitting. Miss Diana Trevlyn, who had been gathering various particulars from the crowd, who had said a word of comfort—though it was little comfort they could listen to yet—to the miserable women, came up at this moment to Chattaway.
"It was a very unhappy thing that you should have sent Rupert into the pit this morning," she said, her face wearing its most haughty expression.
"Yes," he answered. "But I could not foresee what was about to happen. It—it might have been Cris. Had Cris been in the way at the time, and not Rupert, I should have despatched him."
"Chattaway, I would give all my fortune to have him back again. I——"
A strange commotion on the outskirts of the crowd attracted their attention, and Miss Diana brought her sentence to an abrupt conclusion, and turned sharply towards it, for the shouts bore the sound of triumph; and a few voices were half breaking into hurrahs. Strange sounds, in that awful death-scene!