“It isn’t a story at all, it’s quite true. She had a stroke that very day. Fancy, just the very day when we—— And we never heard a word. If we had heard I should have been the very first to bring you home.”
“What good would that have done?” Gervase said sullenly, “we were better where we were.”
“Not and her dying, and wanting her son.”
Gervase was cowed and troubled by the news, which gave him a shock which he could not understand. It made him sullen and difficult to manage. “You’re playing off one of your jokes upon me,” he said.
“I playing a joke! I’d have found something better than a funeral to joke about. Gervase, we have just come back in time. The funeral’s to-morrow, and oh! I’m so thankful we came home. I’m going to send for Sally Fletcher to make me up some nice deep mourning with crape, like a lady wears for her own mother.”
“She was no mother of yours,” said Gervase, with a frown.
“No; nor she didn’t behave like one: but being her son’s wife and one that is to succeed her, I must get my mourning deep; and you and me, we’ll go. We’ll walk next to Sir Giles, as chief mourners,” she said.
Gervase gave a lowering look at her, and then he turned away to the open window, to count as he had been doing before, but in changing tones, the white horses and the brown.
CHAPTER XXII.
Patty sat up half the night with Sally Fletcher, arranging as rapidly and efficiently as possible her new mise en scène. To work all night at mourning was by no means a novel performance for Miss Fletcher, the lame girl who was the village dressmaker; and she felt herself amply repaid by the news, as yet almost unknown to the neighbours, of the Softy’s marriage and Patty’s new pretentions. It is true that it had a little leaked out in the evening symposium in Hewitt’s parlour; but what the men said when they came home from their dull, long booze was not received with that faith which ladies put in the utterances of the clubs. The wives of the village had always a conviction that the men had “heard wrong”—that it would turn out something quite different from the story told in the watches of the night, or dully recalled next day, confused by the fumes of last night’s beer. But Sally Fletcher knew that her tale would meet with full credence, and that her cottage next morning would be crowded with inquirers; so that her night’s work was not the matter of hardship it might have been supposed. She was comforted with cups of tea during the course of the night, and Patty spent at least half of it with her, helping on the work in a resplendent blue dressing-gown, which she had bought in London, trimmed with lace and ribbons, and dazzling to Sally’s eyes. The dressmaker had brought with her the entire stock of crape which was to be had in “the shop,” a material kept for emergencies, and not, it may be supposed, of the very freshest or finest—which Patty laid on with a liberal hand, covering with it the old black dress, which she decided would do in the urgency of the moment. It was still more difficult to plaster that panoply of mourning over the smart new cape, also purchased in town: but this, too, was finished, and a large hatband, as deep as his hat, procured for Gervase, before the air began to thrill with the tolling, lugubrious and long drawn out, of the village bells, which announced that the procession was within sight.