“I am afraid I cannot ask you to come up-stairs, for he is past all that,” he said, in the half scornful tone which doctors sometimes assume to a clerical visitor.
“Is he so bad as that?” said the minister.
“I do not say,” said Dr. Seaton, “that our patient may not regain consciousness. But certainly, for the present, he is quite unable to join in any religious exercises.”
“I was not thinking of that,” said Mr. Buchanan, almost humbly, “but only to take the last news home. Mr. Anderson has been a good friend to me.”
“So he has been to many,” said Dr. Seaton. “Let us hope that will do more for him where he is going than prayer.”
“Prayer can never be out of place, Dr. Seaton,” said the minister. He went away from the door angry, but still more cast down, with his head sunk on his breast as the children had seen him. He had no good news to take home. He had no comfort to carry with him up to his study, whither he went without pausing, as he generally did, to say a word to his wife. He had no word for anybody that evening. All night long he was repeating to himself the words of the parable, “Sit down quickly, and take thy bill, and write fifty.” Could God lead men astray?
CHAPTER III.
AFTER THE FUNERAL.
“After the funeral, after the funeral will be time enough,” Mr. Buchanan said, when his wife urged him to get it over, and to have his interview with Mr. Morrison, the man of business, in whose hands all Mr. Anderson’s affairs were. Everybody remarked how ill the minister was looking during the week which elapsed between the old man’s death and the large and solemn funeral, which filled the entire length of the High Street with black-coated men. It was a funeral d’estime. There was no active sorrow among the long train of serious people who conducted his mortal part to its long home, but there were a great many regrets. His was a figure as well known as the great old tower of St. Rule, which is one of the landmarks from the sea, and the chief distinction of the town on land, and he was a man who had been kind to everybody. He had been very well off, and he had lived very quietly, spending but little money on himself, and he had no near relation, only a distant cousin’s son, to inherit what he had to leave behind him, for the brother, who was the chief mourner, was a lonely man like himself, and also rich, and without heirs. This being the case, old Mr. Anderson had used his money as few rich men do. He had behaved to many people as he had done to Mr. Buchanan. He had come to the aid of many of the poor people in St. Rule, the fisher population, and the poor shopkeepers, and many a needy family; therefore, though there were perhaps few tears shed, there was a great and universal regret in all the town. Many men put on their “blacks,” and went East, which was their way of indicating the quaint burying-ground that encircled the ruins of the old cathedral, who would not have swelled any other funeral train in the neighbourhood. He was a loss to everybody; but there were few tears. An old man going home, nearer eighty than seventy as the people said, a good old man leaving the world in charity with everybody, and leaving nobody behind whom he would miss much when he got there. A woman, here and there, at her doorhead or her stairfoot, flung her apron over her head as she watched the procession defiling into the wide space before the churchyard, which was visible from the houses at the fishers’ end of the lower street. But the tears she shed were for grief’s sake, and not for grief—for there was no weeping, no desolation, only a kind and universal regret.
Mr. Buchanan was more blanched and pale than ever, as he walked bareheaded behind the coffin. There was one, everybody said, who had a feeling heart—and many were glad when the ceremonial—always of so very simple a kind in the Scotch church, and in those days scarcely anything at all, a short prayer and no more—was over, with the thought that the minister being evidently so much out of health and spirits, and feeling the loss of the kind old elder so deeply, was just in the condition in which some “get their death,” from the exposure and chill of a funeral. Several of his friends convoyed him home after all was completed, and warned Mrs. Buchanan to take very good care of him, to give him some good, strong, hot toddy, or other restorative, and do all she could to bring back his colour and his spirit.
“We have all had a great loss,” said Mr. Moncrieff, who was another leading elder, shaking his head, “but we are not all so sensitive as the minister.”