“Let us pray,” said the vicar in a hushed and awed voice, for he was indeed unspeakably shocked. She dropped on her knees and everyone else knelt also.
Then the shrill short labored breathing ceased to whistle feebly through the silence: the bed-covering heaved no more.
Cocky was dead.
The child slipped down on to the floor. Alberic Orme and Hurstmanceaux stood hesitating on the threshold of the chamber.
“Oh, dear Duchess!” sighed the fashionable Esculapius, who was eminently pious. “These are the trials which are sent to us to detach us from earthly affections! The ways of God are inscrutable, but we must not question their merciful purpose.”
Cocky lay on the bed between them, very straight, very waxen, very like an effigy in yellow stone; but looking down on him his wife shuddered, for it seemed to her that his left eye opened and winked and that his rigid jaw grinned. She had an uncomfortable feeling that, though she would soon comfortably forget all the rest of him, Cocky’s grin and Cocky’s wink would long rise up in her memory.
CHAPTER XX.
In another week he also was carried out under the big yews and the Chantrey and Roubiliac statues, and laid beside the remains of his father and forefathers in a black-velvet covered coffin with silver handles and his ducal coronet upon it. But he had no sincere mourners, not one, although in the usual sickly tawdry habit of the time heaps of wreaths and garlands were piled up to his detested memory. His wife was again present, enveloped in the long crape veil of usage, with her two little sons beside her—a most touching and lovely figure. During the ceremony it would have been impossible for any observer to say whether she were profoundly touched or merely apathetic; but at one point in the service, when the village choir were singing a Mendelssohn hymn, her head drooped lower and lower, and her veiled figure moved with what resembled a convulsive sob: a correspondent of a daily paper, indeed, scribbled in shorthand that only for one instant did her admirable fortitude give way to an irrepressible burst of natural anguish. Jack knew better: he nudged Gerry and whispered very low: “Mammy’s laughin’. We mustn’t.”
Amongst the floral decorations there, heaped on and about the coffin, there was a harp made of lilies with silver strings and one string broken. As an emblem of Cocky’s life it was really too deliciously funny. It got the better of her nerves and she was forced to bury her face in her handkerchief.
For on the harp was a card, and on the card was written in a big sprawling handwriting, “From Lily.”