“He was a great man, was William,” she said again and again between her convulsive sobs, as she sat by the bed on which his body had been laid after the autopsy. “He was a great man, and God knows what heights he wouldn’t have riz to if he’d lived a few years longer. For he’d took the measure of ’em all. He said he’d die a peer, and he would have died a peer if this cruel bullet hadn’t cut him down like a bison on the plains. Lord, to think of all he had gone through by flood and by fire, in storm and in quarrel, by the hand of God and by the hand of man; and when he comes here to enjoy his own and get his just reward, he is struck just like any poor Texan steer pithed in the slaughter place! The ways o’ the Almighty are past finding out indeed.”
Then she took his dead hand between both her own and held it tenderly and kissed it.
His princes and his lords, his fine ladies and fair favorites, were all far away from him now; he was all her own in his dead loneliness; her own man as he had been when they had walked across the green fields of Kilrathy on their marriage-day, with all their worldly goods put up in a bundle hung upon a stick. In her grief and her despair there was a thrill of jealous joy; he was once again all her own as he had been on that soft wet midsummer morning when they had walked through the grass man and wife.
CHAPTER XXXII.
“We’ll give him the grandest buryin’ that money can get,” she said to her daughter.
Katherine could not oppose her wishes, alien as they were to her own tastes and desires. She felt that the wish would have been also her father’s. The tragic suddenness of his end had startled and impressed London society; the evidences of sympathy and condolence were innumerable and seemed sincere; very many were extremely grieved that the hospitalities of Harrenden House had ceased in the height of the season; and the more personal and secret anxieties in those who were his debtors found natural expression in delicate attentions which took much of the sting of her bereavement out of his wife’s heart. A very great personage even called himself, and pressed her hand, and murmured his regret.
“You can’t say as your father ain’t honored in his end,” she said reproachfully to her daughter.
Katherine was silent. Everything that passed was sickeningly, odiously, intolerably offensive to her. The week which followed on his death, during which he was, as it were, lying in state, seemed to her as though it were ten years in length. When it came to a close, the body in its bier (a triple coffin of lead and oak and silver) was taken by rail from London into the southern portion of the county which he had represented, and solemnly deposited at the station of that rural capital town where he had once written down the sum of his subscriptions to the church and to “the dogs.” A very imposing gathering of county notables and borough dignitaries, of noblemen and gentlemen and municipal councilmen and clerical luminaries, were all assembled at the station ready to do him the last honors in their power, and sincerely affected by his loss, for the sad and general conviction was that, without his patronage as a fulcrum, the short-route railway would never now be made.
The blinds were drawn down in the houses of his supporters, and the bells of the churches tolled mournfully as the dismal procession wended on its way through the old-fashioned streets. There were eight black horses harnessed to the hearse with black plumes at their ears and long black velvet housings, and equerries in black walking at their heads, and carriages innumerable followed in slow and stately measure the leading equipages of the Sheriff, the Lord-Lieutenant, and the Mayor, who was a Viscount.
“A prince couldn’t be buried more beautiful,” murmured his widow, as she followed in a mourning-carriage with four black horses. She derived a strange consolation from this pageantry; it made her feel as if she were doing all she could for his soul, and as if she were keeping her marriage vows righteously. She was pleased, too, to see the drawn blinds, the closed shops, the steady, silent, respectful country crowds, the flag which hung half-mast high on the keep of the ancient town-castle.