“They could scarce do more if ’twas a royal prince. ’Tis consoling to see such respect and such lamentation,” she murmured, looking out furtively from the handkerchief in which her face appeared buried. The part of her character which had taken pleasure in the great folk and the great houses, and the great successes of their English life, thrilled with pride to think that her “man,” her own man, with whom she had toiled and moiled so many, many years, was being honored in his obsequies thus. Even English Royalty was represented at the funeral by a small slim young gentleman with an eye-glass, who belonged to the Household and brought with him an enormous wreath of gardenia and Bermuda lilies.
Her daughter, whose eyes were dry, and who had no handkerchief even in her hand, did not answer, but she thought: “The respect and the lamentation are bought like the crape and the horses’ plumes, like the lies on the silver coffin-plate and the stolen place in the Roxhall crypt!”
“That darter o’ Massarene’s a hard woman,” said a cooper of the town to a wheelwright. “Not a drop o’ water in her eye for her pore murdered dad.”
“One don’t pipe one’s eye when one comes into a fortun’,” said the wheelwright, winking his own. “And such a fortun’! For my part I respect her; she don’t pretend nought.”
“No, she don’t pretend. But one likes to see a little ’uman feelin’,” said the more tender-hearted cooper, watching the tails of the black horses sweep the stones of the High Street. That was the general public sentiment in Woldshire against Katherine Massarene. She was a hard young woman. The county foresaw that she would draw her purse-strings very tight, and be but of little use to it. “A hard young woman,” they all thought, as they saw her straight delicate profile, like a fine ivory intaglio, through the glass of her equipage.
It was a fine day in early summer and the sun shone on the green cornfields, the sheep in the meadows, the cows under the pollards, the whirling sails of windmills, the tall yellow flags in the ditches, the hamlets dotting the level lands, the village children climbing on stiles to see the pageant pass.
Katherine looked out at the simple landscape and the soft dim blue of the sky, and felt sick at heart.
“Am I a monster,” she thought, “that I can feel no common ordinary sorrow, no common natural regret even, nothing but a burning humiliation?”
The solemn and stately procession went on its way decorously and tediously, along the country roads which separated the county town from the park of Vale Royal. Everybody in the carriages which one by one followed the widow’s were excruciatingly bored; but they all wore long faces, and conversed under their breath of the Goodwood meeting, of the prospect of the hay harvest, of quarter sessions, of pigeon matches, of drainage, of ensilage, and of the promise of the young broods in the coverts.
“I think death is made more of a nuisance than it need be really,” said the slender young gentleman who represented Royalty to the Custos Rotulorum who replied with a groan, “Oh, Lord, yes! If one could only smoke!”