“Never mind,” said Carmichael, “we shall see if I’m right or not. Meanwhile, there’s the funeral this afternoon, and it would hardly be decent to take any action till after that, would it? Hullo, Marryatt, what time does the thing start?”
“Half-past two. A good many of the members mean to turn out, and one wanted them to get away in time for an afternoon round. I must say, I think the club’s done handsomely by poor Brotherhood, considering how few of us really knew him. The Committee has sent a very fine wreath.”
“And that’s the only one, I should think,” said Gordon.
“Oddly enough, it isn’t. There’s one other, a peculiarly expensive-looking thing, which came down from London. There’s no name on it, no inscription of any kind, in fact.”
“H’m!” said Reeves; “that’s curious.”
“My dear Reeves,” expostulated Gordon, “I’m not going to have you examining the wreaths on the coffin with your lens and forceps. There are limits of decency.”
“Well, I won’t worry about it anyhow till Carmichael has—Hullo! hit him on the back, Gordon.” For Carmichael had been overtaken by one of those choking fits which the best-behaved of us are liable to.
“It’s a curious thing,” he gasped on recovering, “that one always used to say, when one was small, that one’s drink had ‘gone the wrong way.’ Nothing at all to do with the wind-pipe, I believe.”
The funeral was, it must be confessed, a riot of irony. The members who attended had decided that it would look bad to take their clubs with them to the churchyard, but their costumes were plainly a compromise between respect for the dead and a determination to get on with business as soon as it was over. None of them had any tears to shed. The village of Paston Oatvile turned out to a child in sheer morbidity, to see “ ’im as fell down off of the railway put away.” The sonorous assurances of the burial service had to be read out in full earshot of the village green on which, little more than a week ago, Brotherhood had laboriously disproved the doctrine of personal immortality. To these same solemn cadences the great lords of Oatvile, ever since they abandoned the Old Faith under William III, had been laid to rest within these same walls—
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone