“Tomorrow afternoon, my dear. Godfrey was at Conster, and he says he’s seen the Coroner.”
“And shall I have to go?”
“I fear so. But no doubt you’ll get an official intimation. You aren’t afraid, are you, sweetheart?”
“No, I’m not afraid.”
“Will you drive me out this morning? I must go over to Benenden, and take Pipsden on the way back.”
“Yes, I should like to drive you.”
So the day passed. In the morning she drove her father on his rounds, in the afternoon she dispensed in the Surgery, and in the evening there was church again. Church was black.... “And they laid him there, sealing the stone and setting a watch.... Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in the place of darkness, and in the deep—free among the dead, like unto those who are wounded and lie in the grave, who are out of remembrance.... And they laid him there, sealing a stone and setting a watch.”
The great three-days drama was over. For the last time the Tenebrae hearse had stood a triangle of sinister light in the glooms of the sanctuary. Tomorrow’s services would be the services of Easter, in a church stuffed with primroses and gay with daisy chains. What a mockery it all would be! How she wished the black hangings could stay up and the extinguished lamp before the unveiled tabernacle proclaim an everlasting emptiness. She shuddered at the thought of her Easter duties. It would be mere hypocrisy to perform them—she who wished that she had mortal sin to confess so that Peter need not have died in mortal sin.
She thought of Gervase, so near her now at Conster, and yet spiritually so very far away, in peaceful enjoyment of a Kingdom from which she had been cast out. She had half expected to see him in church that evening, but he had not been there, and she had felt an added pang of loneliness. The sight of him, a few words from him, might have comforted her. She thought of Gervase as he used to be in the old days when he first learned the faith from her. She almost laughed—she saw another mockery there. She had taught him, she had brought him to the fold—he himself had said that but for her he would not have been where he was now—and now he was comforted and she was tormented.
Then as she thought of him, it struck her that perhaps he might have written—that there might be a letter waiting for her at home. Surely Gervase, who must guess what she was suffering, would take some notice of her, try to do something for her. Obsessed by the thought, she hurried home from church—and found nothing.