"Aw, yes, my lord."
"And you, too, Mrs. Teare?"
The woman courtesied; the Bishop named them one by one, and stroked the bare head of the little girl who was clinging to her mother's cloak and weeping.
"Then it's the 'Ben-my-Chree' that has been missing since yesterday at high-water?" the Bishop said, in a sort of hushed whisper.
"Yes, sure, my lord."
At that the Bishop turned suddenly aside, without a word more, opened the gate, and walked up the path. "Oh, my son, my son," he cried, in his bleeding heart, "how have you shortened my days! How have you clothed me with shame! Oh, my son, my son!"
Before Ballamona an open cart was standing, with the tail-board down, and the horse was pawing the gravel which had once—on a far different occasion—been strewn with the "blithe-bread." The door of the house stood ajar, and a jet of light from within fell on the restless horse without. The Bishop entered the house, and found all in readiness for the hurried night burial. On chairs that were ranged back to back a rough oak coffin, like an oblong box, was resting, and from the rafter of the ceiling immediately over it a small oil-lamp was suspended. On either side of the hall were three or four men holding brands and leathern lanterns, ready for lighting. The Deemster was coming and going from his own room beyond, attended in bustling eagerness by Jarvis Kerruish. Near the coffin stood the vicar of the parish, father of the dead man's dead wife, and in the opening of a door that went out from the hall Mona stood weeping, with the dead man's child in her arms.
And even as it is only in the night that the brightest stars may truly be seen, so in the night of all this calamity the star of the Bishop's faith shone out clearly again, and his vague misgivings fell away. He stepped up to Mona, whose dim eyes were now fixed on his face in sadness of sympathy, and with his dry lips he touched her forehead.
Then, in the depth of his own sorrow and the breadth of shadow that lay upon him, he looked down at the little one in Mona's arms, where it leaped and cooed and beat its arms on the air in a strange wild joy at this gay spectacle of its father's funeral, and his eyes filled for what the course of its life would be.
Almost as soon as the Deemster was conscious of the Bishop's presence in the house, he called on the mourners to make ready, and then six men stepped to the side of the coffin.