He was startled by the fierce tone of a voice he hardly knew. "Idon't want to hear about her; she's not for decent folk to talk of."The old butler looked round askance. The seamstress was trembling violently. Her fierceness at such a moment shocked him. "'Dust to dust,'" he thought.
"Don't you be considerate of it," he said at last, summoning all his knowledge of the world; "she'll come to her own place." And at the sight of a slow tear trickling over her burning cheek, he added hurriedly: "Think of your baby--I'll see yer through. Sit still, little boy--sit still! Ye're disturbin' of your mother."Once more the little boy stayed the drumming of his heels to look at him who spoke; and the closed cab rolled on with its slow, jingling sound.
In the third four-wheeled cab, where the windows again were wide open, Martin Stone, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his coat, and his long legs crossed, sat staring at the roof, with a sort of twisted scorn on his pale face.
Just inside the gate, through which had passed in their time so many dead and living shadows, Hilary stood waiting. He could probably not have explained why he had come to see this tiny shade committed to the earth--in memory, perhaps, of those two minutes when the baby's eyes had held parley with his own, or in the wish to pay a mute respect to her on whom life had weighed so hard of late. For whatever reason he had come, he was keeping quietly to one side. And unobserved, he, too, had his watcher--the little model, sheltering behind a tall grave.
Two men in rusty black bore the little coffin; then came the white-robed chaplain; then Mrs. Hughs and her little son; close behind, his head thrust forward with trembling movements from side to side, old Creed; and, last of all, young Martin Stone. Hilary joined the young doctor. So the five mourners walked.
Before a small dark hole in a corner of the cemetery they stopped.
On this forest of unflowered graves the sun was falling; the east wind, with its faint reek, touched the old butler's plastered hair, and brought moisture to the corners of his eyes, fixed with absorption on the chaplain. Words and thoughts hunted in his mind.
'He's gettin' Christian burial. Who gives this woman away? I do.
Ashes to ashes. I never suspected him of livin'.' The conning of the burial service, shortened to fit the passing of that tiny shade, gave him pleasurable sensation; films came down on his eyes; he listened like some old parrot on its perch, his head a little to one side.
'Them as dies young,' he thought, 'goes straight to heaven. We trusts in God--all mortal men; his godfathers and his godmothers in his baptism. Well, so it is! I'm not afeared o' death!'
Seeing the little coffin tremble above the hole, he craned his head still further forward. It sank; a smothered sobbing rose. The old butler touched the arm in front of him with shaking fingers.
"Don't 'e," he whispered; "he's a-gone to glory."But, hearing the dry rattle of the earth, he took out his own handkerchief and put it to his nose.
'Yes, he's a-gone,' he thought; 'another little baby. Old men an' maidens, young men an' little children; it's a-goin' on all the time.
Where 'e is now there'll be no marryin', no, nor givin' out in marriage; till death do us part.'
The wind, sweeping across the filled-in hole, carried the rustle of his husky breathing, the dry, smothered sobbing of the seamstress, out across the shadows' graves, to those places, to those streets....
>From the baby's funeral Hilary and Martin walked away together, and far behind them, across the road, the little model followed. For some time neither spoke; then Hilary, stretching out his hand towards a squalid alley, said:
"They haunt us and drag us down. A long, dark passage. Is there a light at the far end, Martin?""Yes," said Martin gruffly.
"I don't see it."
Martin looked at him.
"Hamlet!"
Hilary did not reply.
