The Odd Fellows took charge of my husband's funeral, his body was moved
from the Rathbones', to their hall and did not go back again to the
rooms over the store. Miss Rathbone made up my crape for me. I believe
it gave her a little comfort to do so. Forester came and settled up my
husband's affairs; he was rather inclined to resent what he felt was an
effort of the Rathbones to claim a larger share in the business than the
books showed, but he thought my indifference natural to my grief. He was
shocked a little at my determination to go on with my engagement; we
were not so poor he thought, that I could not afford a little retirement
to my widowhood. But in that strange renewal of communion after death, I
felt my husband nearer than before. He would go with me at last out of
Higgleston. Strangely, I wanted to see Miss Rathbone, but she kept away
from me. That was as it should have been in Higgleston. She had tried to
get my husband, she had been, in a way, the death of him. It was hardly
expected that I could bear the sight of her, though it would have been
Christian to forgive her.
I did see her, however, the night before I went away. It was the dusk of
the first of September. There was a moon coming up, large and dulled at
the edges by the haze, and that strange earthy smell with the hint of
decay in it, kept in by the banded mists that lay below the moon. The
darkness crept close along the earth and spread upward like an
exhalation into the sky where almost the full day halted. I had slipped
out down a side street and across an open lot to the cemetery. I would
have that hour with my dead free from observation.
I went between the white head stones and the flower borders. As I neared
my husband's grave, something moved upon it. It arose out of the low
mound as I approached; for one heart-riving second I stopped,
speechless; it moved again and showed a woman.
"Miss Rathbone!" I called. "Henrietta!" I had not used her name before;
I have just now remembered it.
"You might have left me this," she said. I saw that she had covered the
mound with flowers, and I was glad I had not brought any.
"I am leaving," I answered. "I am going to-morrow ... where my work is."
"Yes, _you_ can go. But I have to stay ... where my work is. I stay with
him. You can go ... you always wanted to go. And I, I have been talked
about and I daren't even cry for him, not even at night, for my father
hears me." She was crying now, deeply, bitterly. "You never cared for
him," she insisted, "and now he knows it; he knows and has come back to
me ... to _me_."
"He comes back," I admitted. I was stricken suddenly with the futility
of all human conviction. Moving about the house that day I had been
conscious of him beside me then, and now, lying there beside my boy,
touching him ... mine ... sealed to me in the certainty of death. And he
had come back to _her_. I did not know even now what she and my husband
had been to one another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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