Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's MovementJohnston, Harry
General
Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement
Johnston, Harry
Feminism -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction; Women's rights -- Fiction
But the financial aspect of the case for the time being did not
concern her. The death of her mother had been a stunning shock, and
when she crossed over to the hotel--what irony, by the bye, to think
she had been born there thirty-nine years ago, in the old inn that
had preceded the twice rebuilt hotel!--when she crossed the street
with Minna, it had been with blazing, tearless eyes and the desire
to take the hotel manager and his minions by the coat collar, fling
_them_ into the street, and assert her right to go up to her room.
But now her violence was spent and she was a broken, weeping woman
as she sat all night by the bedside of her dead mother, holding the
cold hand, imprinting kisses on the dead face which was now that of
a saintly person with nothing of the reprobate in its lineaments.
* * * * *
The burial for various reasons had to take place in the Cemetery of
St. Josse-ten-Noode, near the shuddery National Shooting Range where
Edith Cavell and numerous Belgian patriots had recently been
executed. Minna von Stachelberg left her hospital, with some one
else in charge, and insisted on accompanying Vivie to the interment.
This might have been purely "laic"; not on account of any harsh
dislike to the religious ceremony on Vivie's part; only due to the
fact that she knew no priest or pastor. But there appeared at the
grave-side to make a very suitable and touching discourse and to
utter one or two heartfelt prayers, a Belgian Baptist minister, a
relation of Mme. Trouessart.
Waterloo left many curious things behind it. Not only a tea-shop or
two; but a Nonconformist nucleus, that intermarried, as Sergeant
Walker or Walcker had done, with Belgian women and left descendants
who in the third generation--and by inherent vigour, thrift,
matrimony and conversion--had built up quite a numerous
congregation, which even grew large enough and rich enough to
maintain a mission of its own in Congoland. Kind Mme. Trouessart
(nee Walcker), distressed and unusually moved at the sad
circumstances of Mrs. Warren's death, had called in her uncle the
Baptist pastor (who also in some unexplained way seemed to hold a
brief for the Salvation Army). He prayed silently by the death-bed
which, under the circumstances, was more tactful than open
intercession. He helped greatly over all the formalities of the
funeral, and he took upon himself the arrangement of the ceremony,
so that everything was done decorously, and certainly to the
satisfaction of the Belgians, who attended. Such people would be
large-minded in religion--you might be Protestant, if you were not
Catholic, or you might be Jewish; but a funeral without some outward
sign of faith and hope would have puzzled and distressed them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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