England -- Fiction; Invalids -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
The little crowd on the pavement had swelled. The case and all about it
had been manna to hungry July reporters, and all the world knew of Unity
and judged her this way and that, according to individual prejudice.
But the male part of the crowd uncovered as the coffin and afterward the
little group of mourners passed through. John and Miss Lindon and Lady
Blount went in the first carriage; Stella, Sir Oliver, and Herold in
the second. Sir Oliver, as is the way of Sir Olivers all the world over,
spoke of funerals he had attended in years and latitudes both remote.
Poor Roddy Greenwood--best fellow that ever lived--it was in Berbice,
Demerara--God bless his soul, it was in '68--he had left him at six in
the morning after a night's loo--good game loo; no one ever played it
these days--and he had followed him to his grave that day before sunset.
Then there was Freddy Nicol--they brought it in accidental because he
was cleaning his gun--there were the rags and oil and things about him;
but it was odd, devilish odd, that it should have happened the day after
Kitty Green married that fellow What 's-his-name? Tut! tut! he would
remember it in a minute. Now, what the Dickens was the name of the
fellow Kitty Green married? But as Kitty Green and her obscure and
unremembered spouse were young in the days when Sir Oliver was young,
and at the best and happiest were both wrinkled, uninteresting ancients,
the baffling question did not stir the pulses of his hearers.
“Anyhow,” said Sir Oliver, summing up, “death is a devilish funny
business. I 've seen lots of it.”
“And you who have seen so much of it, dear,” said Stellamaris, very
seriously, “what do you think of death?”
“I 've told you, my child; I 've told you. It 's devilish
funny--odd--here to-day and gone to-morrow. Devilish funny.”
They arrived at the cemetery. In the bare mortuary chapel Stella knelt
and heard for the first time in her life the beautiful words of the
service for the burial of the dead. And there in front of her, covered
with poor, vain flowers, was the coffin containing the clay of one whom
man with his opportunist laws against murder and self-slaughter was
powerless to judge. At the appointed time they went out into the summer
air and walked in forlorn procession behind the hearse, through the
startling city in whose tenements of stone and marble no mortal could
dwell; in which there was no fevered strife as in the cities of men;
in which all the inhabitants slept far beneath their stately domes or
humble monoliths, at peace with mankind, themselves, and God. And green
grass grew between the graves, and sweet flowers bloomed and seemed to
say, “Why weep, since we are here?” But for the faint grinding of the
hearse wheels on the gravelled path and the steps of the followers all
was still. Stellamaris clung to Herold's arm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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