Chapter 25

The faces looked very hard and unmoved that surrounded Dempster’s grave, while old Mr. Crewe read the burial-service in his low, broken voice. The pall-bearers were such men as Mr. Pittman, Mr. Lowme, and Mr. Budd—men whom Dempster had called his friends while he was in life; and worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The one face that had sorrow in it was covered by a thick crape-veil, and the sorrow was suppressed and silent. No one knew how deep it was; for the thought in most of her neighbours’ minds was, that Mrs. Dempster could hardly have had better fortune than to lose a bad husband who had left her the compensation of a good income. They found it difficult to conceive that her husband’s death could be felt by her otherwise than as a deliverance. The person who was most thoroughly convinced that Janet’s grief was deep and real, was Mr. Pilgrim, who in general was not at all weakly given to a belief in disinterested feeling.

‘That woman has a tender heart,’ he was frequently heard to observe in his morning rounds about this time. ‘I used to think there was a great deal of palaver in her, but you may depend upon it there’s no pretence about her. If he’d been the kindest husband in the world she couldn’t have felt more. There’s a great deal of good in Mrs. Dempster—a great deal of good.’

‘I always said so,’ was Mrs. Lowme’s reply, when he made the observation to her; ‘she was always so very full of pretty attentions to me when I was ill. But they tell me now she’s turned Tryanite; if that’s it we shan’t agree again. It’s very inconsistent in her, I think, turning round in that way, after being the foremost to laugh at the Tryanite cant, and especially in a woman of her habits; she should cure herself of them before she pretends to be over-religious.’

‘Well, I think she means to cure herself, do you know,’ said Mr. Pilgrim, whose goodwill towards Janet was just now quite above that temperate point at which he could indulge his feminine patients with a little judicious detraction. ‘I feel sure she has not taken any stimulants all through her husband’s illness; and she has been constantly in the way of them. I can see she sometimes suffers a good deal of depression for want of them—it shows all the more resolution in her. Those cures are rare: but I’ve known them happen sometimes with people of strong will.’

Mrs. Lowme took an opportunity of retailing Mr. Pilgrim’s conversation to Mrs. Phipps, who, as a victim of Pratt and plethora, could rarely enjoy that pleasure at first-hand. Mrs. Phipps was a woman of decided opinions, though of wheezy utterance.

‘For my part,’ she remarked, ‘I’m glad to hear there’s any likelihood of improvement in Mrs. Dempster, but I think the way things have turned out seems to show that she was more to blame than people thought she was; else, why should she feel so much about her husband? And Dempster, I understand, has left his wife pretty nearly all his property to do as she likes with; that isn’t behaving like such a very bad husband. I don’t believe Mrs. Dempster can have had so much provocation as they pretended. I’ve known husbands who’ve laid plans for tormenting their wives when they’re underground—tying up their money and hindering them from marrying again. Not that I should ever wish to marry again; I think one husband in one’s life is enough in all conscience’;—here she threw a fierce glance at the amiable Mr. Phipps, who was innocently delighting himself with the facetiæ in the ‘Rotherby Guardian,’ and thinking the editor must be a droll fellow—’but it’s aggravating to be tied up in that way. Why, they say Mrs. Dempster will have as good as six hundred a-year at least. A fine thing for her, that was a poor girl without a farthing to her fortune. It’s well if she doesn’t make ducks and drakes of it somehow.’

Mrs. Phipps’s view of Janet, however, was far from being the prevalent one in Milby. Even neighbours who had no strong personal interest in her, could hardly see the noble-looking woman in her widow’s dress, with a sad sweet gravity in her face, and not be touched with fresh admiration for her—and not feel, at least vaguely, that she had entered on a new life in which it was a sort of desecration to allude to the painful past. And the old friends who had a real regard for her, but whose cordiality had been repelled or chilled of late years, now came round her with hearty demonstrations of affection. Mr. Jerome felt that his happiness had a substantial addition now he could once more call on that ‘nice little woman Mrs. Dempster’, and think of her with rejoicing instead of sorrow. The Pratts lost no time in returning to the footing of old-established friendship with Janet and her mother; and Miss Pratt felt it incumbent on her, on all suitable occasions, to deliver a very emphatic approval of the remarkable strength of mind she understood Mrs. Dempster to be exhibiting. The Miss Linnets were eager to meet Mr. Tryan’s wishes by greeting Janet as one who was likely to be a sister in religious feeling and good works; and Mrs. Linnet was so agreeably surprised by the fact that Dempster had left his wife the money ‘in that handsome way, to do what she liked with it,’ that she even included Dempster himself, and his villanous discovery of the flaw in her title to Pye’s Croft, in her magnanimous oblivion of past offences. She and Mrs. Jerome agreed over a friendly cup of tea that there were ‘a many husbands as was very fine spoken an’ all that, an’ yet all the while kep’ a will locked up from you, as tied you up as tight as anything. I assure you,’ Mrs. Jerome continued, dropping her voice in a confidential manner, ‘I know no more to this day about Mr. Jerome’s will, nor the child as is unborn. I’ve no fears about a income—I’m well aware Mr. Jerome ‘ud niver leave me stret for that; but I should like to hev a thousand or two at my own disposial; it makes a widow a deal more looked on.’

Perhaps this ground of respect to widows might not be entirely without its influence on the Milby mind, and might do something towards conciliating those more aristocratic acquaintances of Janet’s, who would otherwise have been inclined to take the severest view of her apostasy towards Evangelicalism. Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means—one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies. ‘They’ve got the money for it,’ as the girl said of her mistress who had made herself ill with pickled salmon. However it may have been, there was not an acquaintance of Janet’s, in Milby, that did not offer her civilities in the early days of her widowhood. Even the severe Mrs. Phipps was not an exception; for heaven knows what would become of our sociality if we never visited people we speak ill of: we should live, like Egyptian hermits, in crowded solitude.