my feelings, and I will damn yours," continued Jansenius in
the same tone. Trefusis involuntarily looked at the door through which
he had lately passed. Then, recovering himself, he said quietly:
"It does not matter. She can't hear us."
Before Jansenius could reply his wife hurried upstairs, caught him by
the arm, and said, "Don't speak to him, John. And you," she added, to
Trefusis, "WILL you begone?"
"What!" he said, looking cynically at her. "Without my dead! Without my
property! Well, be it so."
"What do you know of the feelings of a respectable man?" persisted
Jansenius, breaking out again in spite of his wife. "Nothing is sacred
to you. This shows what Socialists are!"
"And what fathers are, and what mothers are," retorted Trefusis, giving
way to his temper. "I thought you loved Hetty, but I see that you only
love your feelings and your respectability. The devil take both! She was
right; my love for her, incomplete as it was, was greater than yours."
And he left the house in dudgeon.
But he stood awhile in the avenue to laugh at himself and his
father-in-law. Then he took a hansom and was driven to the house of
his solicitor, whom he wished to consult on the settlement of his late
wife's affairs.
CHAPTER X
The remains of Henrietta Trefusis were interred in Highgate Cemetery
the day before Christmas Eve. Three noblemen sent their carriages to
the funeral, and the friends and clients of Mr. Jansenius, to a large
number, attended in person. The bier was covered with a profusion of
costly Bowers. The undertaker, instructed to spare no expense, provided
long-tailed black horses, with black palls on their backs and black
plumes upon their foreheads; coachmen decorated with scarves and
jack-boots, black hammercloths, cloaks, and gloves, with many hired
mourners, who, however, would have been instantly discharged had they
presumed to betray emotion, or in any way overstep their function of
walking beside the hearse with brass-tipped batons in their hands.
Among the genuine mourners were Mr. Jansenius, who burst into tears
at the ceremony of casting earth on the coffin; the boy Arthur, who,
preoccupied by the novelty of appearing in a long cloak at the head of a
public procession, felt that he was not so sorry as he ought to be when
he saw his papa cry; and a cousin who had once asked Henrietta to marry
him, and who now, full of tragic reflections, was enjoying his despair
intensely.
The rest wh
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