son
whom Mr Wodehouse had left all his property to, but whom the ladies knew
nothing of; some that it was a strange cousin, whom Lucy was to be
compelled to marry or lose her share; and after a while people compared
notes, and went back upon their recollections, and began to ask each
other if it was true that Tom Wodehouse died twenty years ago in the
West Indies? Then behind the two ladies--poor ladies, whose fate was
hanging in the balance, though they did not know it--came Mr Wentworth
in his cap and gown, pale and stern as nobody ever had seen him before
in Carlingford, excluded from all share in the service, which Mr Leeson,
in a flutter of surplice and solemnity, was giving his valuable
assistance in. The churchyard at Carlingford had not lost its semi-rural
air though the town had increased so much, for the district was very
healthy, as everybody knows, and people did not die before their time,
as in places less favoured. The townspeople, who knew Mr Wodehouse so
well, lingered all about among the graves, looking with neighbourly,
calm regret, but the liveliest curiosity. Most of the shopkeepers at
that end of George Street had closed their shops on the mournful
occasion, and felt themselves repaid. As for Elsworthy, he stood with a
group of supporters round him, as near as possible to the funeral
procession; and farther off in the distance, under the trees, was a much
more elegant spectator--an unlikely man enough to assist at such a
spectacle, being no less a person than Jack Wentworth, in the
perfection of an English gentleman's morning apparel, perfectly at his
ease and indifferent, yet listening with close attention to all the
scraps of talk that came in his way. The centre of all this wondering,
curious crowd, where so many passions and emotions and schemes and
purposes were in full tide, and life was beating so strong and vehement,
was the harmless dead, under the heavy pall which did not veil him so
entirely from the living as did the hopes and fears and curious
speculations which had already sprung up over him, filling up his place.
Among the whole assembly there was not one heart really occupied by
thoughts of him, except that of poor Lucy, who knew nothing of all the
absorbing anxieties and terrors that occupied the others. She had still
a moment's leisure for her natural grief. It was all she could do to
keep upright and support her sister, who had burdens to bear which Lucy
knew nothing of; but still,