University of Virginia Library

32. CHAPTER XXXII.
FUNEREAL.

ALL this while it is still the same long, long day. As
I stood on the bluff with Robert, facing, but hardly
seeing a sunset “which far outshone the wealth of
Ormus or of Ind,” it seemed as if weeks or even months had
rushed vehemently away since that hour of murder and suicide.
After every great calamity, every supreme anguish,
there is a period when life is not properly measurable by
the tickings of a clock, but only by the throbbings of emotion,
which beat so cruelly that we can think of naught else, and
so swiftly that they cannot be counted, and thus seem numberless.
Then time spreads out into gigantic spaces, over
which the troubled soul circles wearily, like a land-bird lost
in mid-ocean.

“It's mighty odd that Westervelt, senior, don't come,” Robert
observed. “He was telegraphed to before daylight. If
a son of mine was in such an awful muss, I should be along
the first chance.”

Five minutes after this we heard the far-away rumble, and
saw the long trailing smoke of the evening train from New
York; and in ten minutes more a hack appeared on the Rockford
road, rolled across the plain at a gallop, labored up the
hill, and halted at Seacliff. Mr. Westervelt and his children
had seen it approaching, and were at the gate. Robert
sprang forward, but a word from me checked him, and we

stood at a distance while the Westervelts walked sadly into
the house, talking softly together, but not looking in each
other's faces.

Half an hour afterwards, judging by the lights, that they
were all up stairs, Robert and I ventured into the parlor.
Westervelt, senior, was there alone, holding a roll of paper in
his hand, and stamping up and down the room with the grim,
granitic air of a funeral obelisk. He had evidently gone
right to work upon the present emergency, after the fashion
of a true business man, and made it his first duty to master
the case by reading the confession of Mrs. Westervelt.

“Mr. Fitz Hugh!” said he, saluting me bluntly, and, as it
were, angrily. Then, turning to Robert, “Who is your
friend, sir?”

I presented a very respectful and humble-browed gentleman,
Mr. Robert Van Leer.

“Oh—ah—yes,” replied Westervelt, senior. “Beg your
pardon, Mr. Van Leer. Remember seeing you now, sir, at
my son's marriage with your cousin. Sir, I offer you my
condolence. Your cousin's death is a shocking affair, to you
and to us.”

“Horrid, sir!” observed Robert, earnestly. “Awful thing,
all the way through.”

“Yes, sir. But there's one comfort. That Somerville has
got his quietus,—got his deserts, sir.”

“I have just finished reading your cousin's confession, sir,”
he added, holding up the manuscript, sternly. “I never
heard of such a rascal as that in all my life. Why, sir, if
he wasn't dead, I could have him kept in jail till he rotted.
State's prison offences, sir!”

“That's a fact, sir,” responded Robert. “I feel very sorry
to think of poor Ellen. She had a dreadful hard life of it.”

“Humph! All her own fault,” observed the old man.
“She shouldn't have defrauded you. By the way, we must
see to that, at a proper time; yes, we must settle that.”

“Oh! it's of no consequence,” said Bob, eagerly. “We
don't mind about that.”

“But it is of consequence, begging your pardon, and I do
mind about it,” retorted Westervelt, senior. “However, another
time,—another time. Mr. Fitz Hugh, can I see you
alone, sir?”

At this hint Robert slid meekly out of the room, and left
me to the old gentleman. He stood silent and absent-minded
for some moments, as if the tragedy of the day had been sufficient
to dissipate even his powers of concentration.

“Mr. Fitz Hugh, I want to know how we are to treat you,”
he at last said, or rather sighed. “You have been accepted
into our family; but now the family name has been dishonored.
You are not bound to hold to your engagement. My
granddaughter, my son, and I,—we all absolve you. You
are welcome to go, and we shall think no worse of you. Consider
this, but decide as early as possible,—say this evening.”

“I have already considered it and decided upon it,” I replied.
“My heart and will are just where they were. Nothing
has happened, and it seems to me that nothing could
happen to detach me from Miss Westervelt.”

“Think well of it,” said he, putting his hand on my arm
gently and almost affectionately. “You have proud relatives
and an old name,—if that counts for anything. Do you know
what you are about? The murder and the suicide are in the
papers to-day; the swindle will be in them to-morrow. There
will be all sorts of shameful suspicions and exaggerations.
The name of Westervelt will become a byword. We shall
see men's fingers pointing at us everywhere; we shall hear
people whispering about us; we shall be notorious.” (Here
the old man's voice shook a little, and he had to reinforce it
with a hem.) “The mere fact that such a fellow as Somerville
has stayed so much in the family, may be enough to
blacken the fame of our girls. Their guilty mother-in-law
will haunt them like a ghost. Do you wish to marry into
such a family? Think before you answer.”

“Mr. Westervelt, I assure you that I have thought it all
over, seriously and calmly,” I replied. “I still wish to marry

Miss Westervelt; wish it as much as ever I did, and more!
I will wait for her, but I must have her.”

After looking in my face for a long time, as if to see
whether there was any shade of doubt or deception there, he
took my hand and shook it warmly.

“I thank you,” said he;—“I do thank you earnestly. I
am glad to find some strength in you,—some true devotion.
I take this as a kindness, not to my granddaughter alone, but
also to myself. I am personally obliged to you.”

“This affair cuts me up terribly,” he continued, after a
moment's silence. “I can't bear to see my family an object
of scorn;—set up, as it were, in the pillory, for every scandal-monger
to throw his rotten eggs at.” (His trumpet of a voice
again missed a note here, and he got it back to its sonorous
natural pitch with difficulty.) “I made the name respectable,
and I wanted it kept so. Now this rascal of a Somerville,
and this simpleton of a Mrs. Van Leer Westervelt, have
blacked it for a whole generation. What under the heavens
God makes knaves and fools for is beyond me to imagine.
It appears to me a miserable investment of flesh and spirit.
Well, we must take life as we find it, and fight through as we
can. It seems to me like a wearisome, unprofitable, disappointing
business now, notwithstanding that I am what the
world calls a successful man.”

Was it not really touching, this sigh of a millionaire?
Stocks, bonds, granite blocks, city lots, Western lands, two
thousand ton clippers, and all the other architecture of gigantic
wealth had been for the moment dissipated into thin
air by one blow of a feeble-minded woman. The rich man
had learned that he could build no sure refuge from calamity;
and the discovery humiliated him with a sense of impoverishment
difficult to bear.

“Stay here a moment,” he observed presently. “I'll bring
my wife down to see you.”

When he reëntered, it was with his usual positive, self-confident
manner, as if he had been brushing up his courage

for the benefit of the timid natures up stairs. Mrs. Westervelt
followed him softly, her meek, white face meeker and
whiter than ever, and her eyelids red with weeping. I presume
that her husband had informed her of our conversation
concerning the marriage, for she came to meet me eagerly
and shook both my hands with affectionate earnestness.

“Oh, how dreadful this is, Mr. Fitz Hugh!” she whispered.
“We feel almost crushed by it.”

“Pooh, nonsense! wife. We are not crushed so easily,”
shouted her husband after the old boastful fashion. “I should
like to know who would dare try to crush us.”

“It isn't other people I care for,” sighed Mrs. Westervelt.
“Did you think we should never come to you?” she asked,
turning to me. “We have been away, and got home only
this afternoon. We received your message at the door, and
came up by the next train. What do you think of my poor
son? Will he be able to bear it?”

“I have hardly spoken with him to-day,” I replied. “He
has his children.”

“Oh, yes! Dear children! What would he do without
them! Well, I must go back and sit with him. I can't bear
to leave him alone now, you know. We have left him alone
too much of his life already.”

Out of the room and up stairs she stole, with a step as
quick and soft as a girl's.

“Yes, she's right,” muttered Mr. Westervelt, after he had
walked up and down two or three times. “We have left
him alone too much. It's not my wife's fault.—Mine!—Mr.
Fitz Hugh, if you ever have a son and he disappoints you,
don't get out of patience with him. We must have patience
in this world. It seems late at eighty to be learning
such a simple lesson as that; but I am only just learning
it.”

Is there any more pleasant and improving spectacle than
that of a man, who, having passed great part of his life in
bullying other people, at last finds himself bullied by his own

conscience? The sight is not a common one, I admit; but it
pleases Heaven to exhibit it occasionally; about once, perhaps,
in an angel's visit.

At last and at last this weary day ended. I had scarcely
slept for more than forty hours, and the first touch of the
pillow threw me into a heavy, painful slumber. It was luxury
compared with our woful waking life, and I fairly spited
the morning light because it brought with it recollection and
anticipation.

That day we were to bury the wife, the mother, the suicide.
Westervelt, senior, who, from the moment of his arrival, directed
everything, had arranged that we should leave Rockford
in the eleven o'clock train, reach New York at half-past
twelve, take carriages and drive directly to Greenwood Cemetery.
The grave, the hearse, the coaches, the clergyman,
had all been ordered the previous evening by telegraph.
The old business man attended to everything, and saw the
entire programme carried out as accurately and punctually
as he would have delivered a consignment from one of his
clippers. At the New York station we were joined by his
two married daughters and their husbands. It was half-past
two when our hearse and its following of four coaches halted
beside the conspicuous grassy knoll in Greenwood which
awaited the coming of all the Westervelts.

“I won't have a vault,” the Senior had said to me in
the cars. “Vaults are absurd, sir. I prefer the good old
way.”

There was neither monument nor headstone on the knoll,
but a far mournfuller object, something with no beauty nor
resignation in it, the pile of fresh earth which flanks a new-made
grave, and in the summit of it two spades standing
awry. All about this harsh deformity, in sweet contrast
with it, the grass was daintily green, loyal still to the bygone
summer. Here and there tufts of dwarf pine; here and there
the waxen gleam of snowdrops; here and there a mountain
ash, throwing out its sprays of crimson. Over all, high in the

September wind, which blew with a faint whisper as of talking
waves from the southern ocean, two hemlocks sighed and
a noble elm waved its long garments of shadow.

As we halted, two men, evidently the sexton and his assistant,
left the grave and came to open the gate of the enclosure.
One carriage was there before us, and a clergyman in a gown
now descended from it. Beside these three and the fourteen
who composed our party of mourners, the drivers and two of
the Westervelt servants, no one was present. Better thus,
far better than to be attended by a curious and scandalized
multitude, struggling to obtain a view of the poor suicide's
cold face, and prating to each other in loud whispers of the
forgery which she had consented to, of the murder which her
small hand had done, and of the foul suspicions which stained,
so unjustly, her matronly name.

The coffin was borne to the grave-side by the sextons and
the two old waiting-men of Westervelt, senior. The husband
followed, supporting Genevieve and leading Willie;
then Mary, leaning on my arm, and then the Van Leers;
lastly the Westervelts of New York. The clergyman performed
his office with a sad and almost stern conscientiousness.
The service was brief and painful; no pious assurance
nor consolation; no blessed hope of a sinless resurrection;
but a mournful surrendry as to uncovenanted mercies; a
tearful plea for pity on the afflicted; and then dust to dust,
ashes to ashes.

Willie Westervelt held his father's hand, wonderingly observant
of the grief in all these loved faces, constrained out
of his childish gayety by it, but evidently not fully aware of
its meaning It was the first time that he had ever looked
upon the strong tranquillity of death, and he had no conception
of its unflagging, pitiless endurance; he perhaps expected
that his mother would soon open her eyes from that strange
sleep, rise out of the coffin, kiss away his uneasiness, fondle
him as of old, and go back with him to Seacliff. Over and
over he looked up into the dim sorrow of his father's eyes,

with a faint smile, half questioning, half encouraging, which
changed nature and grew piteously tremulous as the ceremony
verged towards its end, and the gloom of it chilled more sensibly
through him. At last, when he saw the coffin let down
into the earth and left there, when he heard the first cruel
crash of gravel on the hollow-voiced lid, the whole meaning of
the scene, all the completeness and eternity of his loss, seemed
to burst upon him. With a loud cry he desperately caught his
father's hand and dragged him forward to the brink of the
grave. He did not say a word, but his eyes and one little
outstretched, imploring hand pleaded for his mother. Then,
seeing that there was no hope, and that his father either
could not or dared not prevent that horrible deed, he burst
into violent sobs, and, rushing back to Mary, hid his face in
the folds of her dress. Through her the sobs reëchoed;
through all of us, even to the coldest.

The burial was over. The sepulchral knoll had received
into its bosom the first Westervelt. The shadows of the elm
were to be no more withdrawn from her until it should fall,
and the mourning hemlocks were to sing as long as they
lived over her last slumber. Winter drifts, young grasses
of spring, summer rains, dead leaves of autumn, were henceforth
to be her visitants, clothing her abode with what beauty
God giveth them, and saying forever above her in voices
audible to all gentle spirits, “Compassion! Peace!”

As we passed out of the cemetery another funeral procession
met us, and through the window of the first carriage we
saw the noble, mournful face of the last of the Somervilles.
We shrank back, though he did not look up: he was gazing
steadily down, as into a grave: there was a dead man who
stood between him and all the living. We passed each other,
going opposite ways, never more to meet, but shadowed by
the same calamity.

Through the quiet of Brooklyn, through the thronged
streets of New York, noisy with life, unconscious apparently
of death, we drove as hurriedly as possible to the house of

Westervelt, senior. The New York relatives went to their
own homes; our Van Leer friends to a hotel.

In the evening the elder Westervelt requested me to accompany
him in a call on the two brothers, observing that
there was a matter of business between him and them which
ought to be settled without further delay. Arrived at the
Everett House, we inquired for the Messrs. Van Leer, and
were shown into a private parlor.

“Good evening, Mr. Westervelt. How d'ye do, Fitz
Hugh?” was their salutation.

“Very sorry my wife isn't able to see you,” continued
Henry. “This awful business, you know, has completely
worsted her. She went straight to bed as soon as she got
here.”

“My compliments to her,” said Mr. Westervelt. “I had
no idea of troubling her, though; not a proper occasion.
Gentlemen, I came to see you.”

“Very happy, sir,” observed both the brothers, politely,
and bowing a little, as men ought to millions.

“About business,” prosecuted Mr. Westervelt. “It's no
time, I am aware, for ordinary operations; but this is an
affair which demands immediate attention. I have a debt of
honor and I must pay it, or I shan't sleep. Gentlemen, a
person who once belonged to my family defrauded you out
of sixty thousand dollars. I have calculated it at compound
interest, seven per cent., as you will see by looking at this
paper. Here are two checks which cover the total. Here,
also, is a receipt. Will you be so good as to examine the
checks and sign the receipt.”

“Mr. Westervelt!” deprecated both the brothers, hanging
back from the table on which the old man had successively
laid the papers.

“If you want time to verify the accounts, I will give you
till to-morrow noon,” said the Senior. “I shall be ready to
receive you at my office and settle the matter,—say at one
o'clock precisely.”

Henry looked perplexed, and was silent. Robert screwed
up his courage and stammered out, “Why—Mr. Westervelt
—the fact is—we'd made up our minds not to touch this—
not the first red cent of it, sir. She was our cousin, and we
was quite willing she should have it.”

“Nonsense!” returned the old merchant, impatiently.
“She cheated you out of the property. She was my son's
wife, and he is indebted to you for it. You must take your
own money, gentlemen; you must take your own money.”

After an embarrassing discussion, in which the brothers
showed as much generosity of soul as awkwardness of manner,
they gave way before Mr. Westervelt's Quincy granite
steadiness.

“Well,” said Henry, “I suppose we must take it. It's of
no great account to us, but it's a good deal less to you; and,
since you insist upon it, why I suppose Bob and I must take
it. We did want to show that we had a kind feeling towards
poor Nelly's husband and child. But you won't let us. So,
Mr. Westervelt, there's my name. Now, Bob.”

Robert added his clumsy signature to his brother's, and
Mr. Westervelt stowed the receipt away in his gigantic
pocket-book.

“Won't you take a glass of wine?” asked Henry.
“Sorry I didn't think of it before. You must be dead beat
out, sir.”

“No, thank you; no occasion,” responded Mr. Westervelt,
bracing himself up very stifly, as if to show that he was not
in the least beat out. “I must go back to my family. My
respects to Mrs. Van Leer; hope to see her better soon.
Good-evening, gentlemen.”

“What a h—ll of an upper lip the old cock has!” I
heard Henry Van Leer remark as I followed the senior out
of the room. Let not my good readers, my best readers, be
angry with the poor man for using this comprehensive word
which I have dared to only half spell; let them lay the sin,
not to the wickedness of his heart, but to the incompleteness

of his vocabulary, which was very often inadequate to his
conversational necessities. Had he known how to analyze
the character of Westervelt, senior, in clear decent English,
he would not have been reduced to swear.

“There!” exclaimed Mr. Westervelt, when we had got
into the street. “I've paid up that family. I've seen the
last of it, I hope. Now sir,” (taking my arm as fiercely as if
he were going to garrote me,) “I wan't to tell you my plans.
I shan't bully my son any more; he can't stand it now; and
I'm sick of it. I shall support him out of my own pocket
liberally, and settle a hundred thousand on his children.
Mary will take her third immediately. That will make
something over sixty thousand between you and her. Don't
you lose it, sir! If you do,” (here he swelled indignantly)—
“if you do” (here he suddenly collapsed)—“you ought to be
ashamed of yourself, sir!”

He had been about to bully me, to threaten me with starvation,
I suppose, in case I lost my property; but the
remembrance of his son, of the ill effects of bullying in that
instance, and of all the sorrowful mystery now just terminated,
had come across him; and so his blustering intentions wilted
into a very harmless affirmation indeed.

The next day a hundred or two thousand of New Yorkers
breakfasted on our family horrors. It is not generally observed
what a large proportion of our population, even in
the most educated and Christian places, where the schoolmaster
is abroad and the minister speaks with authority, is
composed of jackals and hyenas, highly respectable, to be
sure, but body-snatching. In truth I am afraid that the
gentlest of us have something vampyric in our nature, and
can occasionally make a meal off a freshly killed corpse with
excellent relish. How we did enjoy Dr. Parkman and Dr.
Burdell, even weeks and months after they had been in their
graves! The “Seacliff tragedy” furnished columns of copy
to the morning papers; every hungry editor rushed in for
his morsel, to cook it up into a savory leader; and it was

understood that all the illustrated journals would, as soon as
possible, gratify the public palate with drawings of the site
and the scene. One flight of vultures and buzzards scented
out the two graves in Greenwood, while another spread
stronger wings and snuffed the blood-tainted air of our forsaken
dwelling. In the streets newsboys cried the “Somerville
murder;” in the hotels every drummer treated his
southern or western victim to it; in the saloons the hostess
served her visitors with “the particulars.”

Any place at such a time was a refuge compared with the
immense publicity of New York; and we hurried back to
our blood-stained, crime-stained, but isolated and tranquil
home of Seacliff. It was evening when we reached it; not
a soul was moving in the grounds; the lower masses of the
house were hung with palls of shadow; the upper windows,
free from foliage, were spectrally alight with moonbeams;
fearful was the silence, the loneliness, the recollection. How
different, how opposite, had Seacliff become to what it was
when I first knew it! How had the wickedness of one man,
and he not of us, blighted for us all memory, all anticipation,
and made our little world a fallen one!

We tried to nestle into our home and warm it into something
like comfort; but the house had been chilled utterly,
incurably, by the presence of those two corpses; worse still,
they themselves were there, and could not by any means be
got away. We had carried them out with our own hands,
and seen them depart for distant graves; but they had returned
again, and we beheld them daily in the hall, in the
library, in the parlor. They infected every room with the
effluvium of death just as truly and as insupportably as if
they had physically mouldered away there, and tainted the
atmosphere and spotted the boards and walls with their corruption.
How could we live in a house poisoned with such
a body of death and sin!

The Van Leer brothers came up and passed a day, but
only to collect and carry off their luggage.

“It's awful here, isn't it?” Henry said to me. “My wife
hasn't got over it yet. She wouldn't come up, not even to
try and comfort the girls. She begun to cry just as soon as
I urged it. Good-bye, Fitz Hugh. I guess we've looked
our last on Seacliff.”

The following day Westervelt, senior, paid us a visit, saw
the corpses perhaps, and took pity on us.

“You can't stay here,” he said. “New York is better
than this. I'll take you all,—I mean all you children,—into
my own house. As for Mr. Fitz Hugh, he must shift for
himself;—that is, Mary, till he goes to housekeeping.”

And so we all fled the spot forever; the Westervelts going
to the great house in St. Joseph's Place; and I to the hotel
the most adjacent thereto.

“Good-bye, Lewy,” sighed Ma Treat, as she made bold
to kiss me privately. “I did hope that when you married
Mary, you would come and live along side of us. I 'spose
I must give that up now. This splendid house has got to
be too awful; something between a prison and a grave, like.
Verily, the wages of sin is death: Romans sixth, twenty-first.
Well, good-bye, Lewy. Pa Treat and I will always
pray for you and for Mary and for all of them. We never
shall forget you; nor Johnny won't either. Good-bye.”

The tears rolled down her old cheeks and dropped unobstructed
on the fresh calico gown which she had put on for
the occasion. She joined Pa Treat and Johnny, standing in
silent woe; and they waved their hands to us, as if in benediction,
till we were out of sight.

“I feel anxious about my son, sir,” the elder Westervelt
soon confided to me. I'm afraid of a decline. He wants
occupation, to divert his mind from these awful affairs, sir.
I shall take him into my office, give him some little responsibility—nothing
severe, nothing very important, you understand—allow
him the run of the books and let him do the
best he can.”

The old man evidently thought that he was extending a

great favor, which nothing would have justified but the absolute
need that his son stood in of indulgences. I have little
doubt also that Westervelt, junior, was of the same opinion.
His father had achieved power as a man of business, a great
operator; and he had been ambitious all his life to reach
a similar position of splendor and influence, by the same
means; for to him, bred into an early respect for business,
the Exchange seemed the most attractive and noble arena
open to genius. It was free to him now; he could strive
in it with a cestus as weighty as any one's; and doubtless he
found some pleasure in the battle, some forgetfulness of past
sorrows.

But a wounded heart fights no long battle, if it abides in
a sickly body. Before the winter was over, that immortal
chariot which comes at last to every mortal dwelling, halted
at the door, and that still small voice which will not be disobeyed,
nor suffer any delay, called to the millionaire, Bring
out your dead! Then the earth of the Greenwood knoll, now
frozen, was opened again, and the shadow of the funeral elm,
now leafless, crossed the grave of the younger Westervelt.