University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.
AFTERWARDS.

THE funeral was over, and there were two fresh
graves—the only ones in the bit of prairie set
apart for a graveyard. I have written enough in
this melancholy strain. Why should I pause to describe
in detail the solemn services held in the
grove by the lake? It is enough that the land-shark forgot his
illegal traffic in claims; the money-lender ceased for one day
to talk of mortgages and per cent and foreclosure; the fat
gentleman left his corner-lots. Plausaby's bland face was wet
with tears of sincere grief, and Mr. Minorkey pressed his hand
to his chest and coughed more despairingly than ever. The
grove in which the meeting was held commanded a view of
the lake at the very place where the accident occurred. The
nine survivors sat upon the front seat of all; the friends of
the deceased were all there, and, most pathetic sight of all,
the two mute white faces of the drowned were exposed to view.
The people wept before the tremulous voice of the minister
had begun the service, and there was so much weeping that the
preacher could say but little. Poor Mrs. Plausaby was nearly
heart-broken. Nothing could have been more pathetic than
her absurd mingling for two days of the sincerest grief and an

anxious questioning about her mourning-dress. She would ask
Isa's opinion concerning her veil, and then sit down and cry
piteously the next minute. And now she was hopeless and
utterly disconsolate at the loss of her little Katy, but wondering
all the time whether Isa could not have fixed her bonnet so
that it would not have looked quite so plain.

The old minister preached on “Remember now thy Creator
in the days of thy youth.” I am afraid he said some things
which the liberalism of to-day would think unfit—we all have
heresies nowadays; it is quite the style. But at least the old
man reminded them that there were better investments than
corner-lots, and that even mortgages with waivers in them will
be brought into judgment. His solemn words could not have
failed entirely of doing good.

But the solemn funeral services were over; the speculator
in claims dried his eyes, and that very afternoon assigned a
claim, to which he had no right, to a simple-minded immigrant
for a hundred dollars. Minorkey was devoutly thankful that his
own daughter had escaped, and that he could go on getting
mortgages with waivers in them, and Plausaby turned his attention
to contrivances for extricating himself from the embarrassments
of his situation.

The funeral was over. That is the hardest time of all.
You can bear up somehow, so long as the arrangements and
cares and melancholy tributes of the obsequies last. But if
one has occupied a large share of your thoughts, solicitudes,
and affections, and there comes a time when the very last you
can ever do for them, living or dead, is done, then for the
first time you begin to take the full measure of your loss.
Albert felt now that he was picking up the broken threads of

another man's life. Between the past, which had been full of
anxieties and plans for little Kate, and the future, into which
no little Kate could ever come, there was a great chasm.
There is nothing that love parts from so regretfully as its
burdens.

Mrs. Ferret came to see Charlton, and smiled her old sudden
puckered smile, and talked in her jerky complacent voice
about the uses of sanctified affliction, and her trust that the sudden
death of his sister in all the thoughtless vanity of youth
would prove a solemn and impressive warning to him to repent
in health before it should be with him everlastingly too
late. Albert was very far from having that childlike spirit
which enters the kingdom of heaven easily. Some natures are
softened by affliction, but they are not such as his. Charlton
in his aggressiveness demanded to know the reason for everything.
And in his sorrow his nature sent a defiant
why back to the Power that had made Katy's fate so sad, and
Mrs. Ferret's rasping way of talking about Katy's death as a
divine judgment on him filled him with curses bitterer than
Job's.

Miss Isa Marlay was an old-school Calvinist. She had been
trained on the Assembly's Catechism, interpreted in good sound
West Windsor fashion. In theory she never deviated one iota
from the solid ground of the creed of her childhood. But
while she held inflexibly to her creed in all its generalizations,
she made all those sweet illogical exceptions which women of
her kind are given to making. In general, she firmly believed
that everybody who failed to have a saving faith in the vicarious
atonement of Christ would be lost. In particular, she
excepted many individual cases among her own acquaintance.

And the inconsistency between her creed and her applications
of it never troubled her. She spoke with so much confidence
of the salvation of little Kate, that she comforted Albert somewhat,
notwithstanding his entire antagonism to Isa's system of
theology. If Albert had died, Miss Marlay would have fixed
up a short and easy road to bliss for him also. So much
more generous is faith than logic! But it was not so much
Isa's belief in the salvation of Katy that did Albert good, as
it was her tender and delicate sympathy, expressed as much
when she was silent as when she spoke, and when she spoke
expressed more by the tones of her voice than by her words.

There was indeed one part of Isabel's theology that Charlton
would have much liked to possess. He had accepted the
idea of an Absolute God. A personal, sympathizing, benevolent
Providence was in his opinion one of the illusions of the theologic
stage of human development. Things happened by
inexorable law, he said. And in the drowning of Katy he saw
only the overloading of a boat and the inevitable action of
water upon the vital organs of the human system. It seemed
to him now an awful thing that such great and terrible forces
should act irresistibly and blindly. He wished he could find
some ground upon which to base a different opinion. He would
like to have had Isabel's faith in the Paternity of God and in
the immortality of the soul. But he was too honest with himself
to suffer feeling to exert any influence on his opinions.
He was in the logical stage of his development, and built up
his system after the manner of the One-Hoss Shey. Logically
he could not see sufficient ground to change, and he
scorned the weakness that would change an opinion because of
feeling. His soul might cry out in its depths for a Father in

the universe. But what does Logic care for a Soul or its cry?
After a while a wider experience brings in something better
than Logic. This is Philosophy. And Philosophy knows what
Logic can not learn, that reason is not the only faculty by
which truth is apprehended—that the hungers and intuitions of
the Soul are worth more than syllogisms.

Do what he would, Charlton could not conceal from himself
that in sympathy Miss Minorkey was greatly deficient.
She essayed to show feeling, but she had little to show. It
was not her fault. Do you blame the dahlia for not having
the fragrance of a tuberose? It is the most dangerous
quality of enthusiastic young men and women that they are
able to deceive themselves. Nine tenths of all conjugal disappointments
come from the ability of people in love to see more
in those they love than ever existed there. That love is blind
is a fable. He has an affection of the eyes, but it is not blind
ness. Nobody else ever sees so much as he does. For here
was Albert Charlton, bound by his vows to Helen Minorkey,
with whom he had nothing in common, except in intellect, and
already his sorrow was disclosing to him the shallowness of
her nature, and the depth of his own; even now he found that
she had no voice with which to answer his hungry cry for
sympathy. Already his betrothal was becoming a fetter, and
his great mistake was disclosing itself to him. The rude
suspicion had knocked at his door before, but he had been able
to bar it out. Now it stared at him in the night, and he could
not rid himself of it. But he was still far enough from accepting
the fact that the intellectual Helen Minorkey was destitute
of all unselfish feeling. For Charlton was still in love
with her. When one has fixed heart and hope and thought

on a single person, love does not die with the first consciousness
of disappointment. Love can subsist a long time on old associations.
Besides, Miss Minorkey was not aggressively or obtrusively
selfish—she never interfered with anybody else. But
there is a cool-blooded indifference that can be moved by no
consideration outside the Universal Ego. That was Helen.