To most people Mr. Talbot’s death was the first intimation of his ever having lived, and one rather resents for the old man the one day’s publicity which death enforced upon him.  It was indeed well for him that he was dead, for such unwonted excitement would surely have killed him.  This important coming and going of undertakers; this populous invasion of friends talking like muffled drums in the front parlour, and passing up and down and up and down the stairs, in and out and in and out of his still room; this throng of neighbours awaiting him in the streets; these plumed impatient horses, and these carriages of dark grandeur—­“Jane, why ever didn’t you bury me by the back door?” would surely have been the old man’s pitiful complaint could he have known.

However, the day passed and the old man was safe at last, where no front-parlour visitors should affright him more, and where no one would trouble his old brains for speech any more; and to all, save one, his death was but as though he had moved a little farther into the kitchen.

It seemed almost strange that even his wife should miss him.  One had thought so little of them as man and wife.  One could hardly, even by process of thinking, realise that between these rinded and wrinkled beings love had once hung like a rosy cloud, from which one day had sprung Jenny.

On one or two occasions, indeed, they had been surprised in an uncanny semblance of a caress, and once in a while an almost supernatural retrospect had lit up and vanished again in an unaccustomed tender word; and to have been present then was to feel somehow frightened.

Ah! the gay young leaves no longer kiss across in the morning sun, but the stern old trees have meetings you know not of far beneath the ground.  Their roots are twisted and twined in a wonderful embrace there; there in the dark they are very close together, and shall not be wrenched apart without groanings that cannot be uttered.

Jenny can hardly be said to have missed her father, except through her mother, who seemed suddenly to grow a little deafer, a little more dim-sighted, just a trifle less brisk and busy than before, and with a touch about her of that old-age awesomeness that mutters to itself in corners and seems to know strange things.

Yes, Jane missed her John.  Her old heart knew that he was no longer sitting in the kitchen.

CHAPTER XV

JENNY’S BOTTOM DRAWER

Jenny and her old mother began to grow closer to each other at this time.  Perhaps it was because the old woman felt lonelier, and perhaps, too, because the loss of her old man had sent her thoughts wandering among the enchanted fields of her young days, that she began to talk sometimes to Jenny about her marriage, and to give her quaint advice on the subject of “managing” husbands; “as if,” Jenny smilingly said to herself, “an old man like father was the same, belonged even to the same race, as Theophil.”