XII.

It was in a manner grotesque, but to March it was all the more natural for that reason, that Dryfoos should have Lindau’s funeral from his house.  He knew the old man to be darkly groping, through the payment of these vain honors to the dead, for some atonement to his son, and he imagined him finding in them such comfort as comes from doing all one can, even when all is useless.

No one knew what Lindau’s religion was, and in default they had had the Anglican burial service read over him; it seems so often the refuge of the homeless dead.  Mrs. Dryfoos came down for the ceremony.  She understood that it was for Coonrod’s sake that his father wished the funeral to be there; and she confided to Mrs. March that she believed Coonrod would have been pleased.  “Coonrod was a member of the ’Piscopal Church; and fawther’s doin’ the whole thing for Coonrod as much as for anybody.  He thought the world of Coonrod, fawther did.  Mela, she kind of thought it would look queer to have two funerals from the same house, hand-runnin’, as you might call it, and one of ’em no relation, either; but when she saw how fawther was bent on it, she give in.  Seems as if she was tryin’ to make up to fawther for Coonrod as much as she could.  Mela always was a good child, but nobody can ever come up to Coonrod.”

March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless absurdity of Dryfoos’s endeavor at atonement in these vain obsequies to the man for whom he believed his son to have died; but the effort had its magnanimity, its pathos, and there was a poetry that appealed to him in the reconciliation through death of men, of ideas, of conditions, that could only have gone warring on in life.  He thought, as the priest went on with the solemn liturgy, how all the world must come together in that peace which, struggle and strive as we may, shall claim us at last.  He looked at Dryfoos, and wondered whether he would consider these rites a sufficient tribute, or whether there was enough in him to make him realize their futility, except as a mere sign of his wish to retrieve the past.  He thought how we never can atone for the wrong we do; the heart we have grieved and wounded cannot kindle with pity for us when once it is stilled; and yet we can put our evil from us with penitence, and somehow, somewhere, the order of loving kindness, which our passion or our wilfulness has disturbed, will be restored.

Dryfoos, through Fulkerson, had asked all the more intimate contributors of ‘Every Other Week’ to come.  Beaton was absent, but Fulkerson had brought Miss Woodburn, with her father, and Mrs. Leighton and Alma, to fill up, as he said.  Mela was much present, and was official with the arrangement of the flowers and the welcome of the guests.  She imparted this impersonality to her reception of Kendricks, whom Fulkerson met in the outer hall with his party, and whom he presented in whisper to them all.  Kendricks smiled under his breath, as it were, and was then mutely and seriously polite to the Leightons.  Alma brought a little bunch of flowers, which were lost in those which Dryfoos had ordered to be unsparingly provided.