The captain pushed hurriedly past him and went on his way. But Mr. Carlaw in a moment came running after them again, and strode along beside them with a forlorn expression of countenance and with a hurried appeal to Comethup to bear his trouble manfully, and to look to something higher for consolation. Then he turned, and was off again, his step growing jauntier as the distance increased between them.
The captain strode along fiercely, muttering to himself; only at the garden gate did his features relax, and he passed into the house with a gentler face.
The dead man had been carried in there and laid in that big best room upstairs. Comethup had a wish to see him, and expressed it to the captain. But the captain shook his head. He sat down and drew the boy, in the old fashion, against his knee, and put his arm about him. "There are foolish, morbid people, boy, who'd be only too glad to let a little child look on death; but if you'll take your old friend's advice, don't do it. I told you that he had gone to meet your mother; all the best of him has gone, and what is left scarcely concerns us any more. If you saw him now you would carry the remembrance with you to your grave. He died quite suddenly, and very peacefully; think of him as you saw him last, when he stood at the church door in the sunshine, with a smile upon his face. The rest is nothing, boy; the best of him is gone."
Comethup urged no more. The very tones of the captain's voice seemed to bring peace and consolation to him, and he went about the house--into every room except that which was closed against him--and wandered in the garden of the roses, almost believing that the roses drooped their heads a little, in pity for his sorrow.
While he was wandering aimlessly there he heard a noise in the street beyond, and saw that a fly had driven up and stopped. The driver descended from his box and opened the door, and out of the vehicle got, with considerable difficulty, a strange figure. It was the figure of an elderly lady, very richly dressed and enormously stout--so stout that Comethup saw she had a difficulty in getting through the narrow doorway of the fly. Her difficulty in alighting appeared, too, to be increased by the fact that she groped for the step with one foot, even though her arm was resting on the arm of the driver. She had a heavy black polished stick in her hand, and when she reached the pavement, still leaning on the man's arm, she moved the stick gently in front of her, as though to feel her way. As the man pushed open the garden gate, and allowed her to walk inside, Comethup saw that her eyes were closed, and that she still moved the stick in front of her, feeling her way delicately with its point along the edge where the gravel joined the grass. Comethup knew then that she was blind.