Читать книгу Awake and Rehearse - Louis Bromfield - Страница 12

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“YES, she was a wonderful daughter to him. She’ll always have that to think of, no matter what happens.”

The old woman, dowdy and fat and swathed in rusty crape that had witnessed a hundred funerals, sat on the edge of the collapsible chair, peering between black shoulders at a coffin covered feebly with meager carnations and tuberoses and autumn flowers. Among these shown resplendently two or three great bursts of roses sent by distant rich relations from a Park Avenue florist. The thin woman beside her wiped the red tip of her nose and sniffed the heavy-scented air.

“Yes,” she said, “she need never reproach herself for having neglected him. She gave up her life to him.”

The fat woman said, “Have you noticed the sweet expression it’s given her? I tell you the lives of people show in their faces. She looks like a saint.”

They knew, then, I thought, how she looked when her face was not hidden by the horrible black veil, for nothing was visible of Louise. Her head, bowed a little as she sat beside her father’s coffin, was completely obscured by thick black cloth. I wondered whether she herself could see through it to discover me sitting there far at the back among the old women who loved funerals.

“Shhh!” hissed the thin woman, and in the cramped shabby flat where the sunlight never entered, the fat little priest began.... I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord ...

It was the shabby funeral of a man who had come down in the world; for what lay in the coffin now had come into the world seventy years earlier rich and well-born. They sat there—the mourners—a strange assortment of remote and seedy cousins who came out of the earth only when there was a funeral in the family. They were immensely old and respectable men and women, worn down to pettiness by poverty and obscurity, who rarely saw each other save at funerals where they spoke of dear Cousin Laura and dear Cousin Kate. In their midst, and with a vulgarity that emanated like a cloud from their furs and broadcloths and pearls, cowered two rich relatives who in the midst of a decaying family had managed to keep their heads above water. They sat here uneasily, as if the poverty of all the others whom they pitied was in some way a reproach to themselves. They were the ones who, as if to ease their consciences, had sent the great bursts of expensive roses that made the other flowers seem only more shabby and pitiful.

And last of all there was myself, who had nothing to do with any of the others, who was not even an obscure cousin, but only a healthy, prosperous, middle-aged man with a happy home and children, who had come only because once long ago he had been in love with Louise Milbrook.

For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.

And now at last old Milbrook lay in his coffin and a score of people had gathered to mourn him on this dreary January day. Why? He was a man who had been kind to none, not even to his own wife and children. He had wasted his money and brought them to the aching poverty that must keep up appearances. All of us, even the two crape-laden women beside me, knew him as a monster of selfishness. We had all watched him slipping down, down, down from one house to another, each smaller than the last, from one flat to another, each shabbier than the last, until it had all come to an end on the fringes of the fashionable world, in a street where crowds of urchins stood outside waiting until John Milbrook came down to take his last ride. None of us, in the stuffy little room, had loved him. Perhaps it was Louise whom we loved and respected, sitting there, the last of her family, her head bowed a little over her frail body. Perhaps she had loved him, for she had stayed by him until the end, watching, spoiling him, reading to him, playing matador through endless evenings, gratifying his slightest whim while together they slipped down, down, down ...

O teach us to number our days: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

The priest was fat and oily like a white worm and he read in a bored, monotonous, mechanical voice, hurrying as much as he dared. He was an office boy of the church (they had not bothered to send the rector, who had a fashionable funeral at the same hour), but he was good enough to bury old Milbrook, who ten years ago had been forced to give up his pew in fashionable St. Bart’s. Still, it would look well in the papers ... “The Reverend So-and-So, curate of St. Bart’s.” It would be the last faint echo in the world from which the Milbrooks had fallen.

The sound of a funeral whisper at my side: “I hate the smell of tuberoses.” The two old women sniffed the air. “They’re so sickening!”

Tuberoses! It was the scent of tuberoses, thick and heavy, drifting up from the terraced gardens of Nice that enveloped us as we sat in the moonlight—how long ago?—more than twenty years, at least. Louise, pale and lovely, in a lilac gown, who blushed and clung to my hand while I talked to her.

Louise saying, “I do love you. Don’t think it’s because I don’t.” And then weeping silently. “But Father ... You see, he’s left alone so much since Mother died, and he’s so helpless. I can’t leave him just yet. I do love you, Robert. I do.”

So we had parted.

And again in Paris a long time afterward. “If we could only wait a little time. Father is so helpless and unhappy. Wait a little time!”

Wait! Wait for what? For this. It was only now, twenty years after, that John Milbrook’s leathery, sodden old face lay still at last in his coffin.

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God, in His wise providence, to take out of this world the soul of our deceased brother ...

In His providence! Perhaps it was just that. In His providence, Almighty God had set her free. She might be free now. She might be happy. She might marry. She might lift the veil of crape that hid her frail beauty and look out upon a new world in which she might begin at last to live!

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all for evermore. Amen.

They were shutting in old Milbrook until Judgment Day, and in the shabby room laden with the scent of tuberoses I rose to hurry away. I almost ran, but somehow in the mazes of the narrow hall I came suddenly full upon the one person I had hoped to escape. She stood in the shadows, startled, staring at me through the thick veil as if she had not seen an old lover, married, middle-aged and happy, but some terrifying ghost. Then she sighed, “Thank you, Robert. It was good of you to remember us.”

Slowly she raised her veil to smile at me, wistfully. The face was old and lined and worn like the face of an old, old woman. There was the soft thud of a coffin lid being closed in the dreary parlor. Into the coffin they were shutting more than the body of selfish old John Milbrook. They had shut into it something far more precious than all his existence.

The scent of the tuberoses hung thick in the air. Behind me, the fat old lady, pushing for a better view of the coffin, was telling someone else, “Yes, she was a wonderful daughter to him. She can always remember that, no matter what happens.”