THAT was Gita’s last talk with her grandmother. The next day Mr. Donald called, and on the following the old lady had what the nurse alluded to vaguely as one of her attacks. Two nights later she died quietly in her sleep. At the earliest moment consistent with cherished proprieties, Topper telephoned to Mrs. Pleyden, and she came to the manor an hour later.
“Polly had a telegram from Bar Harbor yesterday asking her to a house-party,” she said sympathetically to Gita, looking as if she would kiss her if she dared, “and she went off last night. But she’ll be home in a few days and I know she’d want you to come to us for a bit. You will, won’t you, my dear? You’ve hardly had time to get accustomed to this gloomy old house. Do run up and pack a bag.”
But Gita shook her head. She felt uncommonly bereft. Her grandmother was a person to be missed, whether she had unconsciously grown fond of her or not. At all events she felt a desire to stand by until the last of the ceremonies. And the old house, in which so many of her blood had lived and died, mysteriously held her.
“You are very kind,” she said. “And I’ll be glad to see Polly when she comes back. But I’d better stay here. I’m sure grandmother would have wished it. If—if—you’ll attend to things, though, I’d be grateful.”
“I will indeed.” Mrs. Pleyden was a tall slender woman, admirably dressed and poised, but although her life for the most part was spent in a round of bridge, she was by nature executive and always willing to exercise her talent. Her house in Chelsea and her apartment in New York were models of bland extravagance and housewifely skill. In an earlier day she would have been a “leader,” and, as it was, her large and exclusive circle deferred to her and regarded her as a personage. Between herself and Polly there was an unspoken compact. Mrs. Pleyden moved with the times, and life had taught her philosophy.
“Better go out of doors,” she continued. “Perhaps you will change your mind later, but meanwhile don’t stay in the house any more than you can help. I’ll do the telephoning, and Topper always knows what to do. He’s seen many a funeral in this house.”
Gita shuddered and went out into the garden.
The more intimate of her grandmother’s friends were in and out constantly during the next three days. Flowers arrived by the motor-load. The heavy perfume in the unaired rooms was unendurable. It seemed to Gita as if all the dead Carterets had fertilized the roots of those flowers and contributed their odor of decay.
The old lady lay in state, not in the drawing-room but in the great central hall. Her face looked like an ancient wax mask. It was devoid of expression, and it had had so much in life! Gita did not give it a second glance. She preferred to remember that wise sarcastic old face on the pillows, lit by the indomitable dark brilliancy of the eyes.
Mrs. Pleyden had telephoned to a New York house for Gita’s mourning and it arrived early on the day of the funeral. It was merely a straight little frock of crêpe de Chine and a black straw hat like an inverted bowl, from which a short veil of chiffon depended. Gita wondered what her grandmother would have thought of it. Her crêpe veils no doubt had trailed the ground like those of the afflicted in French provincial towns.
She rummaged in the drawers of a chest in the old lady’s room and found a long necklace of jet and oxidized silver and put it on. The act made her feel less modern than usual, but she thought, somewhat humorously, that her grandmother would approve of this subtle, if momentary, linking of her unruly descendant with the past.
She had heard the rolling of many motors, and as she descended the broad stair she saw that the hall as well as the large and smaller drawing-rooms were crowded with ladies and gentlemen, who, as she learned later, had come not only from Atlantic City, but from Philadelphia and many of the country estates in New Jersey. It was a last tribute from friends and acquaintances that would have pleased Mrs. Carteret, although she would have regarded it as a matter of course. The Carteret funerals had always been affairs of state, a signal for all affiliated clans.
There were even reporters on the lawn.
Topper, in a rusty dress suit, once in the wardrobe of Mr. Carteret, and black gloves, was master of ceremonies, and Andrew, the old gardener, bent nearly double with rheumatism, had been given a chair near the casket. The other servants, housemaid and cook, were more recent acquisitions, but sniffled audibly. Topper’s eyes were red, but no Carteret could have presented a more immobile front to the world.
Mr. Donald, the family lawyer, met Gita at the foot of the stair and offered his arm. She was conscious of a ripple of decorous interest and several hundred examining eyes as they made their way to the upper end of the hall and took the seats reserved for them. There were no young people present. Polly, who had returned the night before, had telephoned that she would be over after the funeral; she would pass out if she found herself at one of those hang-overs of barbarism.
Gita privately made up her own mind that it was the last funeral she would ever attend. In an effort to look grave the company was as if suddenly bereft of individuality, and all the women who possessed black gowns wore them whether they were cut in the latest fashion or not. The pall-bearers, most of them keen business or professional men, looked like expressionless mutes. Mr. Donald, who was one of them, wore a band of black cloth on his sleeve and flourished a handkerchief with a black border. Polly would have said he looked like a walking monument to conservatism, but he was an urbane and pleasant person, inclined to be fatherly in manner to his younger clients and had been sincerely attached to Mrs. Carteret.
The atmosphere was sickening. The day was hot and close. Several of the women surreptitiously inhaled smelling-salts. The clergyman in his Episcopal robes droned on interminably. Not a phrase of the long funeral service could be omitted on so august an occasion. Gita felt as if she were on the verge of hysterics. At her mother’s simple funeral on the desert, where Millicent had asked to be buried—she was “tired of traveling”—Gita had felt only numbness and desolation, and had passively permitted herself, when it was over, to be carried off to San Francisco by Mrs. Melrose to await a possible letter from Carteret Manor. The numbness had not passed until she found herself alone in the train, free of solicitudes and plans for her future, should Mrs. Carteret ignore her. But today she felt a wild desire to laugh and shock some sort of expression into these portentously solemn faces. What a comedy! They were swooning with boredom and tuberoses, and what one of them had really cared for her grandmother? More than once they must have writhed under her merciless tongue. But it was an inherited ritual to attend a Carteret funeral and they were stern devotees of the passing conventions.
The sonorous voice rounded its final period. There was a sigh, a rustle. Mr. Donald left her to join the pall-bearers. Mrs. Pleyden took her firmly by the arm and led her past many staring eyes to her own motor.
“You are going with me to the cemetery,” she said kindly, “and then I’ll turn you over to Mr. Donald, who’ll bring you home and read the will to you in the library. . . . Abominable!” She had heard the click of a camera. “But your features will hardly be distinguishable through that veil. I only hope the paper is one that decent people take in.” She looked askance at the necklace but concluded to ignore it. Tact never failed her.