George did not want to go back with them and be forced to hear the shreds of Aunt Maw’s life torn apart and pieced together again, so he linked his arm through Margaret’s and led her over the brow of the hill to the other side. For a little while they stood in the slanting light, silent, their faces to the west, and watched the great ball of the sun sink down behind the rim of distant mountains. And the majestic beauty of the spectacle, together with the woman’s quiet presence there beside him, brought calm and peace to the young man’s troubled spirit.
When they came back, the cemetery appeared to be deserted. But as they approached the Joyner plot they saw that Mrs. Delia Flood was still waiting for them. They had forgotten her, and realised now that she could not go without them, for there was only one car on the gravelled roadway below and the hired chauffeur was slumped behind his wheel, asleep. In the fast-failing light Mrs. Flood was wandering among the graves, stopping now and then to stoop and peer closely at an inscription on a stone. Then she would stand there meditatively and look out across the town, where the first lights were already beginning to wink on. She turned to them casually when they came up, as though she had taken no notice of their absence, and spoke to them in her curious fragmentary way, plucking the words right out of the middle of her thoughts.
“Why, to think,” she said reflectively, “that he would go and move her! To think that any man could be so hard-hearted! Oh!” she shuddered with a brief convulsive pucker of revulsion. “It makes my blood run cold to think of it—and everybody told him so!—they told him so at the time—to think he would have no more mercy in him than to go and move her from the place where she lay buried!”
“Who was that, Mrs. Flood?” George said absently. “Move who?”
“Why, Amelia, of course—your mother, child!” she said impatiently, and gestured briefly towards the weather-rusted stone.
He bent forward and read again the familiar inscription:
Amelia Webber, née Joyner
and below her dates the carved verse:
Still is the voice we knew so well, Vanished the face we love, Flown her spirit pure to dwell With angels up above. Ours is the sorrow, ours the pain, And ours the joy alone To clasp her in our arms again In Heaven, by God’s throne.
“That’s the thing that started all this movin’!” Mrs. Flood was saying. “Nobody’d ever have thought of comin’ here if it hadn’t been for Amelia! And here,” she cried fretfully, “the woman had been dead and in her grave more than a year when he gets this notion in his head he’s got to move her—and you couldn’t reason with him! Why, your uncle, Mark Joyner—that’s who it was! You couldn’t argue with him!” she cried with vehement surprise. “Why, yes, of course! It was back there at the time they were havin’ all that trouble with your father, child. He’d left Amelia and gone to live with that other woman—but I will say this for him!” and she nodded her head with determination. “When Amelia died, John Webber did the decent thing and buried her himself—claimed her as his wife and buried her! He’d bought a plot in the old cemetery, and that’s where he put her. But then, more than a year afterwards—_you_ know, child—when Mark Joyner had that trouble with your father about who was to bring you up—yes, and took it to the courts and won!—why, that’s when it was that Mark took it in his head to move Amelia. Said he wouldn’t let a sister of his lie in Webber earth! He already had this plot, of course, way over here on this hill where nobody’d ever thought of goin’. It was just a little private buryin’ ground, then—a few families used it, that was all.”