Chapter 10

The remains of Henrietta Trefusis were interred in Highgate
Cemetery the day before Christmas Eve. Three noblemen sent their
carriages to the funeral, and the friends and clients of Mr.
Jansenius, to a large number, attended in person. The bier was
covered with a profusion of costly Bowers. The undertaker,
instructed to spare no expense, provided long-tailed black
horses, with black palls on their backs and black plumes upon
their foreheads; coachmen decorated with scarves and jack-boots,
black hammercloths, cloaks, and gloves, with many hired mourners,
who, however, would have been instantly discharged had they
presumed to betray emotion, or in any way overstep their function
of walking beside the hearse with brass-tipped batons in their
hands.

Among the genuine mourners were Mr. Jansenius, who burst into
tears at the ceremony of casting earth on the coffin; the boy
Arthur, who, preoccupied by the novelty of appearing in a long
cloak at the head of a public procession, felt that he was not so
sorry as he ought to be when he saw his papa cry; and a cousin
who had once asked Henrietta to marry him, and who now, full of
tragic reflections, was enjoying his despair intensely.

The rest whispered, whenever they could decently do so, about a
strange omission in the arrangements. The husband of the deceased
was absent. Members of the family and intimate friends were told
by Daniel Jansenius that the widower had acted in a blackguard
way, and that the Janseniuses did not care two-pence whether he
came or stayed at home; that, but for the indecency of the thing,
they were just as glad that he was keeping away. Others, who had
no claim to be privately informed, made inquiries of the
undertaker's foreman, who said he understood the gentleman
objected to large funerals. Asked why, he said he supposed it was
on the ground of expense. This being met by a remark that Mr.
Trefusis was very wealthy, he added that he had been told so, but
believed the money had not come from the lady; that people seldom
cared to go to a great expense for a funeral unless they came
into something good by the death; and that some parties the more
they had the more they grudged. Before the funeral guests
dispersed, the report spread by Mr. Jansenius's brother had got
mixed with the views of the foreman, and had given rise to a
story of Trefusis expressing joy at his wife's death with
frightful oaths in her father's house whilst she lay dead there,
and refusing to pay a farthing of her debts or funeral expenses.

Some days later, when gossip on the subject was subsiding, a
fresh scandal revived it. A literary friend of Mr. Jansenius's
helped him to compose an epitaph, and added to it a couple of
pretty and