As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular, dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs. Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply:  “Come, come, mother; you mustn’t go on like this!” Her tone changed to one of obsequious solemnity as she turned to the banker:  “The parlour is ready, Mr. Phelps.”

The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests.  They bore it into a large, unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish, and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass prisms and before a “Rogers group” of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed with smilax.  Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening conviction that there had been a mistake, and that he had somehow arrived at the wrong destination.  He looked at the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the hand-painted china placques and panels and vases, for some mark of identification,—­for something that might once conceivably have belonged to Harvey Merrick.  It was not until he recognized his friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls, hanging above the piano, that he felt willing to let any of these people approach the coffin.

“Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy’s face,” wailed the elder woman between her sobs.  This time Steavens looked fearfully, almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses of strong, black, shiny hair.  He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost incredulously, looked again.  There was a kind of power about her face—­a kind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it was scarred and furrowed by violence, and so coloured and coarsened by fiercer passions that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there.  The long nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, her teeth were large and square, and set far apart—­teeth that could tear.  She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool.

The daughter—­the tall, raw-boned woman in crepe, with a mourning comb in her hair which curiously lengthened her long face—­sat stiffly upon the sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of the coffin.  Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the house, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and gentle.  She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob.  Steavens walked over and stood beside her.

Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail, odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept grey hair and a dingy beard, tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly.  He went slowly up to the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife’s orgy of grief that he had no consciousness of anything else.