On the occasion of his sister’s death, Anthony informed his bereaved brother-in-law that he could not come down to follow the hearse as a mourner.  “My place is one of great trust;” he said, “and I cannot be spared.”  He offered, however, voluntarily to pay half the expenses of the funeral, stating the limit of the cost.  It is unfair to sound any man’s springs of action critically while he is being tried by a sorrow; and the farmer’s angry rejection of Anthony’s offer of aid must pass.  He remarked in his letter of reply, that his wife’s funeral should cost no less than he chose to expend on it.  He breathed indignant fumes against “interferences.”  He desired Anthony to know that he also was “not a beggar,” and that he would not be treated as one.  The letter showed a solid yeoman’s fist.  Farmer Fleming told his chums, and the shopkeeper of Wrexby, with whom he came into converse, that he would honour his dead wife up to his last penny.  Some month or so afterward it was generally conjectured that he had kept his word.

Anthony’s rejoinder was characterized by a marked humility.  He expressed contrition for the farmer’s misunderstanding of his motives.  His fathomless conscience had plainly been reached.  He wrote again, without waiting for an answer, speaking of the Funds indeed, but only to pronounce them worldly things, and hoping that they all might meet in heaven, where brotherly love, as well as money, was ready made, and not always in the next street.  A hint occurred that it would be a gratification to him to be invited down, whether he could come or no; for holidays were expensive, and journeys by rail had to be thought over before they were undertaken; and when you are away from your post, you never knew who maybe supplanting you.  He did not promise that he could come, but frankly stated his susceptibility to the friendliness of an invitation.  The feeling indulged by Farmer Fleming in refusing to notice Anthony’s advance toward a reconciliation, was, on the whole, not creditable to him.  Spite is more often fattened than propitiated by penitence.  He may have thought besides (policy not being always a vacant space in revengeful acts) that Anthony was capable of something stronger and warmer, now that his humanity had been aroused.  The speculation is commonly perilous; but Farmer Fleming had the desperation of a man who has run slightly into debt, and has heard the first din of dunning, which to the unaccustomed imagination is fearful as bankruptcy (shorn of the horror of the word).  And, moreover, it was so wonderful to find Anthony displaying humanity at all, that anything might be expected of him.  “Let’s see what he will do,” thought the farmer in an interval of his wrath; and the wrath is very new which has none of these cool intervals.  The passions, do but watch them, are all more or less intermittent.