"Why, Trumbull himself is pretty sure of five hundred--_that_ you may
depend,--I shouldn't wonder if my brother promised him," said Solomon,
musing aloud with his sisters, the evening before the funeral.
"Dear, dear!" said poor sister Martha, whose imagination of hundreds
had been habitually narrowed to the amount of her unpaid rent.
But in the morning all the ordinary currents of conjecture were
disturbed by the presence of a strange mourner who had plashed among
them as if from the moon. This was the stranger described by Mrs.
Cadwallader as frog-faced: a man perhaps about two or three and thirty,
whose prominent eyes, thin-lipped, downward-curved mouth, and hair
sleekly brushed away from a forehead that sank suddenly above the ridge
of the eyebrows, certainly gave his face a batrachian unchangeableness
of expression. Here, clearly, was a new legatee; else why was he
bidden as a mourner? Here were new possibilities, raising a new
uncertainty, which almost checked remark in the mourning-coaches. We
are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed
very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we
have been making up our world entirely without it. No one had seen
this questionable stranger before except Mary Garth, and she knew
nothing more of him than that he had twice been to Stone Court when Mr.
Featherstone was down-stairs, and had sat alone with him for several
hours. She had found an opportunity of mentioning this to her father,
and perhaps Caleb's were the only eyes, except the lawyer's, which
examined the stranger with more of inquiry than of disgust or
suspicion. Caleb Garth, having little expectation and less cupidity,
was interested in the verification of his own guesses, and the calmness
with which he half smilingly rubbed his chin and shot intelligent
glances much as if he were valuing a tree, made a fine contrast with
the alarm or scorn visible in other faces when the unknown mourner,
whose name was understood to be Rigg, entered the wainscoted parlor and
took his seat near the door to make part of the audience when the will
should be read. Just then Mr. Solomon and Mr. Jonah were gone
up-stairs with the lawyer to search for the will; and Mrs. Waule,
seeing two vacant seats between herself and Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, had
the spirit to move next to that great authority, who was handling his
watch-seals and trimming his outlines with a determination not to show
anything so compromising to a man of ability as wonder or surprise.
"I suppose you know everything about what my poor brother's done, Mr.
Trumbull," said Mrs. Waule, in the lowest of her woolly tones, while
she turned her crape-shadowed bonnet towards Mr. Trumbull's ear.