We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the
brood of desire; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way
in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of
illusion. In writing the programme for his burial he certainly did not
make clear to himself that his pleasure in the little drama of which it
formed a part was confined to anticipation. In chuckling over the
vexations he could inflict by the rigid clutch of his dead hand, he
inevitably mingled his consciousness with that livid stagnant presence,
and so far as he was preoccupied with a future life, it was with one of
gratification inside his coffin. Thus old Featherstone was
imaginative, after his fashion.
However, the three mourning-coaches were filled according to the
written orders of the deceased. There were pall-bearers on horseback,
with the richest scarfs and hatbands, and even the under-bearers had
trappings of woe which were of a good well-priced quality. The black
procession, when dismounted, looked the larger for the smallness of the
churchyard; the heavy human faces and the black draperies shivering in
the wind seemed to tell of a world strangely incongruous with the
lightly dropping blossoms and the gleams of sunshine on the daisies.
The clergyman who met the procession was Mr. Cadwallader--also
according to the request of Peter Featherstone, prompted as usual by
peculiar reasons. Having a contempt for curates, whom he always called
understrappers, he was resolved to be buried by a beneficed clergyman.
Mr. Casaubon was out of the question, not merely because he declined
duty of this sort, but because Featherstone had an especial dislike to
him as the rector of his own parish, who had a lien on the land in the
shape of tithe, also as the deliverer of morning sermons, which the old
man, being in his pew and not at all sleepy, had been obliged to sit
through with an inward snarl. He had an objection to a parson stuck up
above his head preaching to him. But his relations with Mr.
Cadwallader had been of a different kind: the trout-stream which ran
through Mr. Casaubon's land took its course through Featherstone's
also, so that Mr. Cadwallader was a parson who had had to ask a favor
instead of preaching. Moreover, he was one of the high gentry living
four miles away from Lowick, and was thus exalted to an equal sky with
the sheriff of the county and other dignities vaguely regarded as
necessary to the system of things. There would be a satisfaction in
being buried by Mr. Cadwallader, whose very name offered a fine
opportunity for pronouncing wrongly if you liked.