He heard a movement above him, and his father came hurriedly down the stairs. He looked dazed, and something glistened about his eyes like tears; but Comethup had never seen a man cry, and did not believe that they could, and therefore dismissed that suggestion as impossible.
"I--I had quite forgotten," said David Willis, glancing with a smile at the captain. "And the bell has stopped. I must hurry." He went past them at a run, and Comethup and the captain quickly followed.
Late though he was, he paused for a moment at the church door and looked away across the little graveyard to the mound which Comethup had seen him decorate so often with flowers from his dead wife's garden; then, remembering himself, he hurried into the church. The captain and Comethup crept in noiselessly by their own door and got into their places. They heard the first wheezy sounds of the organ above them, and then the first notes of the voluntary; then, even while the congregation were rising to their feet, the organ stopped abruptly, dying away on a long, thin note like a wail.
In the silence which followed--a silence in which he did not even seem to hear the sharp whispers of those about him, and in which the beating of his own heart was painfully loud and stifled--Comethup had time to feel with unerring instinct that something dreadful had happened. Moreover, the captain, who was looking up toward the organ-loft, had closed his hands on the boy's shoulder with a grip which hurt him. A moment later, while the people were still standing looking up in the same direction, the captain had pushed past Comethup, bidding him, in a stern whisper, to stay where he was, and was making his way toward the organ-loft. Some one near at hand--a woman--cried out suddenly, and there was a movement about her, and, before Comethup had quite realized all that had happened, another woman, young and pretty and with eyes that smiled at him through tears, had glided into the pew where the boy stood and had drawn him down on the seat, with his head against her breast. Then, dimly understanding that something was very wrong indeed, he clung to her, and let his tears have vent.
The next thing that he remembered was that the captain was in the pew behind, bending over and touching his head softly with one lean old hand; the woman was rocking him to and fro and murmuring to him, as though he had been in pain. And the people were all rustling out of church.