met his death by being thrown from his half-broken mustang, and dragged
at its heels, and medical opinion, hastily summoned from Santa Inez
after the body had been borne to the corral, and stripped of its
hideous encasings, declared that the neck had been broken, and death had
followed instantaneously. An inquest was deemed unnecessary.
Clarence had selected Mary to break the news to Mrs. Peyton, and the
frightened young girl was too much struck with the change still visible
in his face, and the half authority of his manner, to decline, or even
to fully appreciate the calamity that had befallen them. After the first
benumbing shock, Mrs. Peyton passed into that strange exaltation of
excitement brought on by the immediate necessity for action, followed by
a pallid calm, which the average spectator too often unfairly accepts as
incongruous, inadequate, or artificial. There had also occurred one
of those strange compensations that wait on Death or disrupture by
catastrophe: such as the rude shaking down of an unsettled life, the
forcible realization of what were vague speculations, the breaking of
old habits and traditions, and the unloosing of half-conscious bonds.
Mrs. Peyton, without insensibility to her loss or disloyalty to her
affections, nevertheless felt a relief to know that she was now really
Susy's guardian, free to order her new life wherever and under what
conditions she chose as most favorable to it, and that she could dispose
of this house that was wearying to her when Susy was away, and which
the girl herself had always found insupportable. She could settle this
question of Clarence's relations to her daughter out of hand without
advice or opposition. She had a brother in the East, who would be
summoned to take care of the property. This consideration for the living
pursued her, even while the dead man's presence still awed the hushed
house; it was in her thoughts as she stood beside his bier and adjusted
the flowers on his breast, which no longer moved for or against these
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