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And regarding this delightful secret, not one syllable more was said by either of the young women. But it was destined to come out before long. Some short period after the above events, and Miss Rebecca Sharp still remaining at her patroness's house in Park Lane, one more hatchment might have been seen in Great Gaunt Street, figuring amongst the many which usually ornament that dismal quarter.
Shakespeare alludes to this custom when, in Hamlet, he makes Laertes say: His means of death, his obscure burial No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o'er his bones, No noble rite, nor formal ostentation. You can see the armour of the Black Prince over his tomb at Canterbury, and at Westminster the shield of Henry V that probably did its duty at Agincourt.
Brushing away the mould that clung to it, this proved to be a piece of plank some twenty-seven inches in length, carefully smoothed upon one side, and painted with what seemed an heraldic achievement, while the top was cut into something of the fashion of a crest consisting of three spikes or tines. "It is a hatchment over a noble's grave," cried Standish. "Say you not so, Master Winslow?
The arched hall was crowded on either side by her domestics, whose dresses formed a gloomy back-ground, which, nevertheless, accorded well with the hatchment that hung over the entrance, a memorial of Lady Cecil's recent death.
Within a week she had dried her eyes, washed out her handkerchiefs, made a hatchment of her little girl's frock with quarterings of crape, piled the few necessities of existence on a barrow and settled in a single room in the poorest street of the district. It was not much of a place, and it cost her half a crown a week, but in six months she had come to think of it as a home.
Here and there a Hatchment, with the whole science of Heraldry in it, loomed down upon the street, like an Archbishop discoursing on Vanity. The shops, few in number, made no show; for popular opinion was as nothing to them.
The houses on each side of the broad and quiet street were handsome, old-fashioned dwelling-places, not one of which had as yet been turned into a shop. The most eminent lawyers and doctors lived in it; and there was more than one frontage which displayed a hatchment, left to grow faded and discolored long after the year of mourning was ended.
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