The boy was in his best clothes; but Constance's garments gave no sign of the Sabbath.
She wore a large apron over an old dress that was rather tight for her.
She was pale and looked ill.
"Oh, mother!" Cyril exclaimed suddenly.
"Listen!
I'm sure I can hear the band."
She checked him with a soundless movement of her lips; and they both glanced anxiously at the silent bed, Cyril with a gesture of apology for having forgotten that he must make no noise.
The strains of the band came from down King Street, in the direction of St. Luke's Church.
The music appeared to linger a long time in the distance, and then it approached, growing louder, and the Bursley Town Silver Prize Band passed under the window at the solemn pace of Handel's
"Dead March."
The effect of that requiem, heavy with its own inherent beauty and with the vast weight of harrowing tradition, was to wring the tears from Constance's eyes; they fell on her aproned bosom, and she sank into a chair.
And though, the cheeks of the trumpeters were puffed out, and though the drummer had to protrude his stomach and arch his spine backwards lest he should tumble over his drum, there was majesty in the passage of the band.
The boom of the drum, desolating the interruptions of the melody, made sick the heart, but with a lofty grief; and the dirge seemed to be weaving a purple pall that covered every meanness.
The bandsmen were not all in black, but they all wore crape on their sleeves and their instruments were knotted with crape.
They carried in their hats a black-edged card.
Cyril held one of these cards in his hands.
It ran thus:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF DANIEL POVEY A TOWN COUNCILLOR OF THIS TOWN JUDICIALLY MURDERED AT 8 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING 8TH FEBRUARY 1888 "HE WAS MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING."
In the wake of the band came the aged Rector, bare-headed, and wearing a surplice over his overcoat; his thin white hair was disarranged by the breeze that played in the chilly sunshine; his hands were folded on a gilt-edged book.
A curate, churchwardens, and sidesmen followed.
And after these, tramping through the dark mud in a procession that had apparently no end, wound the unofficial male multitude, nearly all in mourning, and all, save the more aristocratic, carrying the memorial card in their hats.
Loafers, women, and children had collected on the drying pavements, and a window just opposite Constance was ornamented with the entire family of the landlord of the Sun Vaults.
In the great bar of the Vaults a barman was craning over the pitchpine screen that secured privacy to drinkers.
The procession continued without break, eternally rising over the verge of King Street 'bank,' and eternally vanishing round the corner into St. Luke's Square; at intervals it was punctuated by a clergyman, a Nonconformist minister, a town crier, a group of foremen, or a few Rifle Volunteers.
The watching crowd grew as the procession lengthened.
Then another band was heard, also playing the march from Saul.
The first band had now reached the top of the Square, and was scarcely audible from King Street.
The reiterated glitter in the sun of memorial cards in hats gave the fanciful illusion of an impossible whitish snake that was straggling across the town.
Three-quarters of an hour elapsed before the tail of the snake came into view, and a rabble of unkempt boys closed in upon it, filling the street,
"I shall go to the drawing-room window, mother," said Cyril.
She nodded. He crept out of the bedroom.
St. Luke's Square was a sea of hats and memorial cards.
Most of the occupiers of the Square had hung out flags at half-mast, and a flag at half-mast was flying over the Town Hall in the distance.
Sightseers were at every window.
The two bands had united at the top of the Square; and behind them, on a North Staffordshire Railway lorry, stood the white-clad Rector and several black figures.
The Rector was speaking; but only those close to the lorry could hear his feeble treble voice.
Such was the massive protest of Bursley against what Bursley regarded as a callous injustice.
The execution of Daniel Povey had most genuinely excited the indignation of the town.
That execution was not only an injustice; it was an insult, a humiliating snub.
And the worst was that the rest of the country had really discovered no sympathetic interest in the affair.
Certain London papers, indeed, in commenting casually on the execution, had slurred the morals and manners of the Five Towns, professing to regard the district as notoriously beyond the realm of the Ten Commandments.
This had helped to render furious the townsmen. This, as much as anything, had encouraged the spontaneous outburst of feeling which had culminated in a St. Luke's Square full of people with memorial cards in their hats.
The demonstration had scarcely been organized; it had somehow organized itself, employing the places of worship and a few clubs as centres of gathering.
And it proved an immense success.
There were seven or eight thousand people in the Square, and the pity was that England as a whole could not have had a glimpse of the spectacle.
Since the execution of the elephant, nothing had so profoundly agitated Bursley.
Constance, who left the bedroom momentarily for the drawing-room, reflected that the death and burial of Cyril's honoured grandfather, though a resounding event, had not caused one-tenth of the stir which she beheld.
But then John Baines had killed nobody.
The Rector spoke too long; every one felt that.
But at length he finished.