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CHAPTER 54
The bachelor, among his various occupations, found in the old church a constant source
of interest and amusement. Taking that pride in it which men conceive for the wonders of
their own little world, he had made its history his study; and many a summer day within its
walls, and many a winter's night beside the parsonage fire, had found the bachelor still
poring over, and adding to, his goodly store of tale and legend.
As he was not one of those rough spirits who would strip fair Truth of every little shadowy
vestment in which time and teeming fancies love to array heróand some of which become
her pleasantly enough, serving, like the waters of her well, to add new graces to the charms
they half conceal and half suggest, and to awaken interest and pursuit rather than languor
and indifferenceóas, unlike this stern and obdurate class, he loved to see the goddess
crowned with those garlands of wild flowers which tradition wreathes for her gentle wearing,
and which are often freshest in their homeliest shapesóhe trod with a light step and bore
with a light hand upon the dust of centuries, unwilling to demolish any of the airy shrines
that had been raised above it, if any good feeling or affection of the human heart were
hiding thereabouts. Thus, in the case of an ancient coffin of rough stone, supposed, for
many generations, to contain the bones of a certain baron, who, after ravaging, with
cut, and thrust, and plunder, in foreign lands, came back with a penitent and sorrowing heart
to die at home, but which had been lately shown by learned antiquaries to be no such
thing, as the baron in question (so they contended) had died hard in battle, gnashing his teeth
and cursing with his latest breathóthe bachelor stoutly maintained that the old tale was the
true one; that the baron, repenting him of the evil, had done great charities and meekly
given up the ghost; and that, if ever baron went to heaven, that baron was then at peace.
In like manner, when the aforesaid antiquaries did argue and contend that a certain secret
vault was not the tomb of a grey-haired lady who had been hanged and drawn and quartered
by glorious Queen Bess for succouring a wretched priest who fainted of thirst and hunger at
her door, the bachelor did solemnly maintain, against all comers, that the church was hallowed
by the said poor lady's ashes; that her remains had been collected in the night from four
of the city's gates, and thither in secret brought, and there deposited; and the bachelor
did further (being highly excited at such times) deny the glory of Queen Bess, and assert
the immeasurably greater glory of the meanest woman in her realm, who had a merciful and
tender heart. As to the assertion that the flat stone near the door was not the grave
of the miser who had disowned his only child and left a sum of money to the church to buy
a peal of bells, the bachelor did readily admit the same, and that the place had given
birth to no such man. In a word, he would have had every stone, and plate of brass,
the monument only of deeds whose memory should survive. All others he was willing to forget.
They might be buried in consecrated ground, but he would have had them buried deep, and
never brought to light again.
It was from the lips of such a tutor, that the child learnt her easy task. Already impressed,
beyond all telling, by the silent building and the peaceful beauty of the spot in which
it stoodómajestic age surrounded by perpetual youthóit seemed to her, when she heard these
things, sacred to all goodness and virtue. It was another world, where sin and sorrow
never came; a tranquil place of rest, where nothing evil entered.
When the bachelor had given her in connection with almost every tomb and flat grave-stone
some history of its own, he took her down into the old crypt, now a mere dull vault,
and showed her how it had been lighted up in the time of the monks, and how, amid lamps
depending from the roof, and swinging censers exhaling scented odours, and habits glittering
with gold and silver, and pictures, and precious stuffs, and jewels all flashing and glistening
through the low arches, the chaunt of aged voices had been many a time heard there, at
midnight, in old days, while hooded figures knelt and prayed around, and told their rosaries
of beads. Thence, he took her above ground again, and showed her, high up in the old
walls, small galleries, where the nuns had been wont to glide alongódimly seen in their
dark dresses so far offóor to pause like gloomy shadows, listening to the prayers.
He showed her too, how the warriors, whose figures rested on the tombs, had worn those
rotting scraps of armour up aboveóhow this had been a helmet, and that a shield, and
that a gauntletóand how they had wielded the great two-handed swords, and beaten men
down, with yonder iron mace. All that he told the child she treasured in her mind; and sometimes,
when she awoke at night from dreams of those old times, and rising from her bed looked
out at the dark church, she almost hoped to see the windows lighted up, and hear the organ's
swell, and sound of voices, on the rushing wind.
The old sexton soon got better, and was about again. From him the child learnt many other
things, though of a different kind. He was not able to work, but one day there was a
grave to be made, and he came to overlook the man who dug it. He was in a talkative
mood; and the child, at first standing by his side, and afterwards sitting on the grass
at his feet, with her thoughtful face raised towards his, began to converse with him.
Now, the man who did the sexton's duty was a little older than he, though much more active.
But he was deaf; and when the sexton (who peradventure, on a pinch, might have walked
a mile with great difficulty in half-a-dozen hours) exchanged a remark with him about his
work, the child could not help noticing that he did so with an impatient kind of pity for
his infirmity, as if he were himself the strongest and heartiest man alive.
'I'm sorry to see there is this to do,' said the child when she approached. 'I heard of
no one having died.'
'She lived in another hamlet, my dear,' returned the sexton. 'Three mile away.'
'Was she young?'
'Ye-yes' said the sexton; not more than sixty-four, I think. David, was she more than sixty-four?'
David, who was digging hard, heard nothing of the question. The sexton, as he could not
reach to touch him with his crutch, and was too infirm to rise without assistance, called
his attention by throwing a little mould upon his red nightcap.
'What's the matter now?' said David, looking up.
'How old was Becky Morgan?' asked the sexton.
'Becky Morgan?' repeated David.
'Yes,' replied the sexton; adding in a half compassionate, half irritable tone, which
the old man couldn't hear, 'you're getting very deaf, Davy, very deaf to be sure!'
The old man stopped in his work, and cleansing his spade with a piece of slate he had by
him for the purposeóand scraping off, in the process, the essence of Heaven knows how
many Becky Morgansóset himself to consider the subject.
'Let me think' quoth he. 'I saw last night what they had put upon the coffinówas it
seventy-nine?'
'No, no,' said the sexton.
'Ah yes, it was though,' returned the old man with a sigh. 'For I remember thinking
she was very near our age. Yes, it was seventy-nine.'
'Are you sure you didn't mistake a figure, Davy?' asked the sexton, with signs of some
emotion.
'What?' said the old man. 'Say that again.'
'He's very deaf. He's very deaf indeed,' cried the sexton petulantly; 'are you sure you're
right about the figures?'
'Oh quite,' replied the old man. 'Why not?'
'He's exceedingly deaf,' muttered the sexton to himself. 'I think he's getting foolish.'
The child rather wondered what had led him to this belief, as, to say the truth, the
old man seemed quite as sharp as he, and was infinitely more robust. As the sexton said
nothing more just then, however, she forgot it for the time, and spoke again.
'You were telling me,' she said, 'about your gardening. Do you ever plant things here?'
'In the churchyard?' returned the sexton, 'Not I.'
'I have seen some flowers and little shrubs about,' the child rejoined; 'there are some
over there, you see. I thought they were of your rearing, though indeed they grow but
poorly.'
'They grow as Heaven wills,' said the old man; 'and it kindly ordains that they shall
never flourish here.'
'I do not understand you.'
'Why, this it is,' said the sexton. 'They mark the graves of those who had very tender,
loving friends.'
'I was sure they did!' the child exclaimed. 'I am very glad to know they do!'
'Aye,' returned the old man, 'but stay. Look at them. See how they hang their heads, and
droop, and wither. Do you guess the reason?'
'No,' the child replied.
'Because the memory of those who lie below, passes away so soon. At first they tend them,
morning, noon, and night; they soon begin to come less frequently; from once a day,
to once a week; from once a week to once a month; then, at long and uncertain intervals;
then, not at all. Such tokens seldom flourish long. I have known the briefest summer flowers
outlive them.'
'I grieve to hear it,' said the child.
'Ah! so say the gentlefolks who come down here to look about them,' returned the old
man, shaking his head, 'but I say otherwise. "It's a pretty custom you have in this part
of the country," they say to me sometimes, "to plant the graves, but it's melancholy
to see these things all withering or dead." I crave their pardon and tell them that, as
I take it, 'tis a good sign for the happiness of the living. And so it is. It's nature.'
'Perhaps the mourners learn to look to the blue sky by day, and to the stars by night,
and to think that the dead are there, and not in graves,' said the child in an earnest
voice.
'Perhaps so,' replied the old man doubtfully. 'It may be.'
'Whether it be as I believe it is, or no,' thought the child within herself, 'I'll make
this place my garden. It will be no harm at least to work here day by day, and pleasant
thoughts will come of it, I am sure.'
Her glowing cheek and moistened eye passed unnoticed by the sexton, who turned towards
old David, and called him by his name. It was plain that Becky Morgan's age still troubled
him; though why, the child could scarcely understand.
The second or third repetition of his name attracted the old man's attention. Pausing
from his work, he leant on his spade, and put his hand to his dull ear.
'Did you call?' he said.
'I have been thinking, Davy,' replied the sexton, 'that she,' he pointed to the grave,
'must have been a deal older than you or me.'
'Seventy-nine,' answered the old man with a shake of the head, 'I tell you that I saw
it.'
'Saw it?' replied the sexton; 'aye, but, Davy, women don't always tell the truth about their
age.'
'That's true indeed,' said the other old man, with a sudden sparkle in his eye. 'She might
have been older.'
'I'm sure she must have been. Why, only think how old she looked. You and I seemed but boys
to her.'
'She did look old,' rejoined David. 'You're right. She did look old.'
'Call to mind how old she looked for many a long, long year, and say if she could be
but seventy-nine at lastóonly our age,' said the sexton.
'Five year older at the very least!' cried the other.
'Five!' retorted the sexton. 'Ten. Good eighty-nine. I call to mind the time her daughter died.
She was eighty-nine if she was a day, and tries to pass upon us now, for ten year younger.
Oh! human vanity!'
The other old man was not behindhand with some moral reflections on this fruitful theme,
and both adduced a mass of evidence, of such weight as to render it doubtfulónot whether
the deceased was of the age suggested, but whether she had not almost reached the patriarchal
term of a hundred. When they had settled this question to their mutual satisfaction, the
sexton, with his friend's assistance, rose to go.
'It's chilly, sitting here, and I must be carefulótill the summer,' he said, as he
prepared to limp away.
'What?' asked old David.
'He's very deaf, poor fellow!' cried the sexton. 'Good-bye!' 'Ah!' said old David, looking
after him. 'He's failing very fast. He ages every day.'
And so they parted; each persuaded that the other had less life in him than himself; and
both greatly consoled and comforted by the little fiction they had agreed upon, respecting
Becky Morgan, whose decease was no longer a precedent of uncomfortable application,
and would be no business of theirs for half a score of years to come.
The child remained, for some minutes, watching the deaf old man as he threw out the earth
with his shovel, and, often stopping to cough and fetch his breath, still muttered to himself,
with a kind of sober chuckle, that the sexton was wearing fast. At length she turned away,
and walking thoughtfully through the churchyard, came unexpectedly upon the schoolmaster, who
was sitting on a green grave in the sun, reading.
'Nell here?' he said cheerfully, as he closed his book. 'It does me good to see you in the
air and light. I feared you were again in the church, where you so often are.'
'Feared!' replied the child, sitting down beside him. 'Is it not a good place?'
'Yes, yes,' said the schoolmaster. 'But you must be gay sometimesónay, don't shake your
head and smile so sadly.'
'Not sadly, if you knew my heart. Do not look at me as if you thought me sorrowful. There
is not a happier creature on earth, than I am now.'
Full of grateful tenderness, the child took his hand, and folded it between her own. 'It's
God's will!' she said, when they had been silent for some time.
'What?'
'All this,' she rejoined; 'all this about us. But which of us is sad now? You see that
I am smiling.'
'And so am I,' said the schoolmaster; 'smiling to think how often we shall laugh in this
same place. Were you not talking yonder?'
'Yes,'the child rejoined.
'Of something that has made you sorrowful?'
There was a long pause.
'What was it?' said the schoolmaster, tenderly. 'Come. Tell me what it was.'
'I rather grieveóI do rather grieve to think,' said the child, bursting into tears, 'that
those who die about us, are so soon forgotten.'
'And do you think,' said the schoolmaster, marking the glance she had thrown around,
'that an unvisited grave, a withered tree, a faded flower or two, are tokens of forgetfulness
or cold neglect? Do you think there are no deeds, far away from here, in which these
dead may be best remembered? Nell, Nell, there may be people busy in the world, at this instant,
in whose good actions and good thoughts these very gravesóneglected as they look to usóare
the chief instruments.'
'Tell me no more,' said the child quickly. 'Tell me no more. I feel, I know it. How could
I be unmindful of it, when I thought of you?'
'There is nothing,' cried her friend, 'no, nothing innocent or good, that dies, and is
forgotten. Let us hold to that faith, or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in its
cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those who loved it, and will play its part,
through them, in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes
or drowned in the deepest sea. There is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does
its blessed work on earth in those that loved it here. Forgotten! oh, if the good deeds
of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear;
for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection, would be seen to have their growth
in dusty graves!'
'Yes,' said the child, 'it is the truth; I know it is. Who should feel its force so much
as I, in whom your little scholar lives again! Dear, dear, good friend, if you knew the comfort
you have given me!'
The poor schoolmaster made her no answer, but bent over her in silence; for his heart
was full.
They were yet seated in the same place, when the grandfather approached. Before they had
spoken many words together, the church clock struck the hour of school, and their friend
withdrew.
'A good man,' said the grandfather, looking after him; 'a kind man. Surely he will never
harm us, Nell. We are safe here, at last, eh? We will never go away from here?'
The child shook her head and smiled.
'She needs rest,' said the old man, patting her cheek; 'too paleótoo pale. She is not
like what she was.'
When?' asked the child.
'Ha!' said the old man, 'to be sureówhen? How many weeks ago? Could I count them on
my fingers? Let them rest though; they're better gone.' 'Much better, dear,' replied
the child. 'We will forget them; or, if we ever call them to mind, it shall be only as
some uneasy dream that has passed away.'
'Hush!' said the old man, motioning hastily to her with his hand and looking over his
shoulder; 'no more talk of the dream, and all the miseries it brought. There are no
dreams here. 'Tis a quiet place, and they keep away. Let us never think about them,
lest they should pursue us again. Sunken eyes and hollow cheeksówet, cold, and famineóand
horrors before them all, that were even worseówe must forget such things if we would be tranquil
here.'
'Thank Heaven!' inwardly exclaimed the child, 'for this most happy change!'
'I will be patient,' said the old man, 'humble, very thankful, and obedient, if you will let
me stay. But do not hide from me; do not steal away alone; let me keep beside you. Indeed,
I will be very true and faithful, Nell.'
'I steal away alone! why that,' replied the child, with assumed gaiety, 'would be a pleasant
jest indeed. See here, dear grandfather, we'll make this place our gardenówhy not! It is
a very good oneóand to-morrow we'll begin, and work together, side by side.'
'It is a brave thought!' cried her grandfather. 'Mind, darlingówe begin to-morrow!'
Who so delighted as the old man, when they next day began their labour! Who so unconscious
of all associations connected with the spot, as he! They plucked the long grass and nettles
from the tombs, thinned the poor shrubs and roots, made the turf smooth, and cleared it
of the leaves and weeds. They were yet in the ardour of their work, when the child,
raising her head from the ground over which she bent, observed that the bachelor was sitting
on the stile close by, watching them in silence.
'A kind office,' said the little gentleman, nodding to Nell as she curtseyed to him. 'Have
you done all that, this morning?'
'It is very little, sir,' returned the child, with downcast eyes, 'to what we mean to do.'
'Good work, good work,' said the bachelor. 'But do you only labour at the graves of children,
and young people?'
'We shall come to the others in good time, sir,' replied Nell, turning her head aside,
and speaking softly.
It was a slight incident, and might have been design or accident, or the child's unconscious
sympathy with youth. But it seemed to strike upon her grandfather, though he had not noticed
it before. He looked in a hurried manner at the graves, then anxiously at the child, then
pressed her to his side, and bade her stop to rest. Something he had long forgotten,
appeared to struggle faintly in his mind. It did not pass away, as weightier things
had done; but came uppermost again, and yet again, and many times that day, and often
afterwards. Once, while they were yet at work, the child, seeing that he often turned and
looked uneasily at her, as though he were trying to resolve some painful doubts or collect
some scattered thoughts, urged him to tell the reason. But he said it was nothingónothingóand,
laying her head upon his arm, patted her fair cheek with his hand, and muttered that she
grew stronger every day, and would be a woman, soon.