The churchyard of Lupcombe joins the vicarage garden, and slopes
downhill to it. First comes the church on the top of the hill, with its
squat square tower, weather-beaten and sturdy; then the churchyard, the
God's acre, in which a large proportion of the graves bear the date of
the terrible fever year; then the parson's house and the doctor's; and
then the irregularly flagged village street which runs to the bottom of
the hill.
The parson stood by the grave of his first-born, one May afternoon.
At the time of the boy's birth the churchyard had been white with snow,
and comparatively empty of graves; and when the parson had gone to
church, people had grinned and bobbed to him on each side of the way,
and had asked after his "good lady". The "good lady" slept by her boy
now; and the two little daughters close by; and only the parson was
left, with a heart dry as the turned-up earth.
He read the service with a steady voice; in the presence of this mighty
visitation, who was he to complain?
"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the
Lord."
Barnabas Thorpe buried the boy; for the gravedigger was dead.
The preacher and the parson fulfilled almost every office under the sun;
a pitiless sun that beat down on the parson's uncovered head, which had
whitened during the last month.
He held out his hand to Barnabas across the grave, when their work was
finished.
"Thank you. My arms are old," he said. "If it hadn't been for you we
should have had to do as they did in the plague year. That's the fourth
to-day. Come in now, and eat and rest. Our dead can do without us, but
you'll want all your strength for the living." And Barnabas followed him
down the well-worn path to the garden gate.
In this strange "time of the Lord," no one even gossiped about the
strangeness of the coalition, though it had been well known before that
Mr. Bagshotte hated dissenters as he hated Whigs and liars.
The parson was short and spare, a clear-eyed, ruddy-complexioned English
gentleman, a bit of a scholar, and a judge of good wine, but neither
epicure nor bookworm. A healthy-minded man with a fund of common-sense,
who had never thought too much about things spiritual, but had preached
the same set of sermons year in and year out, and had christened,
churched, married and buried his parishioners very comfortably for the
last thirty years.
Now, in this storm of trouble, he had preached the same sermons still,
till no hearers were left; when he locked the church door, and put the
key in his pocket, observing merely that he had "enough to do in reading
the burial service; and the people were right--while God was speaking
there was no need of his comments".
Barnabas Thorpe preached on the green instead, when he had time. He
prayed by the dying, too, and, as we have seen, he buried the dead. Some
he saved alive. Indeed, the villagers put down every survival to his
agency; and he certainly was a tower of strength, both morally and
physically. Probably his influence really did prevent some deaths; for,
from the evening of his first sermon, the public houses emptied.
The disorganisation and terror which the parson could not cope with,
gave place to a religious "revival," which he also disapproved at first;
but he had come round to Barnabas now. The preacher might be uneducated
and fanatical, but he was risking his life gladly and hourly; and the
parson knew a brave man when he saw one, and knew, too, the value of the
example. So he and Barnabas Thorpe stood shoulder to shoulder, and
worked in the presence of death, unshrinkingly, and as a matter of
course; and when the parson's wife and children were struck down, the
parson showed what manner of man he was; and the preacher wondered
whether all the sleepy, easy-going clergymen he had rather despised had
the same depths of courage in them. He thought, also, of his own wife;
and reverenced his fellow-worker, as he had seldom reverenced any man
before.
The parson unlocked the iron gate that opened on his garden from the
churchyard; he paused a moment there and looked back.
"At this rate the churchyard will soon be fuller than the village," he
remarked. "There are more brown graves than green now. There is a larger
congregation there than I ever drew; but I never was much of a hand at
preaching."
The roses in the garden were straggling over the path; all the flowers
were suffering because the gardener was down. Mr. Bagshotte
instinctively felt for a knife with which to prune them; he had been
proud of his garden, and it had repaid him well; but he threw the roses
he cut off in a heap behind the shrubs--it was useless now to carry
them indoors. His wife, who had loved roses, needed his no more; though
it crossed the parson's mind that he could barely believe--as perhaps he
ought--that all the flowers of heaven (if they have flowers there) could
"make up" to her for the familiar roses _he_ had always brought--she had
been very fond of them, and him.
He fetched bread and meat for his guest with his own hands. The cook had
gone home, the old nurse was sobbing in the empty nursery, the housemaid
was dead.
Barnabas ate without much appetite; the strain was beginning to tell,
even on him. The desolate house oppressed him, and a grief he could not
assuage made him miserable.
Mr. Bagshotte stood with his back to the fireplace and looked at the
preacher thoughtfully: his scrutiny might have disturbed some men, but
Barnabas had not a grain of self-consciousness in him.
It was strange to reflect that this tremendous experience, which was the
one startling event of the old man's life, which had robbed him of all
the sweetness in it--he was too manly a man to say even to himself of
all that made it worth living--was probably only one of many experiences
to this younger brother, whose years, shorter than his own by thirty at
least, were yet probably ten times as full of incident.
"You must have seen some odd things," he remarked. "I suppose that when
we are through this, we shall pick up what remains of us, and steady
back into our ordinary jogtrot as best we can. But you will go away and
come in for fresh upheavals and what you call 'revivals' somewhere else,
and we shan't meet again."
"No," said the preacher. "Very like we shan't--till the day when
Christ's kingdom comes."
His blue eyes brightened at the thought of that time,--which thought,
indeed, was always more or less present with him.
"H'm," said the parson. "It has come to a good many poor souls this
week. I wonder----" It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "I wonder
what they make of it!" It was so difficult to imagine his stolid
L----shire parishioners translated into a purely spiritual atmosphere;
but the observation struck him as unclerical, and he bit it off short.
"Mind you, I don't like ranting, and never shall," he said. "But there's
no doubt men had better turn in their despair to God than to gin or
begging; and a time like this seems bound to bring out either the beast
or the angel in us." He paused, and took snuff emphatically.
"I hope _I_ should have stood to my guns," he resumed; "but all the
same, if it hadn't been for you, the beast would have got the best of it
in the village. Go on eating, man! You ought to eat at the rate you
work. I'd offer you beer, only I suppose you won't touch it. I heard you
stigmatising it as 'accursed poison' on the Green last week. You're
wrong, you know, quite wrong."
Mr. Bagshotte was usually a deliberate and placidly silent man, but
grief made him curiously restless and talkative.
Barnabas lifted his eyes from his plate and looked at his host, who had
just buried his son.
"If you'd felt that drink devil tearing inside you, you'd not care about
playing with him; nor about seeing others do it," he said. "But my
preaching isn't to you, nor such as you, sir. I've not felt called to
speak to them above me, except once." He stopped rather abruptly, and
got up.
"I've done, thank 'ee; an' there's some one coming up the garden. Ay,
it's Polly Taylor, an' she looks as if it was pressing."
He walked to the window; and the child, seeing him, poured out an urgent
message, interspersed with sobs.
Perhaps nothing could have more strongly set forth the general
topsy-turvyness than the fact of the revivalist preacher's receiving a
call through the rectory window, with the parson standing by
unsurprised.
"Her mother's took bad an' her brother's dead," said Barnabas;
"but"--with a moment's hesitation--"will ye no gi'e yourself an hour,
sir? I'll manage."
The old parson straightened himself, and took up his hat and stick.
"Not now," he said. "When the bullets have stopped flying, we'll count
our dead." So the two went into the village street together.
Barnabas Thorpe, with his weather-beaten face and long swinging stride;
Mr. Bagshotte, trotting along by his side in clerical hat and gaitered
legs--these two were the most familiar of sights now; brave men both,
who, whatever their differences, would never duck their heads under
fire, whether visible or invisible.
A starved dog, whose owner lay in the churchyard, crept after them
whining, and thrust his nose under the preacher's hand. Dogs always
followed Barnabas, who, from his childhood, had been bound by a
specially strong tie to the brute creation. Already he had been adopted
as master by four cats and two mongrel dogs, as he remembered with
rather rueful amusement.
"Go home!--I've no room for ye," he said; but, on the dog's explaining
that he had no home, that nobody had any room for him, and that he was
sick of being stoned, his legs having got so shaky that he hadn't energy
to get out of the way, Barnabas relented and picked him up. It was
absolutely impossible to the man to pass on on the other side in any
case, whether advisable or not, as his fellow-worker remarked. Mr.
Bagshotte's liking for Barnabas was, sometimes, touched by something
that would have been pity if the preacher had not been too strong a man
to feel sorry for.
"A bit of a fatalist (though he doesn't know it), a bit of a fanatic,
and a bit of a saint, with an inconveniently big heart," thought the
parson. "The man gives the saint some trouble, I fancy. I wonder what
his wife is like!"
* * * * *
Three weeks later the "bullets" began to slacken.
There was a paragraph in a London paper describing the terrible scourge
that had devastated the little northern village--reducing the population
to less than one half of its original number, and sweeping away whole
families at once. Mr. Bagshotte, the vicar, had lost his wife and three
children, the report said; and several of his contemporaries, who
remembered Bagshotte at the university, wondered whether this was the
same man they used to know, and, if so, why he had buried himself in the
country.
Mr. Bagshotte himself read the meagre account with rather a sad smile.
It would mean so remarkably little to the people who did not live in the
village; and the village had been his world for so long.
He had been essentially a domestic man, loving the routine of everyday
life, absolutely happy with his wife and children, whom he had
surrounded with little old-fashioned tender observances. He had lost
touch with the friends of his youth; though, his friendships being of
sturdy growth, he had prided himself on not forgetting them. He was
alone now, so far as companionship went; and, healthy-minded as he was,
he got to dread the emptiness of the rooms, and would cheat the
loneliness that awaited him by hurrying up the back way, avoiding the
drawing-room door, which used always to open at the sound of his
footstep.
Possibly he came to feel his losses more when the pressure of excitement
was over.
It would have been unworthy to pray for death. A man has no business to
whine for a speedy release because his duty has become irksome; but he
was conscious of some disappointment. He had believed, when he had
buried his son, that his own turn would come when the shots began to
"thin". He was willing to wait till then, indeed it would never have
done for his wife to have been left alone; but now, when the shops were
opening again, when the world was regaining its balance, and men,
meeting in the street, talked of weather and trade, and discovered that
the "Last Day" was, after all, not so very imminent, the old man was
conscious of a slightly surprised disappointment. "The king can do no
wrong," but he had hoped things might have been otherwise ordered.
He was just turning in at his own gate one Sunday morning; the usual
Sunday services had begun again, and he was considering how to fill up
the gaps in the church band, when some one called him by his Christian
name.
He turned, frowning slightly, and a good deal surprised; then his face
changed.
He knew the stranger at once; the twelve years that lay between this and
their last meeting seemed to come like a haze before his eyes. He rubbed
them vigorously, but he had no doubt as to who it was.
"Deane! Charles Deane!" he cried.
"I saw it in the paper, and I came at once. My dear old friend!" cried
the new-comer; and the two men grasped each other silently by the hand.
It is one of the advantages of riches that good impulses can be carried
out with comparative ease, while they are still hot.
Mr. Bagshotte threw open the gate with a jerk.
"Come in, come in. You are more than welcome," he said. "To think that
you should have come like this! It's--it's extraordinarily good of you,
Deane."
The old man was more touched than he would have cared to show. He had
admired his brilliant friend immensely in the olden days; but he had,
somehow, hardly expected that Charles Deane would have remembered him.
"I wish she could have welcomed you. We seldom had any visitors, and she
would have enjoyed it so," he said simply. "So you saw it in the paper
and came! I had fancied I was quite forgotten."
Mr. Deane put his hand for a moment on the parson's shoulder. "But one
doesn't forget one's oldest friends," he said; and the sympathy in his
musical voice was good to hear.
It certainly _was_ fortunate that he had come on the spur of the moment,
before anything had occurred to prevent him.
Mr. Bagshotte led the way into his study, with a brighter look on his
face than it had worn for a long time.
On opening the door, he found Barnabas Thorpe awaiting him.
"They told me that ye would be out o' church in a minute, so I just
waited for 'ee," the preacher began; then stopped short suddenly.
Who was this? this stranger who was yet not a stranger? Who was this who
had _stolen Margaret's eyes_?
Barnabas actually flinched; the likeness hurt him, combined, as it was,
with the utter scorn and distrust that those eyes expressed.
"You are my wife's father!" he cried abruptly, his thoughts treading on
each other's heels, and tumbling confusedly through his brain while he
spoke.
Mr. Deane had turned rather white. Like Meg, his colour went when he was
very angry. He flicked the dust off his boots with his riding whip; then
looked up with a fine smile.
"It is a little late to remember that she had a father," he said. "She
forgot that she was my child when she became your wife. The best that
can happen to her now is that she should continue to forget it--for
ever, if possible. I sincerely hope it may be possible--for her own
sake. No one will disturb your possession."
He turned away when he had spoken. He could not condescend to quarrel
with this man.
"God bless my soul!" cried the parson. "Mr. Deane's daughter your wife;
but--but----"
"But she was never born for the likes o' me, eh?" said the preacher. "Is
that what you'd say, parson? It's her own flesh an' blood she should ha'
clung to, when they miscalled her, an' cast her out? an' I should ha'
shrugged my shoulders an' walked away?" His heart was hot within him.
Mr. Deane's voice and face and manner, the strong indissoluble tie of
blood that made Meg his, even when he denied her, awoke the man's fierce
jealousy, and awoke also a certain sore despondency that he himself
hardly understood.
"An' so ye'll not disturb me?" he went on slowly. The two men's eyes met
for a second, and Barnabas Thorpe laughed rather grimly. "An' that's a
true word," he said. "I am no' o' your kind, thank God; but happen I
know one thing. I can take care o' the woman who is mine."