CHAPTER IV.
The churchyard of Lupcombe joins the vicarage garden, and slopesdownhill to it. First comes the church on the top of the hill, with itssquat square tower, weather-beaten and sturdy; then the churchyard, theGod's acre, in which a large proportion of the graves bear the date ofthe terrible fever year; then the parson's house and the doctor's; andthen the irregularly flagged village street which runs to the bottom ofthe 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 tochurch, 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 boynow; and the two little daughters close by; and only the parson wasleft, with a heart dry as the turned-up earth.
He read the service with a steady voice; in the presence of this mightyvisitation, who was he to complain?
"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of theLord."
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 hadwhitened during the last month.
He held out his hand to Barnabas across the grave, when their work wasfinished.
"Thank you. My arms are old," he said. "If it hadn't been for you weshould have had to do as they did in the plague year. That's the fourthto-day. Come in now, and eat and rest. Our dead can do without us, butyou'll want all your strength for the living." And Barnabas followed himdown the well-worn path to the garden gate.
In this strange "time of the Lord," no one even gossiped about thestrangeness of the coalition, though it had been well known before thatMr. Bagshotte hated dissenters as he hated Whigs and liars.
The parson was short and spare, a clear-eyed, ruddy-complexioned Englishgentleman, a bit of a scholar, and a judge of good wine, but neitherepicure nor bookworm. A healthy-minded man with a fund of common-sense,who had never thought too much about things spiritual, but had preachedthe same set of sermons year in and year out, and had christened,churched, married and buried his parishioners very comfortably for thelast 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 thekey in his pocket, observing merely that he had "enough to do in readingthe burial service; and the people were right--while God was speakingthere was no need of his comments".
Barnabas Thorpe preached on the green instead, when he had time. Heprayed by the dying, too, and, as we have seen, he buried the dead. Somehe saved alive. Indeed, the villagers put down every survival to hisagency; and he certainly was a tower of strength, both morally andphysically. 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 uneducatedand fanatical, but he was risking his life gladly and hourly; and theparson knew a brave man when he saw one, and knew, too, the value of theexample. So he and Barnabas Thorpe stood shoulder to shoulder, andworked in the presence of death, unshrinkingly, and as a matter ofcourse; and when the parson's wife and children were struck down, theparson showed what manner of man he was; and the preacher wonderedwhether all the sleepy, easy-going clergymen he had rather despised hadthe same depths of courage in them. He thought, also, of his own wife;and reverenced his fellow-worker, as he had seldom reverenced any manbefore.
The parson unlocked the iron gate that opened on his garden from thechurchyard; he paused a moment there and looked back.
"At this rate the churchyard will soon be fuller than the village," heremarked. "There are more brown graves than green now. There is a largercongregation there than I ever drew; but I never was much of a hand atpreaching."
The roses in the garden were straggling over the path; all the flowerswere suffering because the gardener was down. Mr. Bagshotteinstinctively felt for a knife with which to prune them; he had beenproud of his garden, and it had repaid him well; but he threw the roseshe cut off in a heap behind the shrubs--it was useless now to carrythem indoors. His wife, who had loved roses, needed his no more; thoughit crossed the parson's mind that he could barely believe--as perhaps heought--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 hadbeen very fond of them, and him.
He fetched bread and meat for his guest with his own hands. The cook hadgone home, the old nurse was sobbing in the empty nursery, the housemaidwas 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 notassuage made him miserable.
Mr. Bagshotte stood with his back to the fireplace and looked at thepreacher thoughtfully: his scrutiny might have disturbed some men, butBarnabas had not a grain of self-consciousness in him.
It was strange to reflect that this tremendous experience, which was theone startling event of the old man's life, which had robbed him of allthe sweetness in it--he was too manly a man to say even to himself ofall that made it worth living--was probably only one of many experiencesto this younger brother, whose years, shorter than his own by thirty atleast, were yet probably ten times as full of incident.
"You must have seen some odd things," he remarked. "I suppose that whenwe are through this, we shall pick up what remains of us, and steadyback into our ordinary jogtrot as best we can. But you will go away andcome 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 whenChrist'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 thisweek. I wonder----" It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "I wonderwhat they make of it!" It was so difficult to imagine his stolidL----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'sno doubt men had better turn in their despair to God than to gin orbegging; and a time like this seems bound to bring out either the beastor the angel in us." He paused, and took snuff emphatically.
"I hope _I_ should have stood to my guns," he resumed; "but all thesame, if it hadn't been for you, the beast would have got the best of itin the village. Go on eating, man! You ought to eat at the rate youwork. I'd offer you beer, only I suppose you won't touch it. I heard youstigmatising it as 'accursed poison' on the Green last week. You'rewrong, you know, quite wrong."
Mr. Bagshotte was usually a deliberate and placidly silent man, butgrief made him curiously restless and talkative.
Barnabas lifted his eyes from his plate and looked at his host, who hadjust buried his son.
"If you'd felt that drink devil tearing inside you, you'd not care aboutplaying with him; nor about seeing others do it," he said. "But mypreaching isn't to you, nor such as you, sir. I've not felt called tospeak to them above me, except once." He stopped rather abruptly, andgot 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 urgentmessage, interspersed with sobs.
Perhaps nothing could have more strongly set forth the generaltopsy-turvyness than the fact of the revivalist preacher's receiving acall through the rectory window, with the parson standing byunsurprised.
"Her mother's took bad an' her brother's dead," said Ba
rnabas;"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 countour 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 gaiteredlegs--these two were the most familiar of sights now; brave men both,who, whatever their differences, would never duck their heads underfire, whether visible or invisible.
A starved dog, whose owner lay in the churchyard, crept after themwhining, and thrust his nose under the preacher's hand. Dogs alwaysfollowed Barnabas, who, from his childhood, had been bound by aspecially strong tie to the brute creation. Already he had been adoptedas master by four cats and two mongrel dogs, as he remembered withrather rueful amusement.
"Go home!--I've no room for ye," he said; but, on the dog's explainingthat he had no home, that nobody had any room for him, and that he wassick of being stoned, his legs having got so shaky that he hadn't energyto get out of the way, Barnabas relented and picked him up. It wasabsolutely impossible to the man to pass on on the other side in anycase, whether advisable or not, as his fellow-worker remarked. Mr.Bagshotte's liking for Barnabas was, sometimes, touched by somethingthat would have been pity if the preacher had not been too strong a manto 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 theparson. "The man gives the saint some trouble, I fancy. I wonder whathis wife is like!"
* * * * *
Three weeks later the "bullets" began to slacken.
There was a paragraph in a London paper describing the terrible scourgethat had devastated the little northern village--reducing the populationto less than one half of its original number, and sweeping away wholefamilies at once. Mr. Bagshotte, the vicar, had lost his wife and threechildren, the report said; and several of his contemporaries, whoremembered Bagshotte at the university, wondered whether this was thesame man they used to know, and, if so, why he had buried himself in thecountry.
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 thevillage; and the village had been his world for so long.
He had been essentially a domestic man, loving the routine of everydaylife, absolutely happy with his wife and children, whom he hadsurrounded with little old-fashioned tender observances. He had losttouch with the friends of his youth; though, his friendships being ofsturdy growth, he had prided himself on not forgetting them. He wasalone now, so far as companionship went; and, healthy-minded as he was,he got to dread the emptiness of the rooms, and would cheat theloneliness that awaited him by hurrying up the back way, avoiding thedrawing-room door, which used always to open at the sound of hisfootstep.
Possibly he came to feel his losses more when the pressure of excitementwas over.
It would have been unworthy to pray for death. A man has no business towhine for a speedy release because his duty has become irksome; but hewas conscious of some disappointment. He had believed, when he hadburied 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 havedone for his wife to have been left alone; but now, when the shops wereopening again, when the world was regaining its balance, and men,meeting in the street, talked of weather and trade, and discovered thatthe "Last Day" was, after all, not so very imminent, the old man wasconscious of a slightly surprised disappointment. "The king can do nowrong," but he had hoped things might have been otherwise ordered.
He was just turning in at his own gate one Sunday morning; the usualSunday services had begun again, and he was considering how to fill upthe gaps in the church band, when some one called him by his Christianname.
He turned, frowning slightly, and a good deal surprised; then his facechanged.
He knew the stranger at once; the twelve years that lay between this andtheir last meeting seemed to come like a haze before his eyes. He rubbedthem 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!" criedthe 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 carriedout 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 thatyou 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 hadadmired 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 shewould have enjoyed it so," he said simply. "So you saw it in the paperand came! I had fancied I was quite forgotten."
Mr. Deane put his hand for a moment on the parson's shoulder. "But onedoesn't forget one's oldest friends," he said; and the sympathy in hismusical 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 hisface 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 justwaited for 'ee," the preacher began; then stopped short suddenly.
Who was this? this stranger who was yet not a stranger? Who was this whohad _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 oneach other's heels, and tumbling confusedly through his brain while hespoke.
Mr. Deane had turned rather white. Like Meg, his colour went when he wasvery angry. He flicked the dust off his boots with his riding whip; thenlooked up with a fine smile.
"It is a little late to remember that she had a father," he said. "Sheforgot that she was my child when she became your wife. The best thatcan happen to her now is that she should continue to forget it--forever, if possible. I sincerely hope it may be possible--for her ownsake. No one will disturb your possession."
He turned away when he had spoken. He could not condescend to quarrelwith 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. "Isthat 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 ofblood that made Meg his, even when he denied her, awoke the man's fiercejealousy, and awoke also a certain sore despondency that he himselfhardly understood.
"An' so ye'll not disturb me?" he went on slowly. The two men's eyes metfor a second, and Barnabas Thorpe laughed rather grimly. "An' that's atrue word," he said. "I am no' o' your kind, thank God; but happen Iknow one thing. I can take care o' the woman who is mine."
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