“With Heaven’s leave, and a little patience. But come in, come in.”
The old man limped on before, and warning her of the downward step, which he achieved himself with no small difficulty, led the way into his little cottage.
“It is but one room you see. There is another up above, but the stair has got harder to climb o’ late years, and I never use it. I’m thinking of taking to it again next summer though.”
The child wondered how a grey-headed man like him—one of his trade too—could talk of time so easily. He saw her eyes wandering to the tools that hung upon the wall, and smiled.
“I warrant now,” he said, “that you think all those are used in making graves.”
“Indeed, I wondered that you wanted so many.”
“And well you might. I am a gardener. I dig the ground, and plant things that are to live and grow. My works don’t all moulder away and rot in the earth. You see that spade in the centre?”
“The very old one—so notched and worn? Yes.”
“That’s the sexton’s spade, and it’s a well-used one, as you see. We’re healthy people here, but it has done a power of work. If it could speak now, that spade, it would tell you of many an unexpected job that it and I have done together; but I forget ’em, for my memory’s a poor one. That’s nothing new,” he added hastily. “It always was.”
“There are flowers and shrubs to speak to your other work,” said the child.
“Oh yes. And tall trees. But they are not so separated from the sexton’s labours as you think.”
“No!”
“Not in my mind, and recollection—such as it is,” said the old man. “Indeed they often help it. For say that I planted such a tree for such a man. There it stands to remind me that he died. When I look at its broad shadow, and remember what it was in his time, it helps me to the age of my other work, and I can tell you pretty nearly when I made his grave.”
“But it may remind you of one who is still alive,” said the child.
“Of twenty that are dead, in connection with that one who lives, then,” rejoined the old man; “wife, husband, parents, brothers, sisters, children, friends—a score at least. So it happens that the sexton’s spade gets worn and battered. I shall need a new one—next summer.”
The child looked quickly towards him, thinking that he jested with his age and infirmity: but the unconscious sexton was quite in earnest.
“Ah!” he said, after a brief silence. “People never learn. They never learn. It’s only we who turn up the ground, where nothing grows and everything decays, who think of such things as these—who think of them properly, I mean. You have been into the church?”
“I am going there now,” the child replied.
“There’s an old well there,” said the sexton, “right underneath the belfry; a deep, dark, echoing well. Forty year ago, you had only to let down the bucket till the first knot in the rope was free of the windlass, and you heard it splashing in the cold dull water. By little and little the water fell away, so that in ten year after that, a second knot was made, and you must unwind so much rope, or the bucket swung tight and empty at the end. In ten years’ time, the water fell again, and a third knot was made. In ten years more the well dried up; and now, if you lower the bucket till your arms are tired and let out nearly all the cord, you’ll hear it of a sudden clanking and rattling on the ground below, with a sound of being so deep and so far down, that your heart leaps into your mouth, and you start away as if you were falling in.”
“A dreadful place to come on in the dark!” exclaimed the child, who had followed the old man’s looks and words until she seemed to stand upon its brink.
“What is it but a grave!” said the sexton. “What else! And which of our old folks, knowing all this, thought, as the spring subsided, of their own failing strength, and lessening life? Not one!”
“Are you very old yourself?” asked the child, involuntarily.
“I shall be seventy-nine—next summer.”
“You still work when you are well?”
“Work! To be sure. You shall see my gardens hereabout. Look at the window there. I made, and have kept, that plot of ground entirely with my own hands. By this time next year I shall hardly see the sky; the boughs will have grown so thick. I have my winter work at night besides.”
He opened, as he spoke, a cupboard close to where he sat, and produced some miniature boxes, carved in a homely manner and made of old wood.
“Some gentlefolks who are fond of ancient days, and what belongs to them,” he said, “like to buy these keepsakes from our church and ruins. Sometimes I make them of scraps of oak, that turn up here and there; sometimes of bits of coffins which the vaults have long preserved. See here—this is a little chest of the last kind, clasped at the edges with fragments of brass plates that had writing on ’em once, though it would be hard to read it now. I haven’t many by me at this time of year, but these shelves will be full—next summer.”
The child admired and praised his work, and shortly afterwards departed; thinking as she went how strange it was, that this old man, drawing from his pursuits, and everything around him, one stern moral, never contemplated its application to himself; and, while he dwelt upon the uncertainty of human life, seemed both in word and deed to deem himself immortal. But her musings did not stop here, for she was wise enough to think that by a good and merciful adjustment this must be human nature, and that the old sexton, with his plans for
