“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 purpose—and scraping off, in the process, the essence of Heaven knows how many Becky Morgans—set himself to consider the subject.
“Let me think” quoth he. “I saw last night what they had put upon the coffin—was 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 upon 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 sorrowful 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 last—only 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 doubtful—not 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
