Into the Highways and Hedges Part 23

"Ye needn't grudge me the working for 'ee," he said; "I think I'd go mad if I couldn't do that much. I'll try and save more next year. I never have before, not thinking as I was one to marry, or to hanker after any woman." He stood still, they were just in sight of the farm, and held out his hand as if that were the natural ending of his statement.

"At least, I'll not fash ye," he said. "I canna bide here unless ye'll like me better. The best thing I can do for 'ee now is to leave ye; but take care o' yourself, since I'm no' to take care for 'ee; take double care, my la.s.s."

"You need not be afraid," said Meg. "Nothing is in the least likely to happen to me. It is those whose lives are worth the most who run the risks; _I_ shall probably live to a ripe old age."

The perplexed self-reproach that had weighed heavily on her all the way home prompted the speech. She hardly knew herself how sad it was, until she saw him wince, as if she had hurt him.

"Are ye so unhappy?" he said; "an' I'd give my soul for yours! My little la.s.s, what shall I do? If there's aught i' this world 'll make ye happier, I'll do it somehow. I'd be glad if the fever took me, if that 'ud be easiest for ye; but it's easy saying I'd die for ye, when it's the living is the puzzle. Ay, I know I am scaring ye even now; I love ye a deal more nor ye want me to, but ye are a woman after all. Margaret, Margaret, have ye _no_ heart for me?"

Meg covered her face with her hands; the appeal moved her, though not to love.

"Don't, don't!" she cried. "It's my fault that it's not in me to care--like that. I can't help it, Barnabas; but it's all wrong from the beginning to end; and it's my fault."

Barnabas drew himself up with a quick gesture.

"Shame on me!" he said. "I hadn't meant to ha' said that. Ye must forget it, la.s.s. Ay, it's time I went. See now, I'm going. But doan't 'ee cry so; gi'e me one look; for I canna leave ye like this. I'm sore ashamed to ha' made ye cry."

Meg lifted her head and looked at him, ashamed too, though with a smile through her tears.

"It was something in your voice that made me so silly," she said. "But I am not going to be unhappy, and I wasn't crying for myself."

"Good-bye," said the preacher steadily. "But I want no pity, my la.s.s.

I'll not have ye waste tears for me. We've not come to the end yet."

With that he turned away, and set his face in the other direction. He was glad there was a stiff bit of work before him; after facing the problem of life, it was somewhat of a relief to turn to a grapple with death.

CHAPTER IV.

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 st.u.r.dy; then the churchyard, the G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 appet.i.te; the strain was beginning to tell, even on him. The desolate house oppressed him, and a grief he could not a.s.suage 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 G.o.d 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.