The Old Curiosity Shop

Chapter 54

The bachelor, among his various occupations, found in the old
church a constant source of interest and amusement. Taking that
pride in it which men conceive for the wonders of their own little
world, he had made its history his study; and many a summer day
within its walls, and many a winter's night beside the parsonage
fire, had found the bachelor still poring over, and adding to, his
goodly store of tale and legend.

As he was not one of those rough spirits who would strip fair Truth
of every little shadowy vestment in which time and teeming fancies
love to array her--and some of which become her pleasantly enough,
serving, like the waters of her well, to add new graces to the
charms they half conceal and half suggest, and to awaken interest
and pursuit rather than languor and indifference--as, unlike this
stern and obdurate class, he loved to see the goddess crowned with
those garlands of wild flowers which tradition wreathes for her
gentle wearing, and which are often freshest in their homeliest
shapes--he trod with a light step and bore with a light hand upon
the dust of centuries, unwilling to demolish any of the airy
shrines that had been raised above it, if any good feeling or
affection of the human heart were hiding thereabouts. Thus, in the
case of an ancient coffin of rough stone, supposed, for many
generations, to contain the bones of a certain baron, who, after
ravaging, with cut, and thrust, and plunder, in foreign lands, came
back with a penitent and sorrowing heart to die at home, but which
had been lately shown by learned antiquaries to be no such thing,
as the baron in question (so they contended) had died hard in
battle, gnashing his teeth and cursing with his latest breath--
the bachelor stoutly maintained that the old tale was the true one;
that the baron, repenting him of the evil, had done great charities
and meekly given up the ghost; and that, if ever baron went to
heaven, that baron was then at peace. In like manner, when the
aforesaid antiquaries did argue and contend that a certain secret
vault was not the tomb of a grey-haired lady who had been hanged
and drawn and quartered by glorious Queen Bess for succouring a
wretched priest who fainted of thirst and hunger at her door, the
bachelor did solemnly maintain, against all comers, that the church
was hallowed by the said poor lady's ashes; that her remains had
been collected in the night from four of the city's gates, and
thither in secret brought, and there deposited; and the bachelor
did further (being highly excited at such times) deny the glory of
Queen Bess, and assert the immeasurably greater glory of the
meanest woman in her realm, who had a merciful and tender heart.
As to the assertion that the flat stone near the door was not the
grave of the miser who had disowned his only child and left a sum
of money to the church to buy a peal of bells, the bachelor did
readily admit the same, and that the place had given birth to no
such man. In a word, he would have had every stone, and plate of
brass, the monument only of deeds whose memory should survive. All
others he was willing to forget. They might be buried in
consecrated ground, but he would have had them buried deep, and
never brought to light again.

It was from the lips of such a tutor, that the child learnt her
easy task. Already impressed, beyond all telling, by the silent
building and the peaceful beauty of the spot in which it stood--
majestic age surrounded by perpetual youth--it seemed to her, when
she heard these things, sacred to all goodness and virtue. It was
another world, where sin and sorrow never came; a tranquil place of
rest, where nothing evil entered.

When the bachelor had given her in connection with almost every
tomb and flat grave-stone some history of its own, he took her down
into the old crypt, now a mere dull vault, and showed her how it
had been lighted up in the time of the monks, and how, amid lamps
depending from the roof, and swinging censers exhaling scented
odours, and habits glittering with gold and silver, and pictures,
and precious stuffs, and jewels all flashing and glistening through
the low arches, the chaunt of aged voices had been many a time
heard there, at midnight, in old days, while hooded figures knelt
and prayed around, and told their rosaries of beads. Thence, he
took her above ground again, and showed her, high up in the old
walls, small galleries, where the nuns had been wont to glide along
--dimly seen in their dark dresses so far off--or to pause like
gloomy shadows, listening to the prayers. He showed her too, how
the warriors, whose figures rested on the tombs, had worn those
rotting scraps of armour up above--how this had been a helmet, and
that a shield, and that a gauntlet--and how they had wielded the
great two-handed swords, and beaten men down, with yonder iron
mace. All that he told the child she treasured in her mind; and
sometimes, when she awoke at night from dreams of those old times,
and rising from her bed looked out at the dark church, she almost
hoped to see the windows lighted up, and hear the organ's swell,
and sound of voices, on the rushing wind.

The old sexton soon got better, and was about again. From him the
child learnt many other things, though of a different kind. He was
not able to work, but one day there was a grave to be made, and he
came to overlook the man who dug it. He was in a talkative mood;
and the child, at first standing by his side, and afterwards
sitting on the grass at his feet, with her thoughtful face raised
towards his, began to converse with him.

Now, the man who did the sexton's duty was a little older than he,
though much more active. But he was deaf; and when the sexton (who
peradventure, on a pinch, might have walked a mile with great
difficulty in half-a-dozen hours) exchanged a remark with him about
his work, the child could not help noticing that he did so with an
impatient kind of pity for his infirmity, as if he were himself the
strongest and heartiest man alive.

'I'm sorry to see there is this to do,' said the child when she
approached. 'I heard of no one having died.'

'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 on 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 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 this question
to their mutual satisfaction, the sexton, with his friend's
assistance, rose to go.

'It's chilly, sitting here, and I must be careful--till the
summer,' he said, as he prepared to limp away.

'What?' asked old David.

'He's very deaf, poor fellow!' cried the sexton. 'Good-bye!'
'Ah!' said old David, looking after him. 'He's failing very fast.
He ages every day.'

And so they parted; each persuaded that the other had less life in
him than himself; and both greatly consoled and comforted by the
little fiction they had agreed upon, respecting Becky Morgan, whose
decease was no longer a precedent of uncomfortable application, and
would be no business of theirs for half a score of years to come.

The child remained, for some minutes, watching the deaf old man as
he threw out the earth with his shovel, and, often stopping to
cough and fetch his breath, still muttered to himself, with a kind
of sober chuckle, that the sexton was wearing fast. At length she
turned away, and walking thoughtfully through the churchyard, came
unexpectedly upon the schoolmaster, who was sitting on a green
grave in the sun, reading.

'Nell here?' he said cheerfully, as he closed his book. 'It does
me good to see you in the air and light. I feared you were again
in the church, where you so often are.'

'Feared!' replied the child, sitting down beside him. 'Is it not
a good place?'

'Yes, yes,' said the schoolmaster. 'But you must be gay
sometimes--nay, don't shake your head and smile so sadly.'

'Not sadly, if you knew my heart. Do not look at me as if you
thought me sorrowful. There is not a happier creature on earth,
than I am now.'

Full of grateful tenderness, the child took his hand, and folded it
between her own. 'It's God's will!' she said, when they had been
silent for some time.

'What?'

'All this,' she rejoined; 'all this about us. But which of us is
sad now? You see that I am smiling.'

'And so am I,' said the schoolmaster; 'smiling to think how often
we shall laugh in this same place. Were you not talking yonder?'

'Yes,'the child rejoined.

'Of something that has made you sorrowful?'

There was a long pause.

'What was it?' said the schoolmaster, tenderly. 'Come. Tell me
what it was.'

'I rather grieve--I do rather grieve to think,' said the child,
bursting into tears, 'that those who die about us, are so soon
forgotten.'

'And do you think,' said the schoolmaster, marking the glance she
had thrown around, 'that an unvisited grave, a withered tree, a
faded flower or two, are tokens of forgetfulness or cold neglect?
Do you think there are no deeds, far away from here, in which these
dead may be best remembered? Nell, Nell, there may be people busy
in the world, at this instant, in whose good actions and good
thoughts these very graves--neglected as they look to us--are the
chief instruments.'

'Tell me no more,' said the child quickly. 'Tell me no more. I
feel, I know it. How could I be unmindful of it, when I thought of
you?'

'There is nothing,' cried her friend, 'no, nothing innocent or
good, that dies, and is forgotten. Let us hold to that faith, or
none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in its cradle, will live
again in the better thoughts of those who loved it, and will play
its part, through them, in the redeeming actions of the world,
though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deepest sea.
There is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does its
blessed work on earth in those that loved it here. Forgotten! oh,
if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their
source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much
charity, mercy, and purified affection, would be seen to have their
growth in dusty graves!'

'Yes,' said the child, 'it is the truth; I know it is. Who should
feel its force so much as I, in whom your little scholar lives
again! Dear, dear, good friend, if you knew the comfort you have
given me!'

The poor schoolmaster made her no answer, but bent over her in
silence; for his heart was full.

They were yet seated in the same place, when the grandfather
approached. Before they had spoken many words together, the church
clock struck the hour of school, and their friend withdrew.

'A good man,' said the grandfather, looking after him; 'a kind man.
Surely he will never harm us, Nell. We are safe here, at last, eh?
We will never go away from here?'

The child shook her head and smiled.

'She needs rest,' said the old man, patting her cheek; 'too pale--
too pale. She is not like what she was.'

When?' asked the child.

'Ha!' said the old man, 'to be sure--when? How many weeks ago?
Could I count them on my fingers? Let them rest though; they're
better gone.'
'Much better, dear,' replied the child. 'We will forget them; or,
if we ever call them to mind, it shall be only as some uneasy dream
that has passed away.'

'Hush!' said the old man, motioning hastily to her with his hand
and looking over his shoulder; 'no more talk of the dream, and all
the miseries it brought. There are no dreams here. 'Tis a quiet
place, and they keep away. Let us never think about them, lest
they should pursue us again. Sunken eyes and hollow cheeks--wet,
cold, and famine--and horrors before them all, that were even
worse--we must forget such things if we would be tranquil here.'

'Thank Heaven!' inwardly exclaimed the child, 'for this most happy
change!'

'I will be patient,' said the old man, 'humble, very thankful, and
obedient, if you will let me stay. But do not hide from me; do not
steal away alone; let me keep beside you. Indeed, I will be very
true and faithful, Nell.'

'I steal away alone! why that,' replied the child, with assumed
gaiety, 'would be a pleasant jest indeed. See here, dear
grandfather, we'll make this place our garden--why not! It is a
very good one--and to-morrow we'll begin, and work together, side
by side.'

'It is a brave thought!' cried her grandfather. 'Mind, darling--
we begin to-morrow!'

Who so delighted as the old man, when they next day began their
labour! Who so unconscious of all associations connected with the
spot, as he! They plucked the long grass and nettles from the
tombs, thinned the poor shrubs and roots, made the turf smooth, and
cleared it of the leaves and weeds. They were yet in the ardour of
their work, when the child, raising her head from the ground over
which she bent, observed that the bachelor was sitting on the stile
close by, watching them in silence.

'A kind office,' said the little gentleman, nodding to Nell as she
curtseyed to him. 'Have you done all that, this morning?'

'It is very little, sir,' returned the child, with downcast eyes,
'to what we mean to do.'

'Good work, good work,' said the bachelor. 'But do you only labour
at the graves of children, and young people?'

'We shall come to the others in good time, sir,' replied Nell,
turning her head aside, and speaking softly.

It was a slight incident, and might have been design or accident,
or the child's unconscious sympathy with youth. But it seemed to
strike upon her grandfather, though he had not noticed it before.
He looked in @ hurried manner at the graves, then anxiously at the
child, then pressed her to his side, and bade her stop to rest.
Something he had long forgotten, appeared to struggle faintly in
his mind. It did not pass away, as weightier things had done; but
came uppermost again, and yet again, and many times that day, and
often afterwards. Once, while they were yet at work, the child,
seeing that he often turned and looked uneasily at her, as though
he were trying to resolve some painful doubts or collect some
scattered thoughts, urged him to tell the reason. But he said it
was nothing--nothing--and, laying her head upon his arm, patted
her fair cheek with his hand, and muttered that she grew stronger
every day, and would be a woman, soon.