The Old Curiosity Shop
fellow--a diver, Lord save us! This is a boy, sir, who had a fancy for
plunging into eighteen feet of water, with his clothes on, and bringing
up a blind man’s dog, who was being drowned by the weight of his chain
and collar, while his master stood wringing his hands upon the bank,
bewailing the loss of his guide and friend. I sent the boy two guineas
anonymously, sir,’ added the bachelor, in his peculiar whisper,
‘directly I heard of it; but never mention it on any account, for he
hasn’t the least idea that it came from me.’
Having disposed of this culprit, the bachelor turned to another, and
from him to another, and so on through the whole array, laying, for
their wholesome restriction within due bounds, the same cutting
emphasis on such of their propensities as were dearest to his heart and
were unquestionably referrable to his own precept and example.
Thoroughly persuaded, in the end, that he had made them miserable by
his severity, he dismissed them with a small present, and an admonition
to walk quietly home, without any leapings, scufflings, or turnings out
of the way; which injunction, he informed the schoolmaster in the same
audible confidence, he did not think he could have obeyed when he was a
boy, had his life depended on it.
Hailing these little tokens of the bachelor’s disposition as so many
assurances of his own welcome course from that time, the schoolmaster
parted from him with a light heart and joyous spirits, and deemed
himself one of the happiest men on earth. The windows of the two old
houses were ruddy again, that night, with the reflection of the
cheerful fires that burnt within; and the bachelor and his friend,
pausing to look upon them as they returned from their evening walk,
spoke softly together of the beautiful child, and looked round upon the
churchyard with a sigh.
CHAPTER 53
Nell was stirring early in the morning, and having discharged her
household tasks, and put everything in order for the good schoolmaster
(though sorely against his will, for he would have spared her the
pains), took down, from its nail by the fireside, a little bundle of
keys with which the bachelor had formally invested her on the previous
day, and went out alone to visit the old church.
The sky was serene and bright, the air clear, perfumed with the fresh
scent of newly fallen leaves, and grateful to every sense. The
neighbouring stream sparkled, and rolled onward with a tuneful sound;
the dew glistened on the green mounds, like tears shed by Good Spirits
over the dead. Some young children sported among the tombs, and hid
from each other, with laughing faces. They had an infant with them,
and had laid it down asleep upon a child’s grave, in a little bed of
leaves. It was a new grave--the resting-place, perhaps, of some little
creature, who, meek and patient in its illness, had often sat and
watched them, and now seemed, to their minds, scarcely changed.
She drew near and asked one of them whose grave it was. The child
answered that that was not its name; it was a garden--his brother’s.
It was greener, he said, than all the other gardens, and the birds
loved it better because he had been used to feed them. When he had
done speaking, he looked at her with a smile, and kneeling down and
nestling for a moment with his cheek against the turf, bounded merrily
away.
She passed the church, gazing upward at its old tower, went through the
wicket gate, and so into the village. The old sexton, leaning on a
crutch, was taking the air at his cottage door, and gave her good
morrow.
‘You are better?’ said the child, stopping to speak with him.
‘Ay surely,’ returned the old man. ‘I’m thankful to say, much better.’
‘_You_ will be quite well soon.’
‘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 separate 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 connexion 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 next summer,
was but a type of all mankind.
Full of these meditations, she reached the church. It was easy to find
the key belonging to the outer door, for each was labelled on a scrap
of yellow parchment. Its very turning in the lock awoke a hollow
sound, and when she entered with a faltering step, the echoes that it
raised in closing, made her start.
If the peace of the simple village had moved the child more strongly,
because of the dark and troubled ways that lay beyond, and through
which she had journeyed with such failing feet, what was the deep
impression of finding herself alone in that solemn building, where the
very light, coming through sunken windows, seemed old and grey, and the
air, redolent of earth and mould, seemed laden with decay, purified by
time of all its grosser particles, and sighing through arch and aisle,
and clustered pillars, like the breath of ages gone! Here was the
broken pavement, worn, so long ago, by pious feet, that Time, stealing
on the pilgrims’ steps, had trodden out their track, and left but
crumbling stones. Here were the rotten beam, the sinking arch, the
sapped and mouldering wall, the lowly trench of earth, the stately tomb
on which no epitaph remained--all--marble, stone, iron, wood, and
dust--one common monument of ruin. The best work and the worst, the
plainest and the richest, the stateliest and the least imposing--both
of Heaven’s work and Man’s--all found one common level here, and told
one common tale.
Some part of the edifice had been a baronial chapel, and here were
effigies of warriors stretched upon their beds of stone with folded
hands--cross-legged, those who had fought in the Holy Wars--girded
with their swords, and cased in armour as they had lived. Some of
these knights had their own weapons, helmets, coats of mail, hanging
upon the walls hard by, and dangling from rusty hooks. Broken and
dilapidated as they were, they yet retained their ancient form, and
something of their ancient aspect. Thus violent deeds live after men
upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in
mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but
atoms of earth themselves.
The child sat down, in this old, silent place, among the stark figures
on the tombs--they made it more quiet there, than elsewhere, to her
fancy--and gazing round with a feeling of awe, tempered with a calm
delight, felt that now she was happy, and at rest. She took a Bible