CHAPTER XXXIII. SEPULTURE AT LAST.
Truly, it was Betsy, the mare which they had lost on that fearful day at the Stye Head Pass. Her dread burden, the coffin containing the body of Angus Ray, was still strapped to her back. None had come nigh to her, or this must have been removed. She looked worn and tired as she rose now to her feet amid the snow. The old creature was docile enough this morning, and when Ralph patted her head, she seemed to know the hand that touched her.
She had crossed a range of mountains, and lived, no doubt, on the thin grass of the fells. She must have famished quickly had the snow fallen before.
Ralph was profoundly agitated. Never before had Sim seen him betray such deep emotion. If the horse with its burden had been a supernatural presence, the effect of its appearance on Ralph had not been greater. At first clutching the bridle, he looked like a man who was puzzled to decide whether, after all, this thing that had occurred were not rather a spectre that had wandered out of his dreams than a tangible reality, a blessed and gracious reality, a mercy for which he ought there and then to fling himself in gratitude on the ground, even though the snow drifted over him forever and made that act his last. Then the tears that tenderer moments could not bring stood in his enraptured eyes. Those breathless instants were as the mirror of what seemed to be fifty years of fear and hope.
Ralph determined that no power on earth should remove his hand from the bridle until his father had at length been buried. The parish of Askham must have its church and churchyard, and Angus Ray should be buried there. They had not yet passed by the church—it must be still in front of them—and with the horse and its burden by their side the friends walked on.
When Ralph found voice to speak, he said, “Wednesday—then it is three weeks to-day since we lost her, and for three weeks my father has waited sepulture!”
Presently they came within sight of a rude chapel that stood at the meeting of two roads. A finger-post was at the angle, with arms pointing in three directions. The chapel was a low whitewashed Gothic building, with a little belfry in which there hung no bell. At its rear was a house with broken gablets and round dormers stuck deep into the thatch. A burial ground lay in front of both edifices, and looked dreary and chilling now, with the snow covering its many mounds and dripping from the warm wood of its rude old crosses.
“This will be the minister's house,” said Ralph.
They drew up in front and knocked at the door of a deep porch. An old man opened it and looked closely at his visitors through sharp, watchful eyes. He wore a close jerkin of thick blue homespun, and his broad-topped boots were strapped round his short pantaloons.
“Does the priest live here?” said Ralph, from the road, where he held the mare's head.
“No priest lives here,” said the old man, somewhat curtly.
“Does the minister?”
“No, nor a minister.”
The changes of ecclesiastical administration had been so frequent of late that it was impossible to say what formula was now in the ascendent. Ralph understood the old man's laconic answers to imply a remonstrance, and he tried again.
“Do you preach in this church?”
“I preach? No; I practise.”
It transpired after much wordy fencing, which was at least as irritating as amusing to a man in Ralph's present temper, that there was no minister now in possession of the benefice, and that the church had for some months been closed, the spiritual welfare of the parishioners being consequently in a state of temporary suspension. The old man who replied to Ralph's interrogations proved to be the parish clerk, and whether his duties were also suspended—whether the parishioners did not die, and did not require to be buried—during the period in which the parish was deprived of a parson, was a question of more consequence to Ralph than the cause of the religious bankruptcy which the old man described.
Ralph explained in a few words the occasion of his visit, and begged the clerk to dig a grave at once.
“I fear it will scarce conform to the articles,” the clerk said with a grave shake of his old head; “I'm sore afraid I'll suffer a penalty if it's known.”
Ralph passed some coins into the old man's hand with as little ostentation as possible; whereupon the clerk, much mollified, continued,—
“But it's not for me to deny to any Christian a Christian burial—that is to say, as much of it as stands in no need of the book. Sir, I'll be with you in a crack. Go round, sir, to the gate.”
Ralph and his companion did as they were bidden, and in a few minutes the old clerk came hurrying towards them from a door at the back of his house that looked into the churchyard.
He had a spade over his shoulder and a great key in his hand.
Putting the key into a huge padlock, he turned back its rusty bolt, and the gate swung stiff on its hinges, which were thick with moss.
Then Ralph, still holding the mare's head, walked into the churchyard with Sim behind him.
“Here's a spot which has never been used,” said the old man, pointing to a patch close at hand where long stalks of yarrow crept up through the snow. “It's fresh mould, sir, and on the bright days the sun shines on it.”
“Let it be here,” said Ralph.
The clerk immediately cleared away the snow, marked out his ground with the edge of the spade, and began his work.
Ralph and Sim, with Betsy, stood a pace or two apart. It was still early morning, and none came near the little company gathered there.
Now and again the old man paused in his work to catch his breath or to wipe the perspiration from his brow. His communicativeness at such moments of intermission would have been almost equal to his reticence at an earlier stage, but Ralph was in no humor to encourage his garrulity, and Sim stood speechless, with something like terror in his eyes. “Yes, we've had no minister since Michaelmas; that, you know, was when the new Act came In,” said the clerk.
“What Act?” Ralph asked.
“Why, sir, you never mean that you don't know about the Act of Uniformity?”
“That's what I do mean, my friend,” said Ralph.
“Don't know the Act of Uniformity! Have you heard of the Five Mile Bill?”
“No.”
“Nor the Test Bill that the Bishop wants to get afoot?”
“No.”
“Deary me, deary me,” said the clerk, with undisguised horror at Ralph's ignorance of the projected ecclesiastical enactments of his King and country. Then, with a twinkle in the corner of his upward eye as he held his head aside, the old man said,—
“Perhaps your honor has been away in foreign parts?”
Ralph had to decline this respectable cover for his want of familiarity with matters which were obviously vital concerns, and perhaps the subjects of daily conversation, with his interlocutor.
The clerk had resumed his labors. When he paused again it was in order to enlighten Ralph's ignorance on these solemn topics.
“You see, sir, the old 'piscopacy is back again, and the John Presbyters that joined it are snug in their churches, but the Presbyters that would not join it are turned out of their livings. There—that's the Act of Uniformity.”
“The Act of Non-Conformity, I should say,” replied Ralph.
“Well, the Jack Presbyters are not to be allowed within five miles of a market town—that's the new Five Mile Bill. And they are not to be made schoolmasters or tutors, or to hold public offices, unless they take the sacrament of the Church—and that's what the Bishop calls his Test Act; but he'll scarce get it this many a long year, say I—no, not he.”
The clerk had offered his lucid exposition with the air of one who could afford to be modestly sensible of the superiority of his knowledge.
“And when he does get it he'll want an Act more, so far as I can see,” said Ralph, “and that's a Burial Act—an Act to bury the Presbyters alive. They'd be full as well buried, I think.”.
A shrewd glance from the old man's quick eyes showed that at that moment he had arrived at one of three conclusions—that Ralph himself was a Presbyter or a Roundhead, or both.
“Our minister was a Presbyter,” he observed aloud, “and when the Act came in he left his benefice.”
But Ralph was not minded to pursue the subject.
The grave was now ready; it had required to be long and wide, but not deep.
The snow was beginning to fall again.
“Hard work on a morning like this,” said the clerk, coughing as he threw aside his spade. “This is the sort of early morning that makes an old man like me catch his breath. And I haven't always been parish clerk and dug graves. I was schoolmaster till Michaelmas.”
It was time to commit to the grave the burden which had passed three long weeks on the back of the mare. Not until this moment did Ralph's hand once relax its firm grip of Betsy's bridle. Loosing it now, he applied himself to the straps and ropes that bound the coffin. When all was made clear, he prepared to lift the body to the ground. It was large and heavy, and required the hands of Sim and the clerk as well.
By their united efforts the coffin was raised off the horse's back and lowered. The three men were in the act of doing this, when Betsy, suddenly freed from the burden which she had carried, pranced aside, looked startled, plunged through the gate, and made off down the road.
“Let her go,” said Ralph, and turned his attention once more to what now lay on the ground.
Then Angus Ray was lowered into his last home, and the flakes of snow fell over him like a white and silent pall.
Ralph stood aside while the old man threw back the earth. It fell from the spade in hollow thuds.
Sim crouched beside a stone, and looked on with frightened eyes.
The sods were replaced; there was a mound the more in the little churchyard of Askham, and that was the end. The clerk shouldered his spade and prepared to lock the gate.
It was then they were aware that there came from over their heads a sound like the murmuring of a brook under the leaves of June; like the breaking of deep waters at a weir; like the rolling of foam-capped wavelets against an echoing rock. Look up! Every leafless bough of yonder lofty elder-tree is thick with birds. Listen! A moment, and their song has ceased; they have risen on the wing; they are gone like a cloud Of black rain through the white feathery air. Then silence everywhere.
Was it God's sign and symbol—God's message to the soul of this stricken man? God's truce?
Who shall say it was not!
“A load is lifted off my heart,” said Ralph. He was thinking of the terrible night he had spent on the fells. And indeed there was the light of another look in his face. His father had sepulture. God had shown him this mercy as a sign that what he purposed to do ought to be done. Such was Ralph's reading of the accidental finding of the horse.
They bade good morning to the old man and left him. Then they walked to the angle of the roads where the guidepost stood. The arms were covered with the snow, and Ralph climbed on to the stone wall behind and brushed their letters clear.
“To Kendal.” That pointed in the direction from whence they came.
“To Gaskarth.”
“That's our road,” said Sim.
“No,” said Ralph; “this is it—'To Penrith and Carlisle.'”
What chance remained now to Robbie?