“Caroline Pettigrove. What be you thinking on?”
“We’re in the wrong hole, Jethro; come and see for yourself, the plate on this old coffin says Caroline Cronshaw, see for yourself, we’re in the wrong hole.”
Again the bell voiced its melancholy admonition.
Jethro descended the short ladder and stood in the grave with Mark just as the cortège entered the church by the door on the opposite side of the yard. He knelt down and rubbed with his own fingers the dulled inscription on the mouldering coffin; there was no doubt about it, Caroline Cronshaw lay there.
“Well, may I go to glory,” slowly said the old man. It may have occurred to Mark that this was an extravagantly remote destination to prescribe; at any rate he said: “There ain’t no time, now, come on.”
“Who the devil be she? However come that wrong headstone to be putt on this wrong grave?” quavered the kneeling man.
“Are you coming out?” growled Mark, standing with one foot on the ladder, “or ain’t you? They’ll be chucking him on top of you in a couple o’ minutes. There’s no time, I tell you.”
“’Tis a strange come-up as ever I see,” said the old man; striking one wall of the grave with his hand: “that’s where we should be, Mark, next door, but there’s no time to change it and it must go as it is, Mark. Well, it’s fate; what is to be must be whether it’s good or right and you can’t odds it, you darn’t go against it, or you be wrong.” They stood in the grave muttering together. “Not a word, Mark, mind you!” At last they shovelled some earth back upon the tell-tale name-plate, climbed out of the grave, drew up the ladder, and stood with bent heads as the coffin was borne from the church towards them. It was lowered into the grave, and at the “earth to earth” Jethro, with a flirt of his spade dropped in a handful of sticky marl, another at “ashes to ashes,” and again at the “dust to dust.” Finally, when they were alone together again, they covered in the old lovers, dumping the earth tightly and everlastingly about them, and reset the headstone, Jethro remarking as they did so: “That headstone, well, ’tis a mystery, Mark! And I can’t bottom it, I can’t bottom it at all, ’tis a mystery.”
And indeed, how should it not be, for the secret had long since been forgotten by its originator.