A small boy, playing truant from his dame’s school, discovered the nature of John Aggett’s final action. The lad, seeking for those elements of mystery and adventure never absent from a wood, found both readily enough, where a great beech stood at the precincts of the pine forest. First a bundle in a red handkerchief with a stout stick lying beside it made the explorer peep fearfully about for the owner. Then he found him; and the small boy’s eyes grew round, his hair rose under his cap and his jaw fell. Lifted but a few inches above his head, and hanging by the neck from a great limb of the beech, was a man weary of waiting for a woman who could not keep her word.
In the earth they laid John Aggett, at the junction of cross-roads not far from his mother’s home; and they handled his clay roughly and, cutting a blackthorn stake from the tree by his cottage door, buried the man with old-time indignities and set no mark upon his grave.
For two years Sarah and Timothy were strangers after that night; then Farmer Chave passed to his ancestors and Tim found himself lord of Bellever Barton and a free man. In course of time he won the girl back—indeed little effort was needed to do so. Their wedded life is not recorded and may be supposed to have passed peacefully away. A son’s son now reigns in the place of his yeoman fathers; and his grandparents lie together under the grass of Widecombe churchyard. There, for fifty years an antique monument has risen above them, and a fat cherub puffed at a posthorn; but to-day gold lichens threaten to obliterate the manifold virtues of Timothy Chave and his lady as set forth on slanting stone.
And the other man rests lonely under the sloe tree; for its green wood grew and flourished to the amazement of those who set it there. Yet the purple harvest of that haggard and time-fretted thorn men still bid their children leave upon the bough; for the roots of it wind in the dust of the unholy dead, and to gather the flower or pluck the fruit would be to beckon sorrow.
‘CORBAN’
“’Tis a question which to drown,” said Mr. Sage.
He smoked his churchwarden and looked down between his knees where a mother cat was gazing up at him with green eyes. She purred, rolled half on her back and opened and contracted her forepaws with pleasure, while she suckled two kittens.
Mr. Sage’s daughter—a maiden of twelve—begged him to spare both squeaking dabs of life.
“They’m so like as two peas, faither—braave li’l chets both. Doan’t ’e drown wan of ’em,” she said.
“Thicky cat’s been very generous of chets in her time,” declared Mr. Sage. “If such things had ghostesses, you might see a whole regiment of ’em—black an’ white, tabby an’ tortoiseshell—down-along by the river come dark.”