“O, it’s of no consequence,” I said. “Are they all well?”
“All comfortable, sir. It be fine dry weather for them, this, sir. It be in winter it be worst for them.”
“But it’s a snug enough shelter you’ve got here. It seems such, anyhow; though, to be sure, it is the blasts of winter that find out the weak places both in house and body.”
“It ben’t the wind touch them” he said; “they be safe enough from the wind. It be the wet, sir. There ben’t much snow in these parts; but when it du come, that be very bad for them, poor things!”
Could it be that he was harping on the old theme again?
“But at least this cottage keeps out the wet,” I said. “If not, we must have it seen to.”
“This cottage du well enough, sir. It’ll last my time, anyhow.”
“Then why are you pitying your family for having to live in it?”
“Bless your heart, sir! It’s not them. They du well enough. It’s my people out yonder. You’ve got the souls to look after, and I’ve got the bodies. That’s what it be, sir. To be sure!”
The last exclamation was uttered in a tone of impatient surprise at my stupidity in giving all my thoughts and sympathies to the living, and none to the dead. I pursued the subject no further, but as I lay in bed that night, it began to dawn upon me as a lovable kind of hallucination in which the man indulged. He too had an office in the Church of God, and he would magnify that office. He could not bear that there should be no further outcome of his labour; that the burying of the dead out of sight should be “the be-all and the end-all.” He was God’s vicar, the gardener in God’s Acre, as the Germans call the churchyard. When all others had forsaken the dead, he remained their friend, caring for what little comfort yet remained possible to them. Hence in all changes of air and sky above, he attributed to them some knowledge of the same, and some share in their consequences even down in the darkness of the tomb. It was his way of keeping up the relation between the living and the dead. Finding I made him no reply, he took up the word again.