The old man’s jaw fell, and he stepped back, slipped, and would have fallen, but for the Rector’s hands, to which the old fellow clung spasmodically, his face working, his lips twitching in his efforts to speak. But for a long time no words would come, and then but two, twice repeated, though with earnest emphasis—
“Bless thee! Bless thee!”
Then, quickly snatching his hands away, the old man turned aside, leaned his trembling arm against a tombstone which had gradually encroached upon the path, and stood with his head bent down, trying to recover his strength.
It was a strange contrast: the thin, sharply featured old man, and the handsome portly figure of the Rector, as he stood there vexed with himself at having, as he called it, been so weak as to give way at the first difficulty that he had to encounter; and he afterwards came to the conclusion that he might just as well have held out, for the people gave him the credit of killing old Warmoth so as to have his way.
“Let me help you into the church to sit down for a bit,” he said to the trembling old man.
Old Warmoth turned and laid one hand upon the Rector’s, gazing up in his face, and there was a piteous smile upon his withered lips.
“I was afraid thou’d want me to go as soon as I heard thou was coming back; and they said thou’dst get shut o’ me. But sixty year, sir! It would have killed me. I couldn’t have beared to go.”
Two Sundays later the congregation had just left the church, and Portlock was going up to the vestry, when he saw there was something wrong in the clerk’s seat.
“Why, Sammy, owd man,” he cried, “what ails—”
He did not finish his broken sentence, but tore open the door of the clerk’s desk, the Rector coming forward to where the old man knelt in his accustomed narrow place, his hands upon his book, his head upon his breast, as he had knelt down after the sermon.