It was old Mary, “Moll o’ the graves,” as the folk used to call her. Father Laurence felt a little reassured, but she was not one whom anybody would wish to meet on a dark night, least of all in a churchyard.
“What is the matter, Mary? Why are you not in your bed,” he asked; “disturbing honest folk at this time of night?”
“You let me alone,” she replied, “with your saints and your prayers and your Holy Mother. I go where I please and do as I please. I knew Sarah would die. I like folk to die,” she said with horrible glee; “and she cursed Janet Arnside, did she? A curse on them all, every one of them. I wish she would die too; ay, and that slip of a girl that Sarah has left behind. What are you shaking for?” she added. “Do you think I do not know what is going on? You have nothing to tell me; I assure you the powers are on our side. There is nothing like the night and the dark.”
“You are a wicked woman, Mary,” said the old priest sorrowfully, “and God will punish you one day. See you—I am going home; you go home too.”
“You may go home if you like,” said the old hag as he moved on, “and my curses go with you; but I stay here;” and she stood and looked after him as he faded into the darkness.
“Silly old dotard,” she growled; “I saw him at her bedside or ever I came along here. The blessed sacrament indeed; and much may it profit her! I wish now I had waited and seen what he did after she had gone; comforted that child, I expect! Fancy loving a mother like that! Ha! Ha! No, I am glad I came here and scared the pious old fool.”
She moved among the tombs and sat down near an open grave that had just been dug. “Pah! I am sick of their nonsense. Why cannot they leave folk in peace? I want to go my own way; why should I not go my own way? All my life they have been at me, ever since I was a little girl. My foolish old mother began it. Why should I not please myself? Well, she’s dead anyway! I like people to die. And now Mother Church is at me. Why should I think of other people, why should I always be holding myself in control? No, I let myself go, I please myself.”
“I have no patience with any of them,” she muttered, “and now there is a new one to plague me,” and “Moll o’ the graves” saw in her mind’s eye a slim, graceful girl of twelve, endowed with an unparalleled refinement of beauty. “What do they mean by bringing that child to Holwick Hall,” she continued, “as if things were not bad enough already,—a-running round and waiting on folk, a-tending the sick and all the rest of it? Let them die! I like them to die. Self-sacrifice and self-control forsooth! They say she is clever and well-schooled and mistress of herself and withal sympathetic. What’s the good of unselfishness and self-control? No, liberty, liberty—that’s the thing for you, Moll. Self-control, indeed!” and again the ghastly laugh rang through the night air. “Yes, liberty, Moll,—liberty. Are you not worth more than all their church-ridden priests and docile unselfish children? What avails unselfishness and affection? Father Laurence and Aline Gillespie, there’s a pair of them! No, hate is the thing, hate is better than love. Scandal and spite and jealousy—that’s true joy, that’s the true woman, Moll,” and she rubbed her hands with unholy mirth.
As she talked to herself the moon rose and gradually the churchyard became light. “Love!” she went on, “love! Yes, Oswald, that’s where they laid you,” she said, as she looked at the next place to the open grave. “Ah, but hate got the better of your love, for all that, fine big man that you were, a head taller than the rest of the parish, and all the girls after you, too!”
She looked at the side of the open grave, where the end of a bone protruded. She pulled it out. It was a femur of unusual size. “Yes, Oswald,” she repeated, “and that’s yours. You did not think I would be holding your thigh-bone these forty years after!