“Yes, mem!” Now we detected a rich, full-bodied Scotch brogue in his speech. “Pairhaps ye wouldna’ moind knawing that by that gett—where ye’ll see the bairs—the puir wretches went on the verra same mornin’. Wha passed by that gett never cam’ back.”
It was a dour-looking passage to a disgraceful death; a small door crossed by iron bars, and fastened with a rusty chain. It made us sick to think who had dragged their feet across the dirt-crusted threshold, and when.
The cab jerked up again in half a minute, although we had rushed off at a smart trot that engaged to land us at least a mile off.
“St. Sephulchre’s, mem!”
I have alluded to the difficulty of determining the age of London buildings from the outward appearance. A year in the sooty moisture that bathes them for seven or eight months out of twelve, destroys all fairness of coloring, leaving them without other beauty than such as depends upon symmetrical proportions, graceful outlines and carving. The humidity eats into the pores of the stone as cosmetics impair the texture of a woman’s skin. But St. Sepulchre has a right to be blasé. It antedated the Great Fire of 1666, the noble porch escaping ruin from the flames as by a miracle. It is black, like everything else in the neighborhood, and, to our apprehension, not comely beyond the portico. The interior is as cheerless as the outside, cold and musty. Throughout, the church has the air of a battered crone with the sins of a fast youth upon her conscience. There are vaults beneath the floor, lettered memorial-stones in the aisle, tarnished brasses on the walls. Clammy sweats break out upon floor, walls, pews and altar in damp weather, and this day of our visit had begun to be damp. It was an unwholesome place even to be buried in. What we wanted to see was a flat stone on the southern side of the choir, reached in bright weather by such daring sunbeams as could make their way through a window, the glass of which was both painted and dirty. A brownish-gray stone, rough-grained, and so much defaced that imagination comes to the help of the eyes that strive to read it: “Captain John Smith—Sometime Governour of Virginia and Admirall of New-England.” He died in 1631, aged fifty-two. The Three Turks’ Heads are still discernible upon the escutcheon above the inscription. The rhyming epitaph begins with—
“Here lyes One conquerd that Hath conquerd Kings.”
We knew that much and failed to decipher the rest.
Family traditions, tenderly transmitted through eight generations, touching the unwritten life of the famous soldier of fortune, of the brother who was his heir-at-law, and bequeathed the coat-of-arms to American descendants, were our nursery tales. For him whose love of sea and wildwood was a passion captivity nor courts could tame, his burial-place is a sorry one, although esteemed honorable. I think he would have chosen rather an unknown grave upon the border of the Chickahominy or James, the stars, that had guided him through swamp and desert, for tapers, instead of organ-thrill and incense, the song of mockingbirds and scent of pine woods. The more one knows and thinks and sees of St. Sepulchre’s the less tolerant is he of it as a spot of sepulture for this gallant and true knight. They interred him there because it was his parish church. But they—the English—are not backward in removing other people’s bones when it suits their pride or convenience to do so. In the square tower, lately restored, hangs the bell that has tolled for two hundred years when the condemned passed out of the little iron gate we had just seen. They used to hang them at Tyburn, afterward in the street before the prison. Now, executions take place privately within the Newgate walls. In the brave old times, when refinement of torture was appreciated more highly than now as a means of grace and a Christian art, the criminal had the privilege of hearing his own funeral sermon,—which was rarely, we may infer, a panegyric,—seated upon his coffin in the broad aisle of St. Sepulchre’s. There was a plat of flowers then in the tiny yard where the grass cannot sprout now for the coal-dust, and as the poor creature took his place—the service done—upon the coffin in the cart that was to take him to the gallows, a child was put forward to present him with a bouquet of blossoms grown under the droppings of the sanctuary. What manner of herbs could they have been? Rue, rosemary, life-everlasting? Yet they may have had their message to the dim eyes that looked down upon them—for the quailing human heart—of the Father’s love for the lowest and vilest of His created things.
“Temple Bar!” was our next order.
Before we reached it our driver checked his horse of his own accord, got down from his perch at the back, and presented his weather-beaten face at my side.