“No, miss, no! No familiar friend; or if he was, he were like King David's. He bore a tyrannous hate against 'e, and the poison of asps were under his lips. In this here hattitude he stood, with his back toward me, and his reins more upright than I be capable of putting it. And this was how he held up his elbow and his head. Look 'e see, miss, and then 'e know as much as I do.”
Mr. Rigg marched with a long smooth step—a most difficult strain for his short bowed legs—as far as the place he had been pointing out; and there he stood with his back to me, painfully doing what the tall man had done, so far as the difference of size allowed.
It was not possible for me to laugh in a matter of such sadness; and yet Jacob stood, with his back to me, spreading and stretching himself in such a way, to be up to the dimensions of the stranger, that—low as it was—I was compelled to cough, for fear of fatally offending him.
“That warn't quite right, miss. Now you look again,” he exclaimed, with a little readjustment. “Only he had a thing over one shoulder, the like of what the Scotchmen wear; and his features was beyond me, because of the back of his head, like. For God's sake keep out of his way, miss.”
The sexton stood in a musing and yet a stern and defiant attitude, with the right elbow clasped in the left-hand palm, the right hand resting half-clinched upon the forehead, and the shoulders thrown back, as if ready for a blow.
“What a very odd way to stand!” I said.
“Yes, miss. And what he said was odder. 'Six, and the mother!' I heared un say; 'no cure for it, till I have all seven.' But stop, miss. Not a breath to any one! Here comes the poor father and mother to speak the blessing across their daughter's grave—and the grave not two foot down yet!”