“Yes, sir, and they’ve sent a message, Would you be good enough to step down? The rector’s away, and Tom’s mother’s crying terrible. But not yet, sir. About seven o’clock, they say. It won’t be over till then, and there’s no immediate danger.”
“Tell them I will be there at seven,” said the clergyman.
Parker went back to the house, and presently we heard the footsteps of a child running down the drive towards the farm.
“How shocking it is!” I said in a moment or two.
“Ah!” said the old man, smiling, “I have learnt my lesson. It is not really so shocking as you think. Does that sound very hard?”
I said nothing, for it seemed to me that all the consolations of religion could not soften the horror of such things. If such agonies are necessary as remedies or atonements, at least they are terrible.
“I learnt my lesson,” the old man went on, “down the road there outside the hedge––down by the bridge. Would you like to hear it? Or are you tired of an old dreamer’s stories?” and he smiled at me.
“Now I know you think that I am hard––that I am a little apart maybe from human life––that I cannot understand the blind misery of those who suffer in ignorance; yet you would be the first, I believe, to think that Mrs. Awcock’s consolations are unreal, and that when she tells me that she knows there is a wise purpose behind, she is only repeating what is proper to say to a clergyman. But that is not so; that old threadbare sentence is intensely real to these people, and, I hope, to myself too. For there is nothing that I desire more than to be a child like them. It is the apparent purposelessness that distresses you: it is the certainty of a deliberate purpose that comforts me. Well, shall I tell you what I saw?”
I was a little distressed at what looked like callousness, but I told him I would like to hear the story.
“I was standing one evening––it would be about five years ago––in the field down there near the stream. You remember the bridge there, over which the road goes, just outside the hedge. I love running water, and I went slowly up and down by the side of the beck. There were children on the road, coming back from school, and they stopped on the bridge to look at the water, as children and old men will. They did not see me, as the field is a little below the road, and besides their backs were turned to me. I could see a pink frock or two, and a pair of stout bare legs. Two girls were taking their brother home––he was between them, a hand clasped by each of the sisters. I suppose the eldest girl would be about nine, and the boy five. They were talking solemnly, and I could hear every word.