“Just as ye think best, Master John,” replied the shrivelled mason. “Ah, poor Lord George!” he continued, looking contemplatively at the huge coffin; “he and I were as bitter enemies once as any could be when one is a lord and t’other only a mortal man. Poor fellow! He’d clap his hand upon my shoulder and cuss me as familial and neighbourly as if he’d been a common chap. Ay, ’a cussed me up hill and ’a cussed me down; and then ’a would rave out again, and the goold clamps of his fine new teeth would glisten in the sun like fetters of brass, while I, being a small man and poor, was fain to say nothing at all. Such a strappen fine gentleman as he was too! Yes, I rather liked en sometimes. But once now and then, when I looked at his towering height, I’d think in my inside, ‘What a weight you’ll be, my lord, for our arms to lower under the aisle of Endelstow Church some day!’”
“And was he?” inquired a young labourer.
“He was. He was five hundredweight if ’a were a pound. What with his lead, and his oak, and his handles, and his one thing and t’other”—here the ancient man slapped his hand upon the cover with a force that caused a rattle among the bones inside—“he half broke my back when I took his feet to lower en down the steps there. ‘Ah,’ saith I to John there—didn’t I, John?—‘that ever one man’s glory should be such a weight upon another man!’ But there, I liked my lord George sometimes.”
“’Tis a strange thought,” said another, “that while they be all here under one roof, a snug united family o’ Luxellians, they be really scattered miles away from one another in the form of good sheep and wicked goats, isn’t it?”
“True; ’tis a thought to look at.”
“And that one, if he’s gone upward, don’t know what his wife is doing no more than the man in the moon if she’s gone downward. And that some unfortunate one in the hot place is a-hollering across to a lucky one up in the clouds, and quite forgetting their bodies be boxed close together all the time.”
“Ay, ’tis a thought to look at, too, that I can say ‘Hullo!’ close to fiery Lord George, and ’a can’t hear me.”
“And that I be eating my onion close to dainty Lady Jane’s nose, and she can’t smell me.”
“What do ’em put all their heads one way for?” inquired a young man.
“Because ’tis churchyard law, you simple. The law of the living is, that a man shall be upright and down-right, and the law of the dead is, that a man shall be east and west. Every state of society have its laws.”