I can well believe it. Your hard-fisted sour-minded Puritan will tell you, that he only sees written in letters of blood the sins he has committed, the hearts he has broken, and the things which he has left undone.
A more beautiful belief in an all-merciful Providence persuades me, that something of the music and the melody of his life is not forgotten even then, and that, if there be such music and melody, even in the lives of the worst of us, they are allowed mercifully to alleviate the agonies of our last moments, to help us through the darkness of that interminable valley which lives in the future for all of us, and whose end no one knows.
I felt exactly in the position of that typical drowning man, when I walked alone—as I shall ever walk alone whilst life lasts—between North Repps Cottage and my house at The Highlands, in the village of Syderstrand in Norfolk, one memorable Christmas Eve.
It is not a long walk, as you all know, within shelter of wood and sound of everlasting sea.
A ruined church, lovingly mantled in dark ivy; a fisher village modernized out of all recognition; two or three scattered farms, sturdy and flinty and grim, laughing to scorn the modern gimcrack red houses that offend the landscape—this is all I passed, from the moment the hospitable door closed behind me, and I had said a “Good night, God bless you” to the old Cheevers who went up the hill to their pretty home in the North Repps almshouses.
The Christmas Eve was over. I had pressed the hand of my old friend and patron, Samuel Barkston, now the owner of North Repps Hall, who was sleeping that Christmas Eve under the roof of North Repps Cottage, now the house of dear old Nick and ever beautiful Nan, and I had made an appointment for all of them on the morrow after Christmas service to “take pot-luck” with the lonely old parson, happy and contented in the care of the simple souls, who dwell in the seaside cottages of Overstrand and its sister parish Syderstrand.
What were the unexpected words that rang in my ears that Christmas Eve, when I had toasted them all, a glass of excellently brewed punch in my hand, in the simple phrase, “God bless us all”? It came from the pipy, crooning voice of old Cheevers, who spoke with his good old wife’s hand locked in his own, and thus he spoke:—
“Well, this ’ere is wonderful! wery wonderful, my dear.”
And then Mrs. Cheevers gave a little convulsive sob, and shed another tear.
“Only to think of our little Nick and Nan, and me and you standing ’ere and drinking their ’earty good ’ealth, and the ’ealth of them dear little ones, and a wishing of ’em ‘A Merry Christmas,’ which we does with all our ’eart, and God’s blessing.”