TOLD TO PARSON
A little girl came rushing into the gate of the vicarage at Postbridge, Dartmoor, and it chanced that she met the minister himself as he bent in his garden and scattered lime around upspringing seeds.
“These slugs would try the patience of a saint,” he said, hearing footsteps, and not looking up. “They have eaten off nearly all my young larkspurs. How can one fight them?”
Then a small, breathless voice broke in upon him.
“Please, sir, mother sent me, an’ I’ve runned a’most all the way from our cottage wi’out stopping once. ’Tis old Mr. Mundy, please. He’m dying—so he told mother when her fetched him his milk this morning—an’ he says he’ve got something very special to tell anybody as’ll care to come an’ listen to it. But nobody don’t want to hear his secrets in the village; so mother said ’twas your job, please, an’ sent me for your honor.”
“My job—yes, so it is, little maid. I’ll come at once. An’ they’d better send for the doctor. It isn’t his regular visiting day until Thursday, but probably it’s his job, too.”
“Mother axed the old man that; an’ he said as he didn’t want no doctor, nor his traade [medicine] neither. He says h’m nearly a hundred years old, an’ he won’t be messed about with at his time of life, but just die easy an’ comfortable.”
In twenty minutes the clergyman had walked a mile and crossed a strip of the wilderness that stretched round about the little hamlet on Dartmoor where he labored. A single cottage separated from the rest by wide tracts of furze and heather stood here, and near it lay a neglected garden. But “Gaffer” Mundy had long ceased to fight the moor or care for his plot of land. His patch of the reclaimed earth returned fast to primitive savagery. Brake fern sprouted in the potato bed; rush, heather and briar choked the currant bushes; fearless rabbits nibbled every green thing.
“Come in, whoever you may be,” said an ancient voice. So the visitor obeyed and entered, to find the sufferer, fully dressed, sitting by a fire of peat. Noah Mundy was once very tall, but now his height had vanished and he had been long bent under his burden of years. A bald, yellow skull rose above his countenance, and infinite age marked his face. As the earth through centuries of cooling has wrinkled into mountains and flattened into ocean beds between them, so these aged features, stamped and torn with the fret and fever of long life, had become as a book whereon time had written many things for those who could read them. Very weak was the man, and very thin. He was toothless and almost hairless; the scanty beard that fell from his chin was white, while his mustache had long been dyed with snuff to a lively yellow. His eyes remained alive, though one was filmed over with an opaline haze. But from the other he saw clearly enough for all his needs. He made it a boast that he could not write, and he could not read. There was no book in his house.
“’Tis you, eh? I could have wished for a man out of your trade, but it won’t matter. I’ve got a thing worth telling; but mark this, I don’t care a button what you think of it, an’ I don’t want none of your bunkum an’ lies after I have told it. Sit down in that thicky chair an’ smoke your pipe an’ keep cool. Ban’t no use getting excited now, for what I be going to tell ’e happened more’n sixty years ago—afore you was born or thought about.”