I fancied
He’d popped up to say fifty: but he dropped back
With knees to chin. They’d got to screw him down:
And they’d sore work to get him underground—
Snow overnight had reached the window-sill:
And when, at length, the cart got on the road,
The coffin was jolted twice into the drifts,
Before they’d travelled the twelve-mile to the church-yard:
And the hole they’d howked for him, chockful of slush:
And the coffin slipt with a splash into the sluther.
Ay—we see life at Krindlesyke, God help us!
Judith:
A fearsome end.
Bell:
Little to choose, ’twixt ends.
So, Michael’s granddad, and your girl’s, went home
To his forefathers, and theirs—both Barrasfords:
Though I’d guess your bairn’s a gentler strain: yet mine’s
No streak of me. All Barrasford, I judged him:
But, though he’s Ezra’s stubbornness, he’s naught
Of foxy Peter: and grows more like Eliza,
I’d fancy: though I never kenned her, living:
I only saw her, dead.
Judith:
Eliza, too?
Bell:
I was the first to look on her dead face,
The morn I came: if she’d but lived a day—
Just one day longer, she’d have let me go.
No living woman could have held me here:
But she was dead; and so, I had to stay—
A fly, caught in the web of a dead spider.
It must be her he favours: and he’s got
A dogged patience well-nigh crazes me:
A husband, born, as I was never born
For wife. But, happen, you ken him, well as I,
Leastways, his company-side, since he does business
At Bellingham? A happy ending, eh!
For our mischances, they should make a match:
Though naught that ever happens is an ending;
A wedding, least of all.
Judith: