The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2

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As I went out for my walk the next morning, I caught sight of the sexton,
with whom as yet I had had but little communication, busily trimming some
of the newer graves in the churchyard. I turned in through the nearer gate,
which was fashioned like a lych-gate, with seats on the sides and a stone
table in the centre, but had no roof. The one on the other side of the
church was roofed, but probably they had found that here no roof could
resist the sea-blasts in winter. The top of the wall where the roof should
have rested, was simply covered with flat slates to protect it from the
rain.

"Good-morning, Coombes," I said.

He turned up a wizened, humorous old face, the very type of a
gravedigger's, and with one hand leaning on the edge of the green mound,
upon which he had been cropping with a pair of shears the too long and
too thin grass, touched his cap with the other, and bade me a cheerful
good-morning in return.

"You're making things tidy," I said.

"It take time to make them all comfortable, you see, sir," he returned,
taking up his shears again and clipping away at the top and sides of the
mound.

"You mean the dead, Coombes?"

"Yes, sir; to be sure, sir."

"You don't think it makes much difference to their comfort, do you, whether
the grass is one length or another upon their graves?"

"Well no, sir. I don't suppose it makes _much_ difference to them. But it
look more comfortable, you know. And I like things to look comfortable.
Don't you, sir?"

"To be sure I do, Coombes. And you are quite right. The resting-place
of the body, although the person it belonged to be far away, should be
respected."

"That's what I think, though I don't get no credit for it. I du believe the
people hereabouts thinks me only a single hair better than a Jack Ketch.
But I'm sure I du my best to make the poor things comfortable."

He seemed unable to rid his mind of the idea that the comfort of the
departed was dependent upon his ministrations.

"The trouble I have with them sometimes! There's now this same one as lies
here, old Jonathan Giles. He have the gout so bad! and just as I come
within a couple o' inches o' the right depth, out come the edge of a great
stone in the near corner at the foot of the bed. Thinks I, he'll never lie
comfortable with that same under his gouty toe. But the trouble I had
to get out that stone! I du assure you, sir, it took me nigh half the
day.--But this be one of the nicest places to lie in all up and down the
coast--a nice gravelly soil, you see, sir; dry, and warm, and comfortable.
Them poor things as comes out of the sea must quite enjoy the change, sir."

There was something grotesque in the man's persistence in regarding the
objects of his interest from this point of view. It was a curious way for
the humanity that was in him to find expression; but I did not like to let
him go on thus. It was so much opposed to all that I believed and felt
about the change from this world to the next!

"But, Coombes," I said, "why will you go on talking as if it made an atom
of difference to the dead bodies where they were buried? They care no more
about it than your old coat would care where it was thrown after you had
done with it."

He turned and regarded his coat where it hung beside him on the headstone
of the same grave at which he was working, shook his head with a smile that
seemed to hint a doubt whether the said old coat would be altogether so
indifferent to its treatment when, it was past use as I had implied. Then
he turned again to his work, and after a moment's silence began to approach
me from another side. I confess he had the better of me before I was aware
of what he was about.

"The church of Boscastle stands high on the cliff. You've been to
Boscastle, sir?"

I told him I had not yet, but hoped to go before the summer was over.

"Ah, you should see Boscastle, sir. It's a wonderful place. That's where I
was born, sir. When I was a by that church was haunted, sir. It's a damp
place, and the wind in it awful. I du believe it stand higher than any
church in the country, and have got more wind in it of a stormy night than
any church whatsomever. Well, they said it was haunted; and sure enough
every now and then there was a knocking heard down below. And this always
took place of a stormy night, as if there was some poor thing down in the
low wouts (_vaults_), and he wasn't comfortable and wanted to get out.
Well, one night it was so plain and so fearful it was that the sexton he
went and took the blacksmith and a ship's carpenter down to the harbour,
and they go up together, and they hearken all over the floor, and they open
one of the old family wouts that belongs to the Penhaligans, and they go
down with a light. Now the wind it was a-blowing all as usual, only worse
than common. And there to be sure what do they see but the wout half-full
of sea-water, and nows and thens a great spout coming in through a hole in
the rock; for it was high-water and a wind off the sea, as I tell you.
And there was a coffin afloat on the water, and every time the spout come
through, it set it knocking agen the side o' the wout, and that was the
ghost."

"What a horrible idea!" I said, with a half-shudder at the unrest of the
dead.

The old man uttered a queer long-drawn sound,--neither a chuckle, a crow,
nor a laugh, but a mixture of all three,--and turned himself yet again
to the work which, as he approached the end of his narration, he had
suspended, that he might make his story _tell_, I suppose, by looking me
in the face. And as he turned he said, "I thought you would like to be
comfortable then as well as other people, sir."

I could not help laughing to see how the cunning old fellow had caught me.
I have not yet been able to find out how much of truth there was in his
story. From the twinkle of his eye I cannot help suspecting that if he did
not invent the tale, he embellished it, at least, in order to produce the
effect which he certainly did produce. Humour was clearly his predominant
disposition, the reflex of which was to be seen, after a mild lunar
fashion, on the countenance of his wife. Neither could I help thinking
with pleasure, as I turned away, how the merry little old man would enjoy
telling his companions how he had posed the new parson. Very welcome was
he to his laugh for my part. Yet I gladly left the churchyard, with its
sunshine above and its darkness below. Indeed I had to look up to the
glittering vanes on the four pinnacles of the church-tower, dwelling aloft
in the clean sunny air, to get the feeling of the dark vault, and the
floating coffin, and the knocking heard in the windy church, out of my
brain. But the thing that did free me was the reflection with what
supreme disregard the disincarcerated spirit would look upon any possible
vicissitudes of its abandoned vault. For in proportion as the body of man's
revelation ceases to be in harmony with the spirit that dwells therein,
it becomes a vault, a prison, from which it must be freedom to escape at
length. The house we like best would be a prison of awful sort if doors and
windows were built up. Man's abode, as age begins to draw nigh, fares thus.
Age is in fact the mason that builds up the doors and the windows, and
death is the angel that breaks the prison-house and lets the captives free.
Thus I got something out of the sexton's horrible story.

But before the week was over, death came near indeed--in far other fashion
than any funereal tale could have brought it.

One day, after lunch, I had retired to my study, and was dozing in my
chair, for the day was hot, when I was waked by Charlie rushing into the
room with the cry, "Papa, papa, there's a man drowning."

I started up, and hurried down to the drawing-room, which looked out over
the bay. I could see nothing but people running about on the edge of the
quiet waves. No sign of human being was on--the water. But the one boat
belonging to the pilot was coming out from the shelter of the lock of the
canal where it usually lay, and my friend of the coastguard was running
down from the tower on the cliff with ropes in his hand. He would not stop
the boat even for the moment it would need to take him on board, but threw
them in and urged to haste. I stood at the window and watched. Every now
and then I fancied I saw something white heaved up on the swell of a wave,
and as often was satisfied that I had but fancied it. The boat seemed to be
floating about lazily, if not idly. The eagerness to help made it appear as
if nothing was going on. Could it, after all, have been a false alarm? Was
there, after all, no insensible form swinging about in the sweep of those
waves, with life gradually oozing away? Long, long as it seemed to me, I
watched, and still the boat kept moving from place to place, so far out
that I could see nothing distinctly of the motions of its crew. At length I
saw something. Yes; a long white thing rose from the water slowly, and was
drawn into the boat. It rowed swiftly to the shore. There was but one place
fit to land upon,--a little patch of sand, nearly covered at high-water,
but now lying yellow in the sun, under the window at which I stood, and
immediately under our garden-wall. Thither the boat shot along; and there
my friend of the coastguard, earnest and sad, was waiting to use, though
without hope, every appliance so well known to him from the frequent
occurrence of such necessity in the course of his watchful duties along
miles and miles of stormy coast.

I will not linger over the sad details of vain endeavour. The honoured head
of a family, he had departed and left a good name behind him. But even in
the midst of my poor attentions to the quiet, speechless, pale-faced wife,
who sat at the head of the corpse, I could not help feeling anxious about
the effect on my Connie. It was impossible to keep the matter concealed
from her. The undoubted concern on the faces of the two boys was enough to
reveal that something serious and painful had occurred; while my wife and
Wynnie, and indeed the whole household, were busy in attending to every
remotest suggestion of aid that reached them from the little crowd gathered
about the body. At length it was concluded, on the verdict of the medical
man who had been sent for, that all further effort was useless. The body
was borne away, and I led the poor lady to her lodging, and remained there
with her till I found that, as she lay on the sofa, the sleep that so
often dogs the steps of sorrow had at length thrown its veil over her
consciousness, and put her for the time to rest. There is a gentle
consolation in the firmness of the grasp of the inevitable, known but to
those who are led through the valley of the shadow. I left her with her son
and daughter, and returned to my own family. They too were of course in the
skirts of the cloud. Had they only heard of the occurrence, it would have
had little effect; but death had appeared to them. Everyone but Connie had
seen the dead lying there; and before the day was over, I wished that she
too had seen the dead. For I found from what she said at intervals, and
from the shudder that now and then passed through her, that her imagination
was at work, showing but the horrors that belong to death; for the
enfolding peace that accompanies it can be known but by sight of the dead.
When I spoke to her, she seemed, and I suppose for the time felt tolerably
quiet and comfortable; but I could see that the words she had heard fall in
the going and coming, and the communications of Charlie and Harry to each
other, had made as it were an excoriation on her fancy, to which her
consciousness was ever returning. And now I became more grateful than I
had yet been for the gift of that gipsy-child. For I felt no anxiety about
Connie so long as she was with her. The presence even of her mother could
not relieve her, for she and Wynnie were both clouded with the same
awe, and its reflex in Connie was distorted by her fancy. But the sweet
ignorance of the baby, which rightly considered is more than a type or
symbol of faith, operated most healingly; for she appeared in her sweet
merry ways--no baby was ever more filled with the mere gladness of life
than Connie's baby--to the mood in which they all were, like a little sunny
window in a cathedral crypt, telling of a whole universe of sunshine and
motion beyond those oppressed pillars and low-groined arches. And why
should not the baby know best? I believe the babies do know best. I
therefore favoured her having the child more than I might otherwise have
thought good for her, being anxious to get the dreary, unhealthy impression
healed as soon as possible, lest it should, in the delicate physical
condition in which she was, turn to a sore.

But my wife suffered for a time nearly as much as Connie. As long as she
was going about the house or attending to the wants of her family, she was
free; but no sooner did she lay her head on the pillow than in rushed the
cry of the sea, fierce, unkind, craving like a wild beast. Again and again
she spoke of it to me, for it came to her mingled with the voice of the
tempter, saying, "_Cruel chance_," over and over again. For although the
two words contradict each other when put together thus, each in its turn
would assert itself.

A great part of the doubt in the world comes from the fact that there are
in it so many more of the impressible as compared with the originating
minds. Where the openness to impression is balanced by the power of
production, the painful questions of the world are speedily met by their
answers; where such is not the case, there are often long periods of
suffering till the child-answer of truth is brought to the birth. Hence the
need for every impressible mind to be, by reading or speech, held in living
association with an original mind able to combat those suggestions of doubt
and even unbelief, which the look of things must often occasion--a look
which comes from our inability to gain other than fragmentary visions of
the work that the Father worketh hitherto. When the kingdom of heaven is at
hand, one sign thereof will be that all clergymen will be more or less of
the latter sort, and mere receptive goodness, no more than education and
moral character, will be considered sufficient reason for a man's occupying
the high position of an instructor of his fellows. But even now this
possession of original power is not by any means to be limited to those
who make public show of the same. In many a humble parish priest it shows
itself at the bedside of the suffering, or in the admonition of the closet,
although as yet there are many of the clergy who, so far from being able to
console wisely, are incapable of understanding the condition of those that
need consolation.

"It is all a fancy, my dear," I said to her. "There is nothing more
terrible in this than in any other death. On the contrary, I can hardly
imagine a less fearful one. A big wave falls on the man's head and stuns
him, and without further suffering he floats gently out on the sea of the
unknown."

"But it is so terrible for those left behind!"

"Had you seen the face of his widow, so gentle, so loving, so resigned in
its pallor, you would not have thought it so _terrible_."

But though she always seemed satisfied, and no doubt felt nearly so, after
any conversation of the sort, yet every night she would call out once and
again, "O, that sea, out there!" I was very glad indeed when Mr. Turner,
who had arranged to spend a short holiday with us, arrived.

He was concerned at the news I gave him of the shock both Connie and her
mother had received, and counselled an immediate change, that time might,
in the absence of surrounding associations, obliterate something of the
impression that had been made. The consequence was, that we resolved to
remove our household, for a short time, to some place not too far off to
permit of my attending to my duties at Kilkhaven, but out of the sight and
sound of the sea. It was Thursday when Mr. Turner arrived, and he spent the
next two days in inquiring and looking about for a suitable spot to which
we might repair as early in the week as possible.

On the Saturday the blacksmith was busy in the church-tower, and I went in
to see how he was getting on.

"You had a sad business here the last week, sir," he said, after we had
done talking about the repairs.

"A very sad business indeed," I answered.

"It was a warning to us all," he said.

"We may well take it so," I returned. "But it seems to me that we are too
ready to think of such remarkable things only by themselves, instead of
being roused by them to regard everything, common and uncommon, as ordered
by the same care and wisdom."

"One of our local preachers made a grand use of it."

I made no reply. He resumed.

"They tell me you took no notice of it last Sunday, sir."

"I made no immediate allusion to it, certainly. But I preached under the
influence of it. And I thought it better that those who could reflect on
the matter should be thus led to think for themselves than that they should
be subjected to the reception of my thoughts and feelings about it; for in
the main it is life and not death that we have to preach."

"I don't quite understand you, sir. But then you don't care much for
preaching in your church."

"I confess," I answered, "that there has been much indifference on that
point. I could, however, mention to you many and grand exceptions. Still
there is, even in some of the best in the church, a great amount of
disbelief in the efficacy of preaching. And I allow that a great deal of
what is called preaching, partakes of its nature only in the remotest
degree. But, while I hold a strong opinion of its value--that is, where it
is genuine--I venture just to suggest that the nature of the preaching to
which the body you belong to has resorted, has had something to do, by way
of a reaction, in driving the church to the other extreme."

"How do you mean that, sir?"

"You try to work upon people's feelings without reference to their
judgment. Anyone who can preach what you call rousing sermons is considered
a grand preacher amongst you, and there is a great danger of his being led
thereby to talk more nonsense than sense. And then when the excitement
goes off, there is no seed left in the soil to grow in peace, and they are
always craving after more excitement."

"Well, there is the preacher to rouse them up again."

"And the consequence is that they continue like children--the good ones, I
mean--and have hardly a chance of making a calm, deliberate choice of that
which is good; while those who have been only excited and nothing more, are
hardened and seared by the recurrence of such feeling as is neither aroused
by truth nor followed by action."

"You daren't talk like that if you knew the kind of people in this country
that the Methodists, as you call them, have got a hold of. They tell me it
was like hell itself down in those mines before Wesley come among them."

"I should be a fool or a bigot to doubt that the Wesleyans have done
incalculable good in the country. And that not alone to the people who
never went to church. The whole Church of England is under obligations to
Methodism such as no words can overstate."

"I wonder you can say such things against them, then."

"Now there you show the evil of thinking too much about the party you
belong to. It makes a man touchy; and then he fancies when another is
merely, it may be, analysing a difference, or insisting strongly on some
great truth, that he is talking against his party."

"But you said, sir, that our clergy don't care about moving our judgments,
only our feelings. Now I know preachers amongst us of whom that would be
anything but true."

"Of course there must be. But there is what I say--your party-feeling makes
you touchy. A man can't always be saying in the press of utterance, '_Of
course there are exceptions_.' That is understood. I confess I do not know
much about your clergy, for I have not had the opportunity. But I do know
this, that some of the best and most liberal people I have ever known have
belonged to your community."

"They do gather a deal of money for good purposes."

"Yes. But that was not what I meant by _liberal_. It is far easier to give
money than to be generous in judgment. I meant by _liberal_, able to see
the good and true in people that differ from you--glad to be roused to the
reception of truth in God's name from whatever quarter it may come, and not
readily finding offence where a remark may have chanced to be too sweeping
or unguarded. But I see that I ought to be more careful, for I have made
you, who certainly are not one of the quarrelsome people I have been
speaking of, misunderstand me."

"I beg your pardon, sir. I was hasty. But I do think I am more ready to
lose my temper since--"

Here he stopped. A fit of coughing came on, and, to my concern, was
followed by what I saw plainly could be the result only of a rupture in the
lungs. I insisted on his dropping his work and coming home with me, where I
made him rest the remainder of the day and all Sunday, sending word to
his mother that I could not let him go home. When we left on the Monday
morning, we took him with us in the carriage hired for the journey, and set
him down at his mother's, apparently no worse than usual.

CHAPTER VII.

AT THE FARM.

Leaving the younger members of the family at home with the servants, we set
out for a farmhouse, some twenty miles off, which Turner had discovered
for us. Connie had stood the journey down so well, and was now so much
stronger, that we had no anxiety about her so far as regarded the
travelling. Through deep lanes with many cottages, and here and there a
very ugly little chapel, over steep hills, up which Turner and Wynnie and
I walked, and along sterile moors we drove, stopping at roadside inns, and
often besides to raise Connie and let her look about upon the extended
prospect, so that it was drawing towards evening before we arrived at our
destination. On the way Turner had warned us that we were not to expect a
beautiful country, although the place was within reach of much that was
remarkable. Therefore we were not surprised when we drew up at the door of
a bare-looking, shelterless house, with scarcely a tree in sight, and a
stretch of undulating fields on every side.

"A dreary place in winter, Turner," I said, after we had seen Connie
comfortably deposited in the nice white-curtained parlour, smelling of
dried roses even in the height of the fresh ones, and had strolled out
while our tea--dinner was being got ready for us.

"Not a doubt of it; but just the place I wanted for Miss Connie," he
replied. "We are high above the sea, and the air is very bracing, and not,
at this season, too cold. A month later I should not on any account have
brought her here."

"I think even now there is a certain freshness in the wind that calls up a
kind of will in the nerves to meet it."

"That is precisely what I wanted for you all. You observe there is no rasp
in its touch, however. There are regions in this island of ours where
even in the hottest day in summer you would frequently discover a certain
unfriendly edge in the air, that would set you wondering whether the
seasons had not changed since you were a boy, and used to lie on the grass
half the idle day."

"I often do wonder whether it may not be so, but I always come to the
conclusion that even this is but an example of the involuntary tendency of
the mind of man towards the ideal. He forgets all that comes between and
divides the hints of perfection scattered here and there along the scope of
his experience. I especially remember one summer day in my childhood, which
has coloured all my ideas of summer and bliss and fulfilment of content.
It is made up of only mossy grass, and the scent of the earth and wild
flowers, and hot sun, and perfect sky--deep and blue, and traversed by
blinding white clouds. I could not have been more than five or six, I
think, from the kind of dress I wore, the very pearl buttons of which,
encircled on their face with a ring of half-spherical hollows, have their
undeniable relation in my memory to the heavens and the earth, to the march
of the glorious clouds, and the tender scent of the rooted flowers; and,
indeed, when I think of it, must, by the delight they gave me, have opened
my mind the more to the enjoyment of the eternal paradise around me. What a
thing it is to please a child!"

"I know what you mean perfectly," answered Turner. "It is as I get older
that I understand what Wordsworth says about childhood. It is indeed a
mercy that we were not born grown men, with what we consider our wits about
us. They are blinding things those wits we gather. I fancy that the single
thread by which God sometimes keeps hold of a man is such an impression of
his childhood as that of which you have been speaking."

"I do not doubt it; for conscience is so near in all those memories to
which you refer. The whole surrounding of them is so at variance with sin!
A sense of purity, not in himself, for the child is not feeling that he
is pure, is all about him; and when afterwards the condition returns upon
him,--returns when he is conscious of so much that is evil and so much that
is unsatisfied in him,--it brings with it a longing after the high clear
air of moral well-being."

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