Chapter XXVII

In another week letters have passed, references been asked and given; Esther proved unimpeachably respectable; the amount of her salary agreed upon; the day of her journey into ----shire fixed, and all preliminaries settled previous to her undertaking the agreeable, free, and independent office of companion to John Blessington, Esq., of Blessington Court, in the county of ----, aged eighty-nine, and to Harriet Blessington his wife, aged eighty.

Miss Craven has but one good-bye to say, and on the afternoon of the day before her departure she stands in the churchyard ready to say it. It is only to a grave. Huge cloud headlands, great leaden capes and promontories, mournful and heavy with unwept snow-tears, heap and pile themselves up behind the dim mirk hills; it snowed last night, but the snow has nearly all melted; only enough remains to make the old dirty church-tower, from which great patches of whitewash have fallen, look dirtier than ever. Upon the broken headstones, all awry and askew with age and negligence, the lichens flourish dankly. Wet nettles and faded bents overlie, overcross each cold hillock. No one cares to weed in the garden of the dead. Each hillock is the last chapter in some forgotten history.

Oh! why must all stories that are told truly end amongst the worms? Why must death be always at the _end_ of life? Oh! if we could but get it over, like some cruelest operation, in the middle or early part of our little day; so that we might have some half a life, some quarter or twentieth part even of one, to live merrily in, to breathe and laugh and be gay in, without, in our cheerfullest moments, experiencing the chilly fear of feeling the black-cloaked skeleton-headed phantom lay his bony finger on us, saying, "Thou art mine!"

Upon the grey flat tombstone near the church-gate the great grave yew has been dropping her scarlet berries, one by one--berries that shine, like little lights, amid the night of her changeless foliage: there they lie like a forgotten rosary, that some holy man, having prayed amongst the unpraying dead, going, has left behind him. Evening is closing in fast; the air is raw and chill; no one that can avoid it is outside a house's sheltering walls: there is no one to disturb Esther's meeting with her brother. What cares she for the cold, or for the six feet of miry earth that part them. She flings herself upon the sodden mound; stretching herself all along upon it, as the prophet stretched himself on the young dead child--hand to hand, heart to heart, mouth to mouth. She lays her lips upon the soaked soil, and whispers moaningly, "Good-bye, Jack--good-bye! Oh! why won't they let you answer me? Why have they buried you so deep that you cannot hear me?"

Lord God! of what stuff can Mary and Martha have been made, to have overlived the awful ecstasy of seeing their dead come forth in warm supple life out of the four-days-holding grave! Their hearts must have been made of tougher fibre than ours, or, in the agony of that terrible rapture, soul and body must have sundered suddenly, and they fallen down into the arms of that tomb whence their brother had just issued in his ghastly cerements, in dazed, astonished gladness!

As Esther lifts her streaming eyes, they fall upon the inscription on the cross at the grave-head:

"Here lieth the Body of JOHN CRAVEN, Who departed
this Life Sept. 24th, 186-. Aged 21 years."

"_Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!_"

She casts her arms about the base of the holy symbol; she presses her panting breast against the stone. "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" she cries too; and surely the live sinner needs mercy as much as the dead one? And as she so lies prostrate, with her forehead leant against the white damp marble, a hideous doubt flashes into her heart--sits there, like a little bitter serpent, gnawing it: "What if there be _no_ Lord! What if I am praying and weeping to and calling upon nothing!

"...................Let me not go mad!
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no heaven, no earth in the void world--
The wide, grave, lampless, deep, unpeopled world."

They tell us--don't they?--in our childhood, that wickedness makes people unhappy: I think the converse is full as often true--that unhappiness makes people wicked.

A little icy wind creeps coldly amongst the strong nettles and weak sapless bents, blowing them all one way--creeps, too, through Esther's mourning weeds, and makes a numbness about her shivering breast. For a moment an angry defiant despair masters her.

"What if this great distant being, who, without any foregone sin of ours, has laid upon us the punishment of _life_--in the hollow of whose hand we lie!--what if He be laughing at us all this while! What if the sight of our writhings, of our unlovely tears and grotesque agonies, be to Him, in His high prosperity, a pleasant diversion!"

So thinking, against her will she involuntarily clasps closer the cross in her straining arms--involuntarily moans a second time, "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" No--no! it cannot be so! it is one of those things that are too horrible to be believed! There is no justice _here!_ none! but it exists _somewhere!_ How else could we ever have conceived the idea of it? It is, then, in some other world: we shall find it on the other side of these drenched, nettly charnels--on the other side of corruption's disgrace and abasement:

"...........................If this be all,
And other life await us not, for one
I say, 'tis a poor cheat, a stupid bungle,
A wretched failure! I, for one, protest
Against it--and I hurl it back with scorn!"

Despair never stays long with any one, unless it is specially invited. Struck with sudden horror at the daring blasphemy of her thoughts, wretched Esther, with clasped hands and a flood of penitential tears, sinks upon her trembling knees. God grant that the thoughts that come to us, we know not whence, that stab us in the dark, that we welcome not, neither cherish at all--yea, rather, drive them away rudely, hatingly--may not be counted to us for crimes in His great Day of Reckoning, any more than the sudden-smiting disease that makes the strong man flag in his noonday is counted to him! With a sudden revulsion of feeling, with a paroxysm of devotion, powerfuller than the former one of doubt had been, the desolate child, prone on the grave of her one treasure, lifts quivering lips and emptied arms to Him who

"...................For mankynde's sake
Justed in Jerusalem, a joye to us all!"--

to Him of whom

"..........They who loved Him said 'He wept,'
None ever said 'He smiled!'"

Perhaps the good Lord, who was sorry for Mary and Martha, may be sorry for her too. Perhaps, after all, her boy is well rid of troublesome breath--well rid of his cares, and his farm, and his useless loving sister! Perhaps she is falsely fond to desire him again--to be so famished for one sight more of his grey laughing eyes, of his smooth stripling face! Beyond her sight, he may be in the fruition of extremest good--in the sweet shade, beneath pleasant-fruited trees, beside great cool rivers. Would she tear him back again thence to toil in the broiling sun, because, so toiling, he would be in her sight?

"If love were kind, why should we doubt That holy death were kinder?"

The night falls fast; she can scarcely any longer distinguish the clear, new black letters on the cross. Lights are twinkling from the village alehouse; the forge shines like a great dull-red jewel in the surrounding grey; laughing voices of boisterous men are wafted unseemly amongst the graves. Shuddering at the sound, she raises herself up quickly; then, stooping again, kisses yet once more the wet red earth that is now closest neighbour to her brother, and sobbing "Good-bye, my boy, good-bye!--God bless you, Jack!" gathers her dusky cloak about her slight shivering figure, and passes away through the darkness.