The Seaboard Parish, Complete

“Don’t think me very disagreeable, papa. I know I am a trouble to you. But I am a trouble to myself first. I fear I have a discontented mind and a complaining temper. But I do try, and I will try hard to overcome it.”

“It will not get the better of you, so long as you do the duty of the moment. But I think, as I told you before, that you are not very well, and that your indisposition is going to do you good by making you think about some things you are ready to think about, but which you might have banished if you had been in good health and spirits. You are feeling as you never felt before, that you need a presence in your soul of which at least you haven’t enough yet. But I preached quite enough to you yesterday, and I won’t go on the same way to-day again. Only I wanted to comfort you. Come and give me my breakfast.”

“You do comfort me, papa,” she answered, approaching the table. “I know I don’t show what I feel as I ought, but you do comfort me much. Don’t you like a day like this, papa?”

“I do, my dear. I always did. And I think you take after me in that, as you do in a good many things besides. That is how I understand you so well.”

“Do I really take after you, papa? Are you sure that you understand me so well?” she asked, brightening up.

“I know I do,” I returned, replying to her last question.

“Better than I do myself?” she asked with an arch smile.

“Considerably, if I mistake not,” I answered.

“How delightful! To think that I am understood even when I don’t understand myself!”

“But even if I am wrong, you are yet understood. The blessedness of life is that we can hide nothing from God. If we could hide anything from God, that hidden thing would by and by turn into a terrible disease. It is the sight of God that keeps and makes things clean. But as we are both, by mutual confession, fond of this kind of weather, what do you say to going out with me? I have to visit a sick woman.”

“You don’t mean Mrs. Coombes, papa?”

“No, my dear. I did not hear she was ill.”

“O, I daresay it is nothing much. Only old nursey said yesterday she was in bed with a bad cold, or something of that sort.”

“We’ll call and inquire as we pass,—that is, if you are inclined to go with me.”

“How can you put an if to that, papa?”

“I have just had a message from that cottage that stands all alone on the corner of Mr. Barton’s farm—over the cliff, you know—that the woman is ill, and would like to see me. So the sooner we start the better.”

“I shall have done my breakfast in five minutes, papa. O, here’s mamma!—Mamma, I’m going out for a walk in the rain with papa. You won’t mind, will you?”

“I don’t think it will do you any harm, my dear. That’s all I mind, you know. It was only once or twice when you were not well that I objected to it. I quite agree with your papa, that only lazy people are glad to stay in-doors when it rains.”

“And it does blow so delightfully!” said Wynnie, as she left the room to put on her long cloak and her bonnet.

We called at the sexton’s cottage, and found him sitting gloomily by the low window, looking seaward.

“I hope your wife is not very poorly, Coombes,” I said.

“No, sir. She be very comfortable in bed. Bed’s not a bad place to be in in such weather,” he answered, turning again a dreary look towards the Atlantic. “Poor things!”

“What a passion for comfort you have, Coombes! How does that come about, do you think?”

“I suppose I was made so, sir.”

“To be sure you were. God made you so.”

“Surely, sir. Who else?”

“Then I suppose he likes making people comfortable if he makes people like to be comfortable.”

“It du look likely enough, sir.”

“Then when he takes it out of your hands, you mustn’t think he doesn’t look after the people you would make comfortable if you could.”

“I must mind my work, you know, sir.”

“Yes, surely. And you mustn’t want to take his out of his hands, and go grumbling as if you would do it so much better if he would only let you get your hand to it.”

“I daresay you be right, sir,” he said. “I must just go and have a look about, though. Here’s Agnes. She’ll tell you about mother.”

He took his spade from the corner, and went out. He often brought his tools into the cottage. He had carved the handle of his spade all over with the names of the people he had buried.

“Tell your mother, Agnes, that I will call in the evening and see her, if she would like to see me. We are going now to see Mrs. Stokes. She is very poorly, I hear.”

“Let us go through the churchyard, papa,” said Wynnie, “and see what the old man is doing.”

“Very well, my dear. It is only a few steps round.”

“Why do you humour the sexton’s foolish fancy so much, papa? It is such nonsense! You taught us it was, surely, in your sermon about the resurrection?”

“Most certainly, my dear. But it would be of no use to try to get it out of his head by any argument. He has a kind of craze in that direction. To get people’s hearts right is of much more importance than convincing their judgments. Right judgment will follow. All such fixed ideas should be encountered from the deepest grounds of truth, and not from the outsides of their relations. Coombes has to be taught that God cares for the dead more than he does, and therefore it is unreasonable for him to be anxious about them.”

When we reached the churchyard we found the old man kneeling on a grave before its headstone. It was a very old one, with a death’s-head and cross-bones carved upon the top of it in very high relief. With his pocket-knife he was removing the lumps of green moss out of the hollows of the eyes of the carven skull. We did not interrupt him, but walked past with a nod.

“You saw what he was doing, Wynnie? That reminds me of almost the only thing in Dante’s grand poem that troubles me. I cannot think of it without a renewal of my concern, though I have no doubt he is as sorry now as I am that ever he could have written it. When, in the Inferno, he reaches the lowest region of torture, which is a solid lake of ice, he finds the lost plunged in it to various depths, some, if I remember rightly, entirely submerged, and visible only through the ice, transparent as crystal, like the insects found in amber. One man with his head only above the ice, appeals to him as condemned to the same punishment to take pity on him, and remove the lumps of frozen tears from his eyes, that he may weep a little before they freeze again and stop the relief once more. Dante says to him, ‘Tell me who you are, and if I do not assist you, I deserve to lie at the bottom of the ice myself.’ The man tells him who he is, and explains to him one awful mystery of these regions. Then he says, ‘Now stretch forth thy hand, and open my eyes.’ ‘And,’ says Dante, I did not open them for him; and rudeness to him was courtesy.’”

“But he promised, you said.”

“He did; and yet he did not do it. Pity and truth had abandoned him together. One would think little of it comparatively, were it not that Dante is so full of tenderness and grand religion. It is very awful, and may teach us many things.”

“But what made you think of that now?”

“Merely what Coombes was about. The visual image was all. He was scooping the green moss out of the eyes of the death’s-head on the gravestone.”

By this time we were on the top of the downs, and the wind was buffeting us, and every other minute assailing us with a blast of rain. Wynnie drew her cloak closer about her, bent her head towards the blast, and struggled on bravely by my side. No one who wants to enjoy a walk in the rain must carry an umbrella; it is pure folly. When we came to one of the stone fences, we cowered down by its side for a few moments to recover our breath, and then struggled on again. Anything like conversation was out of the question. At length we dropped into a hollow, which gave us a little repose. Down below the sea was dashing into the mouth of the glen, or coomb, as they call it there. On the opposite side of the hollow, the little house to which we were going stood up against the gray sky.

“I begin to doubt whether I ought to have brought you, Wynnie. It was thoughtless of me; I don’t mean for your sake, but because your presence may be embarrassing in a small house; for probably the poor woman may prefer seeing me alone.”

“I will go back, papa. I sha’n’t mind it a bit.”

“No; you had better come on. I shall not be long with her, I daresay. We may find some place that you can wait in. Are you wet?”

“Only my cloak. I am as dry as a tortoise inside.”

“Come along, then. We shall soon be there.”