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Updated: August 5, 2024
Down's money, she says; ''tis mine, an' I want you to see to it. I said I would, but we'd made a plot to git some o' them soldiers' headstones that's provided by the government. 'Twas a shame it had been overlooked so long. 'No, says she; 'I'm goin' to pay for Eb's myself. An' I told her there wouldn't be no objection. Don't ary one o' you speak about it. 'Twouldn't be fair.
It is but a small churchyard, and with few monuments of any pretension in it, most of them being slate headstones, standing erect. From the gate at which we entered, a distinct foot-track leads to the corner nearest the riverside, and I turned into it by a sort of instinct, the more readily as I saw a tourist-looking man approaching from that point, and a woman looking among the gravestones.
"I was sitting on the churchyard wall when they came up, one from one way, the other from the other; and Miss Vye was walking thereabouts, looking at the headstones. As soon as they had gone in I went to the door, feeling I should like to see it, as I knew her so well. I pulled off my boots because they were so noisy, and went up into the gallery.
It silvers the snow upon a barren heath between two shores, and shortens with each passing minute the shadows of countless headstones that bear no names, only numbers. The breakers that beat against the bluff wake not those who sleep there. In the deep trenches they lie, shoulder to shoulder, an army of brothers, homeless in life, but here at rest and at peace.
When their notes peal out on the Sabbath and go softly across the valley, I like to imagine that, through the nobler music which immortal ears may hear, he still catches their echo. "There, close together, stand two more headstones, and beneath them sleep the father and the aunt of these men. Thomas Burton, too, lived out a life of stalwart worth.
And every stone and tree on the rough little place, and the very birds that sang in the evening from the dark circle of forest were very dear to the old man's heart. From the doorway he could see down the leafy lane to the church and beyond it into the grassy graveyard with its leaning headstones. There was one there, an old moss-grown, wooden slab, once painted white.
But she passed by the door of it now, and, stepping among the wet grasses, came down the little slope among the headstones to where a very white marble angel clasped an equally white marble cross. She passed to the front of this, and looked, frowning a little over the intolerable taste of the thing.
But the idea of gaiety seems somewhat ironical when we learn that as it was difficult to get a sufficient number of large slabs quarried quickly, headstones from the cemetery of the Holy Innocents were taken for the purpose! Christine, as a child, showed an extraordinary capacity for learning, and this her father zealously fostered and developed.
"Ever go inside the graveyard?" she asked. Sometimes I do go there, and at that answer she walked nearer to me and spoke eagerly. "Air all the tombstones standin' up straight, do you know?" she said. "Hev any o' their headstones fell down on 'em?"
Or they would put up pony and cart at some village inn, explore old battlemented churches and churchyards with seventeenth and eighteenth century headstones, so far more tasteful and seemly than the hideous death memorials of the nineteenth century.
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