to him, and, as may be gathered, he had consulted the churchwardens on the question of the alterations, and among other things suggested that the old clerk should be asked to resign.
The effect we have seen, and that same day Portlock, the farmer, went up and told the result of his chat with the old clerk.
“It is very provoking, Mr Portlock, very. I want the old man to go quietly – in fact, to resign,” said the Rector. “If I send him away the people will say that he is ill-used.”
“That they will, depend on’t,” replied the Churchwarden. “Our folk take a deal o’ driving.”
“Well, well; what is to be done?”
“Best let things bide as they are, sir; you wean’t do any good by trying to alter ’em.”
“Oh, but that is absurd, Mr Portlock, highly absurd. No, I regret it very much, but he must go. There, I will see him myself.”
The Rector saw the old clerk sooner than he expected, for in crossing the churchyard next day he met him going up to the church.
“Poor old fellow! ninety-three,” said the Rector to himself, as he looked curiously at the strange old figure tottering up the rough cobble-stone path.
“Good-morning, Warmoth,” he said. “Here, give me your hand.”
The old man stopped short, thumped his stick down, and peered up fiercely.
“Nay, nay, nay,” he groaned, “not so owd as all that, mester. I can do it yet. Let me bide, I’m reight yet. Yow want to get shut o’ me – to drift me off. Yow thowt wi’ your new ways that I wasn’t good enew for t’ church, but revvylootion or no revvylootion, I stick to church as my fathers did afore me. When I’m down theer, and can howd out no more, thou mun do thy worst.”
“That’s all put aside, Mr Warmoth,” said the Rector, smiling. “I do want to make improvements here, but not to that extent. I did not want to hurt your feelings. Come, shake hands.”
“Nay; I’ll not,” cried the old man, fiercely, his bearing seeming to have wonderfully altered now. “Thou want’st to get round me wi’ soft words, but I’ll howd thee off – I’ll howd thee off. There ain’t every servant of t’ owd church like me, and I’ll howd my own unto the last.”
“My good old fellow, Heaven forbid that I should be guilty of so unkind an act. You shall stop on, Warmoth, till the last, for no act of mine shall remove you from your post.”
The old man’s jaw fell, and he stepped back, slipped, and would have fallen, but for the Rector’s hands, to which the old fellow clung spasmodically, his face working, his lips twitching in his efforts to speak. But for a long time no words would come, and then but two, twice repeated, though with earnest emphasis —
“Bless thee! Bless thee!”
Then, quickly snatching his hands away, the old man turned aside, leaned his trembling arm against a tombstone which had gradually encroached upon the path, and stood with his head bent down, trying to recover his strength.
It was a strange contrast: the thin, sharply featured old man, and the handsome portly figure of the Rector, as he stood there vexed with himself at having, as he called it, been so weak as to give way at the first difficulty that he had to encounter; and he afterwards came to the conclusion that he might just as well have held out, for the people gave him the credit of killing old Warmoth so as to have his way.
“Let me help you into the church to sit down for a bit,” he said to the trembling old man.
Old Warmoth turned and laid one hand upon the Rector’s, gazing up in his face, and there was a piteous smile upon his withered lips.
“I was afraid thou’d want me to go as soon as I heard thou was coming back; and they said thou’dst get shut o’ me. But sixty year, sir! It would have killed me. I couldn’t have beared to go.”
Two Sundays later the congregation had just left the church, and Portlock was going up to the vestry, when he saw there was something wrong in the clerk’s seat.
“Why, Sammy, owd man,” he cried, “what ails – ”
He did not finish his broken sentence, but tore open the door of the clerk’s desk, the Rector coming forward to where the old man knelt in his accustomed narrow place, his hands upon his book, his head upon his breast, as he had knelt down after the sermon.
“He’s like ice,” whispered the Churchwarden, putting forth his great strength, and lifting the old man bodily out, to lay him by the stove, the Rector placing a cushion beneath his head.
The motion seemed to revive the old man for a moment, and he opened his eyes, staring strangely at the Rector, who held one hand.
Then his lips moved, and in a voice hardly above a whisper they heard him say —
“Bless – thou! – Bless – thou! – those words would – have killed me.”
There was a pause, and the Churchwarden was hastening forth to fetch help, when there arose in the now empty church a shrill “Amen.”
It was the old clerk’s last.
Part 1, Chapter IV.
At Lawford School
“Oh!” in a loud shrill voice; and then a general titter.
“Silence! who was that?”
“Please, Miss, Cissy Hudson, Miss. Please, Miss, it’s Mr Bone.”
This last delivered in a chorus of shrill voices; and Sage Portlock turned sharply from the semi-circle of children, one and all standing with their toes accurately touching a thickly-chalked line, to see a head thrust into the schoolroom, but with the edge of the door held closely against the neck, pressing it upon the jamb, so that the entire body to which the head belonged was invisible.
The head which had been thus suddenly thrust into the schoolroom was not attractive, the face being red and deeply lined with marks not made by age. The eyes were dull and watery, there was a greyish stubble of a couple of days’ growth upon the chin, and the hair that appeared above the low brow was rough, unkempt, and, if clean, did no justice to the cleansing hand.
“How tiresome!” muttered Sage Portlock, moving towards the door, which then opened, and a tall man, in a very shabby thin greatcoat which reached almost to his heels, stumped into the room.
Stumped or thumped – either word will do to express the heavy way in which Humphrey Bone, thirty years master of Lawford boys’ school, drew attention to the fact that he had one leg much shorter than the other, the difference in length being made up by a sole of some five inches’ thickness, which sole came down upon the red-brick floor like the modified blows of a pavior’s rammer.
Such a clever man! Such a good teacher! the Lawford people said. There was nothing against him but a drop of drink, and this drop of drink had kept Humphrey Bone a poor man, dislocated his hip in a fall upon a dark night, when the former doctor of the place had not discovered the exact nature of the injury till it was too late, and the drop of drink in this instance had resulted in the partaker becoming a permanent cripple.
Lawford was such a slow-moving place in those days, that it took its principal inhabitants
