History and genealogy of Peter Montague, of Nansemond and ...

42
INTRODUCTION.
see.' We differed from her, saying there was a great deal that
interested us,—could anything be more picturesque or beautiful than
the churchyard ? She shook her head. ' The churchyard was thick
with graves, some with stones and some without, like any other place
of the sort—a poor, melancholy place it was. She thought it so
lonely and miserable, and yet sketchers were always making pictures
of it ; and she had seen a printed book once with a picture of it,
and its history all done into print. She could not but think the
gentry had very little to write about. Yes, there were stories about
those who lay there—many stories. There was a story of two
brothers—wicked men, she called them—who died, she could not
well tell how ; and as to the things cut upon tombstones, she set no
count by such grand words—she knew her own know ! People
could
get anything they liked cut on stones if they paid for it. There was
a cold, proud man who lived at the Hall when she was a child—
bad, cruel man ; his shadow would wither up the young grass, and
the look of his eye was as bad as a curse. He died, as he had lived,
full up of bitter riches : he was not buried in this churchyard—it was
not grand enough for him—but in a fine new one, where so much
was put on his tomb about his charity—he who would steal a halfpenny
out of a blind man's hat— about his justice, who would rob a
foot off the highway to add to his own field—about his being a meek
!
Christian ' the woman laughed, scornfully ;
haughty reprobate !
Well,
i meek !
meek
!
the
a poor little lad, who had but too good
reason to know the falsity of the whole, from first to last, wrote under
' !
it, It's all lies ' and though every one in the place said the lad was
a true lad, and a brave lad, yet he lost his situation, and not one in
the place dared give him food or shelter, so he left the neighborhood
did the lad ; but as sure as that sun is shining above us, so sure is
there One who sifts the tares from the wheat— yes, indeed, the tares
from the wheat. And I forget how it was, for I married out of the
village, and just came back ten years ago, like a crow to the old nest
—only he grew rich, through honest labour ; and his son is in the
Hall now ; and the great tombstone was cleared away, and nothing
to be seen now but a broad slab, with never a word on it, over the
bad man's dust and ashes.'
She was a strange, weird-looking old creature, with odds and ends
of information :
like an artist who can paint a distance, but not a
foreground, the past was with her light and bright enough, but the