Chapter 10
593 Words
At length the dreaded week was come, when Amos and his children must
leave Shepperton. There was general regret among the parishioners at his
departure: not that any one of them thought his spiritual gifts
pre-eminent, or was conscious of great edification from his ministry. But
his recent troubles had called out their better sympathies, and that is
always a source of love. Amos failed to touch the spring of goodness by
his sermons, but he touched it effectually by his sorrows; and there was
now a real bond between him and his flock.
'My heart aches for them poor motherless children,' said Mrs. Hackit to
her husband, 'a-going among strangers, and into a nasty town, where
there's no good victuals to be had, and you must pay dear to get bad
uns.'
Mrs. Hackit had a vague notion of a town life as a combination of dirty
backyards, measly pork, and dingy linen.
The same sort of sympathy was strong among the poorer class of
parishioners. Old stiff-jointed Mr. Tozer, who was still able to earn a
little by gardening 'jobs', stopped Mrs. Cramp, the charwoman, on her way
home from the Vicarage, where she had been helping Nanny to pack up the
day before the departure, and inquired very particularly into Mr.
Barton's prospects.
'Ah, poor mon,' he was heard to say, 'I'm sorry for un. He hedn't much
here, but he'll be wuss off theer. Half a loaf's better nor ne'er un.'
The sad good-byes had all been said before that last evening; and after
all the packing was done and all the arrangements were made, Amos felt
the oppression of that blank interval in which one has nothing left to
think of but the dreary future--the separation from the loved and
familiar, and the chilling entrance on the new and strange. In every
parting there is an image of death.
Soon after ten o'clock, when he had sent Nanny to bed, that she might
have a good night's rest before the fatigues of the morrow, he stole
softly out to pay a last visit to Milly's grave. It was a moonless night,
but the sky was thick with stars, and their light was enough to show that
the grass had grown long on the grave, and that there was a tombstone
telling in bright letters, on a dark ground, that beneath were deposited
the remains of Amelia, the beloved wife of Amos Barton, who died in the
thirty-fifth year of her age, leaving a husband and six children to
lament her loss. The final words of the inscription were, 'Thy will be
done.'
The husband was now advancing towards the dear mound from which he was so
soon to be parted, perhaps for ever. He stood a few minutes reading over
and over again the words on the tombstone, as if to assure himself that
all the happy and unhappy past was a reality. For love is frightened at
the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little
and little on the dominion of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the
keenness of the first anguish.
Gradually, as his eye dwelt on the words, 'Amelia, the beloved wife,' the
waves of feeling swelled within his soul, and he threw himself on the
grave, clasping it with his arms, and kissing the cold turf.
'Milly, Milly, dost thou hear me? I didn't love thee enough--I wasn't
tender enough to thee--but I think of it all now.'
The sobs came and choked his utterance, and the warm tears fell.
- Writer
