“The punishment do fall on his wife an’ child, come to think of it. He was cut off so sudden, an’ left no provision for ’em at all.”
“That’s the law and the prophets,” declared Mr. Lethbridge. “Sins of the fathers be visited on the children—also pretty often on the widows, though they ban’t named by name.”
“Where’s the justice of that, then? Got you there!” cried the blacksmith, triumphantly.
“If you’ve got anybody, you’ve got the Old Testament,” answered the other, grimly, “an’ I’d advise you to call home your words again, an’ not flout the Book o’ Life in a graveyard. ’Twon’t be for your good. An’ such things will turn the scale at Judgement. The man was cut off, an’ ’tis the quality of punishment not to stop at the sinner, but to catch the innocent folk all around him—like measles or a fever do.”
“As a husband, it be generally granted he was a very good an’ proper man,” ventured Mr. Chugg.
“You can’t be a good husband and a bad man.”
“You’m so quick at words, there’s no being even with ye!”
Then the blacksmith went his way, and his friend shouted after him:—
“Justice be justice; an’ for my part I’ll always tell the truth, as I always have, whether it be to a man’s face or his coffin-lid.”
There came a day after long years, and June smiled as of yore, and the scythe of Jonas Lethbridge smoothed the grassy graveyard, even as the scythe of Time filled it. He took a gloomy pride in the place; and while his father, who now slept beneath, had been content to dig deep and bury well, this silent man passed his abstracted days among the graves, and made the face of the little churchyard fair to see.
Few problems troubled him; yet upon this hour in young summer he was faced with a difficulty. He paused, looked with down-drawn brows at a faint path worn in the grass between certain tombs. It was a way trodden there by a woman’s feet, and it led—not to the grave of Amos Thorn, but to a little mound near it, where the woodman’s son slept beside him.
“Haven’t spoke a word to her since her flinged me over, an’ never thought to; but ’tis my duty,” the sexton reflected, “an’ my duty I must do. I could set sticks across, but she’d only think I was ’feared of her. For that matter, so I be.”