The Guardian Of God's Acre

"It's crowded," he muttered.

"We lie close, as we lived close, in Our Square. I am glad for her father's sake that Minnie wished to come back."

"She said she couldn't rest peaceful anywhere else. She said she had some sort of right to be here."

"The Munns belong to what we call the Inalienables in Our Square," said I, and told him of the high court decision which secured to the descendants of the original "churchyard membership," and to them alone, the inalienable right to lie in God's Acre, provided, as in the ancient charter, they had "died in honorable estate." I added: "Bartholomew Storrs, as sexton, has constituted himself watchdog of our graves and censor of our dead. He carried one case to the Supreme Court in an attempt to keep an unhappy woman from sleeping in that pious company."

"That sour-faced prohibitionist?" growled Mr. Hines, employing what I suspect to be the blackest anathema in his lexicon. "Is he the sexton?"

"The same. Our mortuary genius," I confirmed.

"She was a good girl, Min was," said Mr. Hines firmly, though, it might appear, a trifle inconsequentially: "I don't care what they say. Anyway, after I met up with her"; in which qualifying afterthought lay a whole sorrowful and veiled history.

I waited.

"What did they say about her, down here?" he asked jealously.

"Oh, there were rumors. They didn't reach her father."

"No: tell me," he persisted. "I gotta know."

Because Mr. Hines had already impressed himself upon me as one with whom straight talk would serve best, I acceded.

"Bartholomew Storrs said that her feet took hold on hell."

Mr. Hines's face remained impassive. Only his hands worked slightly, perhaps kneading an imaginary throat. I perceived him to be a person of considerable and perhaps formidable self-control.

"Not that she hadn't her friends. The Bonnie Lassie would have stood by her if she had come back, and little Mrs. Morse, and our Dr. Smith, and MacLachan, who thought he had lost his own girl the same way, and--and others, plenty."

"And you, Dominie," said the hard, pink Mr. Hines.

"My dear sir, old men cannot afford harsh judgments. They are too near their own time."

"Yeh?" said Mr. Hines absently. "I guess that's right." But his mind was plainly elsewhere. "When would you say would be the best time to do business with old Funeral-Clothes?" he asked after a thoughtful pause.

"You want to see Bartholomew Storrs?" I interpreted.

"Sure. I gotta deliver the death certificate to him if he runs the graveyard, haven't I?"

"Such is the procedure, I believe."

"Besides," he added with a leer, "I want to get some of that weepy poetry of his."

"Well; he'll sell it to you readily."

"I'll say he'll sell it to me," returned Mr. Hines with a grimness which I failed to comprehend.

"Now is as good a time as any to catch him in his office." I pointed to a sign at the farther end of the yard.

Mr. Hines seemed in no hurry to go. With his elegantly lacquered cane, he picked at the sod, undecidedly. His chill, veiled eyes roved about the open space. He lifted his pearl-gray derby, and, for lack of a handkerchief, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Although the May day was cool and brisk with wind, his knuckles glistened when they descended. I began to suspect that, despite his stony self-command, Mr. Hines's nerves were not all that they should be.

"Perhaps you'd like me to introduce you to Mr. Storrs," I hazarded.

The cold and filmy eyes gleamed with an instant's dim warmth. "Dominie, you're a good guy," responded Mr. Hines. "If a dead cinch at ten to one, all fruited up for next week, the kind of thing you don't hand on to your own brother, would be any use to you--No? I'm off again," he apologized. "Well--let's go."

We went. At the doorstep of Bartholomew Storrs's office he paused.

"This sexton-guy," he said anxiously, "he don't play the ponies, ever, I wouldn't suppose?"

"No more often than he commits murder or goes to sleep in church," I smiled.

"Yeh?" he answered, disheartened. "I gotta get to him some other way. On the poetry--and that's out of my line."

"I don't quite see what your difficulty is."

"By what you tell me, it's easier to break into a swell Fifth Avenue Club than into this place."

"Except for those having the vested right, as your wife has."

"And this sexton-guy handles the concession for--he's got the say-so," he corrected himself hastily--"on who goes in and who stays out. Is that right?"

"Substantially."

"And he'd rather keep 'em out than let 'em in?"

"Bartholomew," I explained, "considers that the honor of God's Acre is in his keeping. He has a fierce sort of jealousy about it, as if he had a proprietary interest in the place."

"I get you!" Mr. Hines's corded throat worked painfully. "You don't suppose the old goat would slip Min a blackball?" he gulped.

"How can he? As an 'Inalienable'--"

"Yeh; I know. But wasn't there something about a clean record? I'll tell you, Dominie"--Mr. Hines's husky but assured voice trailed away into a miserable, thick whisper--"as to what he said--about her feet taking hold on hell--I guess there was a time--I guess about one more slip--I guess I didn't run across her any too quick. But there never was a straighter, truer girl than Min was with me. I gotta get her planted right, Dominie. I gotta do it," he concluded with pathetic earnestness.

"I see no difficulty," I assured him. "The charter specifies 'died in honorable estate.' Matrimony is an honorable estate. How she lived before that is between her and a gentler Judge than Bartholomew Storrs."

"Give her a straight course and a fair judge and I'll back Min to the limit," said Mr. Hines so simply and loyally that no suggestion of irreverence could attach to him.

Nevertheless, doubt was mingled with determination in his florid face as he rang the bell. Bartholomew Storrs opened to us, himself. When he saw me, he hastily pocketed a Rhyming Dictionary. I introduced my companion, stating, by way of a favorable opening, that he was interested in memorial poetry.

"Very pleased," said Bartholomew Storrs in his deep, lugubrious tones. "Bereaved husband?"

Mr. Hines nodded.

"Here's a tasty thing I just completed," continued the poet, and, extending a benignant hand toward the visitor he intoned nasally:

  "Together we have lived our life
  Till thou hast gone on high.
  But I will come to thee, dear Wife,
  In the sweet bye-and-bye."

"That style five dollars," he said.

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