The Guardian Of God's Acre

"Well, you ain't the only one," said the dull voice of Mr. Hines.

"You're tempting me!" Bartholomew Storrs snarled at him. "You're trying to make me false to my trust."

"Just to let her lie by her mother, like her mother would ask you if she could."

"Don't say it to me!" He beat his head with his clenched hand. Recovering command of himself, he straightened up, taking a deep breath: "I must be guided by my conscience and my God," he said professionally, and I noted a more reverent intonation given to the former than to the latter. A bad sign.

"Isabel Munn's daughter, Bartholomew," I reminded him.

Instead of replying he staggered out of the door. Through the window we saw him, a moment later, posting down the street, bareheaded and stony-eyed, like one spurred by tormenting thoughts.

"Will he do it, do you think?" queried the anxious-visaged Mr. Hines.

I shook my head in doubt. With a man like Bartholomew Storrs, one can never tell.

Old memories are restless companions for the old. So I found them that night. But there is balm for sleeplessness in the leafy quiet of Our Square. I went out to my bench, seeking it, and found an occupant already there.

"We ain't the only ones that need a jab of dope, Dominie," said Mr. Hines, hard and pink and hoarsely confidential as when I first saw him.

"No? Who else?" Though I suspected, of course.

"Old Gloom. He's over in the Acre."

"Did you meet him there? What did he say?"

"I ducked him. He never saw me. He was--well, I guess he was praying," said Mr. Hines shamefacedly.

"Praying? At the Munn grave?"

"That's it. Groaning and saying, 'A sign, O Lord! Vouchsafe thy servant a sign!' Kept saying it over and over."

"For guidance to-morrow," I murmured. "Mr. Hines, I'm not sure that I know Bartholomew Storrs's God. Nor can I tell what manner of sign he might give, or with what meaning. But if I know my God, whom I believe to be the true God, your Minnie is safe with him."

"Yeh? You're a good guy, Dominie," said Mr. Hines in his emotionless voice.

I took him home with me to sleep. But we did not sleep. We smoked.

Minnie Munn's funeral morning dawned clear and fresh. No word came from Bartholomew Storrs. I tried to find him, but without avail.

"We'll go through with it," said Mr. Hines quietly.

How small and insignificant seemed our tiny God's Acre, as the few mourners crept into it behind Minnie Munn's body; the gravestones like petty dots upon the teeming earth, dwarfed by the overshadowing tenements, as if death were but an incident in the vast, unhasting, continuous sweep of life, as indeed perhaps it is. Then the grandeur of the funeral service, which links death to immortality, was bodied forth in the aged minister's trembling voice, and by it the things which are of life were dwarfed to nothingness. But my uneasy mind refused to be bound by the words; it was concerned with Bartholomew Storrs, standing grim, haggard, inscrutable, beside the grave, his eyes upturned and waiting. Too well I knew for what he was waiting; his sign. So, too, did Mr. Hines, still hard, still pink, still impeccably tailored, and still clinging to his elegant lacquered cane, as he supported little, broken Mr. Munn, very pathetic and decorous in full black, even to the gloves.

The sonorous beauty and simplicity of the rite suddenly checked, faltered. Bartholomew Storrs leaned over anxiously to the minister. The poor, gentle, worn-out old brain was groping now in semi-darkness, through which shot a cross-ray of memory. The tremulous voice took on new confidence, but the marrow of my spine turned icy as I heard the fatally misplaced and confused words that followed:

"If any man know--know just and good cause why this woman--why this woman--should not--"

Bartholomew Storrs's gaunt hand shot upward, high in air, outspread in the gesture of forbiddance. His deep voice rang, overbearing the stumbling accents of the clergyman.

"A sign! A sign from on High! O God, thou hast spoken through thy servant to forefend a sore offense. Listen, ye people. This woman--"

He stopped as there rose, on the opposite side of the open grave another figure, with hands and voice lifted to heaven in what must surely have been the most ingenuous supplication that ever ascended to the throne of Pity and Understanding. All the passion which, through the bitter hours, had been repressed in the self-commanding soul of the hard and pink Mr. Hines, swelled and cried aloud in his plea:

"O God! have a heart!"

Bartholomew Storrs's hand fell. His eyes faltered. His lips trembled. He stood once more, agonized with doubt. And in that moment the old minister came to his rightful senses.

"Peace, my friends," he commanded with authority. "Let no man disturb the peace of the dead."

And, unwaveringly, he went on to the end of the service.

So little Minnie Munn rests beside the mother who waited for her. No ghosts have risen to protest her presence there. The man who loved her comes back to Our Square from time to time, at which times there are fresh flowers on Minnie's mound, below the headstone reading: "Beloved Wife of Christopher Hines." But the elegiac verse has never appeared. I must record also the disappearance of that tiny bronze cockleshell, outward bound for "Far Ports," from the Bonnie Lassie's window, though Mr. Hines was wrong in his theory that it could be bought--like all else --"at a price." By the way, I believe that he has modified that theory.

As for Bartholomew Storrs, he is prone to take the other side of the Square when he sees me on my accustomed bench. In repose his face is as grim as ever, but I have seen him smile at a child. Probably the weight of our collective sins upon his conscience is less irksome, now that he has a crime of his own to balance them. For forgery and falsification of an official record is a real crime, which might send him to jail. But even that grim and judicial God of his worship ought to welcome him into heaven on the strength of it.

I believe that Bartholomew sleeps o' nights now.

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