Sexton

“ Yet it was in this world that Robert Carlton awoke yet again, to find his precious fire alight after all, and a dilapidated figure nodding over it to the song of a fresh kettle. It was old Busby, the sexton. The sick man could not speak; his little finger seemed to weigh a stone; it was some minutes before he achieved movement enough to attract the sexton's attention. But all this time the live coals had been warming his soul. And already he lay convinced that he also was going to live. ”

“ There was death-like stillness all over the House as Mr. Sexton put his question—picking his words slowly and deliberately. If men were not so anxious and so shocked there might have been some demonstration of the vehement anger which was felt in so many breasts as Mr. Sexton brought out the words which put in collocation in the mind of the unfortunate lunatic the idea of attempting to kill Mr. Gladstone, and the phrase of Sir Henry James during the debate on the Home Rule Bill. ”

“ SEXTON believes he knows a thing or two; O'BRIEN is understood to be something of an orator. FLYNN will show House how all these qualities may be combined in one man. Does it by the tiresome twenty minutes, the lamentable half-hour; popping up on every question with comically judicial air; talking on with fatal feeble flatulent fluency, whilst GILL sits nursing his hat awaiting his turn.
Alack for Irish humour, eloquence and deviltry, that it should come to this! ”

“ The inn yard gradually became quiet; and the dead sexton lay alone, in the dark, on his back, locked up in the old coach-house, the key of which was safe in the pocket of Tom Scales, the trusty old hostler of the George.
It was about eight o'clock, and the hostler, standing alone on the road in the front of the open door of the George and Dragon, had just smoked his pipe out. A bright moon hung in the frosty sky. The fells rose from the opposite edge of the lake like phantom mountains. The air was stirless. ”

“ As if dead priests were laughing in their stalls!
At length the sexton, hearing from without
The tumult of the knocking and the shout,
And thinking thieves were in the house of prayer,
Came with his lantern, asking, "Who is there?"
Half choked with rage, King Robert fiercely said,
"Open: 'tis I, the King! Art thou afraid?"
The frightened sexton, muttering, with a curse,
"This is some drunken vagabond, or worse!" ”

“ The Sexton grinned horribly a ghastly smile. "Will you take your Pible oath you ton't want them to raise the tevil with?" "Willingly," said Mr. Escot, smiling; "I have an abstruse reason for the inquiry."
"Why, if you have an obtuse reason," said the Sexton, who thought this a good opportunity to show that he could pronounce hard words as well as other people; "if you have an obtuse reason, that alters the case." ”

“ The youth called out the second time: ‘What do you want here? Speak if you are an honest fellow, or I’ll knock you down the stairs.’ The sexton thought: ‘He can’t mean that in earnest,’ so gave forth no sound, and stood as though he were made of stone. Then the youth shouted out to him the third time, and as that too had no effect he made a dash at the spectre and knocked it down the stairs, so that it fell about ten steps and remained lying in a corner. Thereupon he tolled the bell, went home to bed without saying a word, and fell asleep. ”

“ The sexton was a meek, acquiescing little man, of a bowing, lowly habit, yet he had a pleasant twinkling in his eye, and if encouraged, would now and then hazard a small pleasantry, such as a man of his low estate might venture to make in the company of high churchwardens and other mighty men of the earth. ”

“ Sexton suddenly dashed in, and, with back-handed stroke at Wolmer, went for the Times who had adopted and improved upon the Viscount's genial remarks. Assault admirably planned; carried on with irresistible vigour, sweeping down earlier resistance of Speaker. Showed what Sexton can do when so deeply moved as to forget himself, and resist besetting temptation to play the fatal windbag.
An hour-and-half's tussle all round House; at end Irish held the field, and, without dissentient voice, Times article declared to be "gross and scandalous breach of privileges of House." ”

“ Near his handiwork hovered the sexton, a wizened being, twisted with rheumatism, leaning on his spade, and grinning as usual over the stupendous hallucination of his latter years. He had swallowed a rudimentary frog with some impure water. This frog had reached maturity in the sexton's body. Many believed it. The man himself could hear it croaking in his breast, where it commanded the pass to his stomach, and intercepted every morsel that he swallowed. Certainly the sexton was very lean, if not starving to death quite as fast as he declared ”

“ Apart from sectarian issues, a sexton is the most mettlesome man that grows, and not at all to be subdued to the ignoble uses of a hoe. This sexton was an agony to my father in the sanctuary, and an anguish to my mother in the garden. ”

“ When these things are said, John Morley smiles grimly; Mr. G. pretends not to hear; Squire of Malwood audibly raps fingers on his manly breast; Liberals cheer ironically; Sexton blushes, and looks across to see if John Redmond is listening.
To-night he feels this thing has gone far enough. There may, perhaps, be some smattering of truth in it; but its disclosure cannot be pleasant to his right hon. friends on Treasury Bench. Accordingly Sexton rose, and, taking Mr. G. by the hand, as it were, and giving a finger to John Morley, declared that there was no foundation for the imputation. ”

“ Carlton lay still with thought and purpose; and death itself could not have given the lower part of his face a harsher cast; but the hot eyes were fixed upon the fading diamonds of the window over the table. At last he spoke—and it was a pity there was but the sexton to hear the firm tones of so faint a voice.
"Find my keys, Busby. I'm going to give you a sovereign——"
"A what?"
"The first of several if you do what I want!"
Not much later the sexton was hobbling towards Lakenhall, for the first time in many years; and the sick man lay greatly doubting whether he should ever see him again. ”

“ CHAPTER XXIX. THE STORY OF THE GOBLINS WHO STOLE A SEXTON ’ In an old abbey town, down in this part of the country, a long, long while ago—so long, that the story must be a true one, because our great-grandfathers implicitly believed it—there officiated as sexton and grave-digger in the churchyard, one Gabriel Grub. It by no means follows that because a man is a sexton, and constantly surrounded by the emblems of mortality, therefore he should be a morose and melancholy man; your undertakers are the merriest fellows in the world ”

“ The office of sexton is hereditary, descending from father to son, and when the line fails, great indeed is the difficulty of inducing another family to undertake its unpleasant duties, involving, as it is supposed, too familiar an association with the dead and the other world to be at all beneficial. Though the prospect of fees is good, and perhaps every family in the village offers six gallons of unpounded rice to start the sexton elect in his new, and certainly useful career, among the Quop Dayaks it is difficult to find a candidate. ”

“ Well, you soon will be; ho, ho! I'll give ye three days. I don't think ye'll last longer nor that; but there's where you've got to lie, willy-nilly," said the sexton, pointing to the grave.640
"You are making very sure of me," remarked the antiquary, with a grim smile.
"Ay, by ——, I am," rejoined the grave-digger, "for when I've once seen a man's corpse candle——"
There is no knowing how much longer the conversation might have lasted, if at this moment two villagers had not entered the churchyard, so Oldstone, not wishing to be overheard, nodded to the sexton, and added, "Till we meet again." ”

“ King David, it is evident, once thought something of becoming a church sexton, for he said, "I had rather be a doorkeeper," and so on. But he never carried out the plan, perhaps because he had not the qualification. It requires more talent in some respects to be sexton than to be king. A sexton, like a poet, is born. A church, in order to peace and success, needs the right kind of man at the prow, and the right kind at the stern—that is, a good minister and a good sexton. ”

“ After school-time it was not the place of the schoolmaster, but of the parson of the parish, or by deputy churchwardens, or failing them the clerk, and (if he were out of the way) the sexton, to impress a certain tone of duty on the young ones. Especially the sexton need not even call his wife to help, if he would but have the wit to cultivate more young thoughtfulness, by digging a grave every other day, and trusting the Lord for orders. ”

“ The little girls pointed out this spot, and the old man kindly sent them away, before he sunk his spade in the turf.
When his task was done he came toward them, wiping the drops from his forehead. The sexton was poor, but out of the feeble strength left to his old age, he had given something to alleviate distress greater than his own. A consciousness of this made his voice peculiarly gentle, as he called a man from the trench to aid in the humble funeral of Jane Chester. ”

“ Gladstone, Mr. Sexton is the one man in the House who is capable of such a feat. This is largely due not merely to his oratorical powers but to the extraordinary range of his gifts. To the outside public—even to the House of Commons—he is chiefly known by his great rhetorical gifts; but this is only a part, and a small part, of his great mental equipment. His mastery over figures in its firmness of grasp, its lightning-like rapidity, its retentiveness, is almost as great as that of a professional calculator. ”

“ Leaving the monument, on which was inscribed an account of the life and sufferings of the Royalist Rector of Horncastle, I followed the sexton to the western end of the church, where, hanging against the wall, were a number of scythes stuck in the ends of poles. “Those are the weapons, measter,” said the sexton, “which the great people put into the hands of the country folks, in order that they might use them against Oliver’s men; ugly weapons enough; however, Oliver’s men won, and Sir Jacob Ashley and his party were beat. ”

“ He is nothing of the kind. He speaks with a great slowness, grave deliberation, and there are often long and sometimes even trying pauses between his sentences. He could not conceal on this great occasion the anxiety and the seriousness of the situation; but the mind was splendidly clear, the language as well chosen as though he were sitting in a room and holding discourse to a few admiring friends; and what Mr. Sexton had to say was, that he would not go into the same lobby with Chamberlain and Balfour in order to defeat the Government; in short, that he was going to vote with Mr. Gladstone. ”

“ It was the farmer coming home. He was a very worthy man; but he had one great peculiarity—namely, that he could not bear to see a sexton. If he saw one he was made quite mad. That was why the sexton had gone to say good-day to the farmer’s wife when he knew that her husband was not at home, and the good woman therefore
put in front of him the best food she had. ”

“ The landlord could not see all this so sharply, being confused, and not so long-sighted as Tom.
"Time, sir," called Tony Turnbull, turning cold as he thought he saw a pair of eyes shining down redly at him—"time for honest folk to be in their beds, and asleep!"
"As sound as your sexton!" said the jeering voice from above.
"Come out of this," whispered the landlord fiercely to his hostler, plucking him hard by the sleeve. ”

“ House of Commons, May 9.—This has been great occasion for Windbag Sexton. Excelled himself, and there is no other point of comparison useful or usable. Saunderson, who always takes friendly views of his countrymen opposite, pleads that Sexton's windbaggism is partly due to his birth. In Ireland, he assures me, a mile is longer than in other parts of the Empire; and so, kind-hearted Colonel pleads, some allowance should be made for Sexton when he gets on the oratorical tramp. ”

“ I have one of these little restraining orders for every able-bodied man in the Laguna Grande Lumber Company's employ—thanks to Mr. Ogilvy's foresight; so it is useless to try to beat this game on a technicality.”
Sexton, who still lingered, made a gesture of surrender. “Dismiss your crew, Rondeau,” he ordered. “We're whipped to a frazzle.”
A gleam of pleasure, not unmixed with triumph, lighted the dark eyes of the French-Canadian. “I tol' M'sieur Sexton she cannot fight M'sieur Cardigan and win,” he said simply, “Now mebbe he believe that Jules Rondeau know somet'ing.” ”

“ Sexton is one of the men whose life is centred in the House of Commons. He will attend to no other business, except under the direst pressure—he has no other interests—though he used to be one of the greatest of readers, and still can quote Shakespeare and other masterpieces of English literature better than any man in the House except Mr. Justin McCarthy. Thus, when he rose after midnight, he had in his notes before him a perfectly tabulated account of the riots in Belfast, so that every single fact was present to his mind. ”

“ But we feel as we read that the man has not arrived at his view of truth without much labour, that we are witnessing an endeavour to escape from the coils of doubt, and that we have a victor who has faced and fought his troubles and difficulties.”
I may state that we had an interesting conversation with the sexton at Clevedon, Augustus James. He had held the office for about eighteen years, and perfectly remembered the interment of Arthur Hallam. His father, who was sexton for forty-three years, made the vault, and officiated at the burial. ”