Moonfleet, John Meade Falkner [intellectual books to read txt] 📗

the houses that held them straggled sadly over half a mile, lying at intervals along either side of the road. Nothing was ever made new in the village; if a house wanted repair badly, it was pulled down, and so there were toothless gaps in the street, and overrun gardens with broken-down walls, and many of the houses that yet stood looked as though they could stand but little longer.

The sun had set; indeed, it was already so dusk that the lower or sea-end of the street was lost from sight. There was a little fog or smoke-wreath in the air, with an odour of burning weeds, and that first frosty feeling of the autumn that makes us think of glowing fires and the comfort of long winter evenings to come. All was very still, but I could hear the tapping of a hammer farther down the street, and walked to see what was doing, for we had no trades in Moonfleet save that of fishing. It was Ratsey the sexton at work in a shed which opened on the street, lettering a tombstone with a mallet and graver. He had been mason before he became fisherman, and was handy with his tools; so that if anyone wanted a headstone set up in the churchyard, he went to Ratsey to get it done. I lent over the half-door and watched him a minute, chipping away with the graver in a bad light from a lantern; then he looked up, and seeing me, said:

“Here, John, if you have nothing to do, come in and hold the lantern for me, ’tis but a half-hour’s job to get all finished.”

Ratsey was always kind to me, and had lent me a chisel many a time to make boats, so I stepped in and held the lantern watching him chink out the bits of Portland stone with a graver, and blinking the while when they came too near my eyes. The inscription stood complete, but he was putting the finishing touches to a little sea-piece carved at the top of the stone, which showed a schooner boarding a cutter. I thought it fine work at the time, but know now that it was rough enough; indeed, you may see it for yourself in Moonfleet churchyard to this day, and read the inscription too, though it is yellow with lichen, and not so plain as it was that night. This is how it runs:

Sacred to the memory
of
David Block

Aged 15, who was killed by a shot fired from the
Elector Schooner, 21 June 1757.

Of life bereft (by fell design),
I mingle with my fellow clay.
On God’s protection I recline
To save me in the Judgement Day.

There too must you, cruel man, appear,
Repent ere it be all too late;
Or else a dreadful sentence fear,
For God will sure revenge my fate.

The Reverend Mr. Glennie wrote the verses, and I knew them by heart, for he had given me a copy; indeed, the whole village had rung with the tale of David’s death, and it was yet in every mouth. He was only child to Elzevir Block, who kept the Why Not? inn at the bottom of the village, and was with the contrabandiers, when their ketch was boarded that June night by the government schooner. People said that it was Magistrate Maskew of Moonfleet Manor who had put the revenue men on the track, and anyway he was on board the Elector as she overhauled the ketch. There was some show of fighting when the vessels first came alongside of one another, and Maskew drew a pistol and fired it off in young David’s face, with only the two gunwales between them. In the afternoon of midsummer’s day the Elector brought the ketch into Moonfleet, and there was a posse of constables to march the smugglers off to Dorchester Jail. The prisoners trudged up through the village ironed two and two together, while people stood at their doors or followed them, the men greeting them with a kindly word, for we knew most of them as Ringstave and Monkbury men, and the women sorrowing for their wives. But they left David’s body in the ketch, so the boy paid dear for his night’s frolic.

“Ay, ’twas a cruel, cruel thing to fire on so young a lad,” Ratsey said, as he stepped back a pace to study the effect of a flag that he was chiselling on the revenue schooner, “and trouble is likely to come to the other poor fellows taken, for Lawyer Empson says three of them will surely hang at next assize. I recollect,” he went on, “thirty years ago, when there was a bit of a scuffle between the Royal Sophy and the Marnhull, they hanged four of the contrabandiers, and my old father caught his death of cold what with going to see the poor chaps turned off at Dorchester, and standing up to his knees in the river Frome to get a sight of them, for all the countryside was there, and such a press there was no place on land. There, that’s enough,” he said, turning again to the gravestone. “On Monday I’ll line the ports in black, and get a brush of red to pick out the flag; and now, my son, you’ve helped with the lantern, so come down to the Why Not? and there I’ll have a word with Elzevir, who sadly needs the talk of kindly friends to cheer him, and we’ll find you a glass of Hollands to keep out autumn chills.”

I was but a lad, and thought it a vast honour to be asked to the Why Not?⁠—for did not such an invitation raise me at once to the dignity of manhood. Ah, sweet boyhood, how eager are we as boys to be quit of thee, with what regret do we look back on thee before our man’s race is halfway run! Yet was not my pleasure without alloy, for