My uncle, therefore, fiated the sexton’s presentment, and the work commenced forthwith. I don’t know whether all boys have the same liking for horrors which I am conscious of having possessed — I only know that I liked the churchyard, and deciphering tombstones, and watching the labours of the sexton, and hearing the old world village talk that often got up over the relics.
When this particular grave was pretty nearly finished — it lay from east to west — a lot of earth fell out at the northern side, where an old coffin had lain, and good store of brown dust and grimy bones, and the yellow skull itself came tumbling about the sexton’s feet. These fossils, after his wont, he lifted decently with the point of his shovel, and pitched into a little nook beside the great mound of mould at top.
‘Be the powers o’ war! here’s a battered head-piece for yez,’ said young Tim Moran, who had picked up the cranium, and was eyeing it curiously, turning it round the while.
‘Show it here, Tim;’ ‘let me look,’ cried two or three neighbours, getting round as quickly as they could.
‘Oh! murdher;’ said one.
‘Oh! be the powers o’ Moll Kelly!’ cried another.
‘Oh! bloody wars!’ exclaimed a third.
‘That poor fellow got no chance for his life at all, at all!’ said Tim.
‘That was a bullet,’ said one of them, putting his finger into a clean circular aperture as large as a half-penny.
‘An’ look at them two cracks. Och, murther!’
‘There’s only one. Oh, I see you’re right, two, begorra!’
‘Aich o’ them a wipe iv a poker.’
Mattocks had climbed nimbly to the upper level, and taking the skull in his fist, turned it about this way and that, curiously. But though he was no chicken, his memory did not go far enough back to throw any light upon the matter.
‘Could it be the Mattross that was shot in the year ‘90, as I often heerd, for sthrikin’ his captain?’ suggested a by-stander.
‘Oh! that poor fellow’s buried round by the north side of the church,’ said Mattocks, still eyeing the skull. ‘It could not be Counsellor Gallagher, that was kilt in the jewel with Colonel Ruck — he was hot in the head — bud it could not be-augh! not at all.’
‘Why not, Misther Mattocks?’
‘No, nor the Mattross neither. This, ye see, is a dhry bit o’ the yard here; there’s ould Darby’s coffin, at the bottom, down there, sound enough to stand on, as you see, wid a plank; an’ he was buried in the year ‘93. Why, look at the coffin this skull belongs to, ‘tid go into powdher between your fingers; ’tis nothin’ but tindher.’
‘I believe you’re right, Mr. Mattocks.’
‘Phiat! to be sure. ’Tis longer undher ground by thirty years, good, or more maybe.’
Just then the slim figure of my tall mild uncle, the curate, appeared, and his long thin legs, in black worsted stockings and knee-breeches, stepped reverently and lightly among the graves. The men raised their hats, and Mattocks jumped lightly into the grave again, while my uncle returned their salute with the sad sort of smile, a regretful kindness, which he never exceeded, in these solemn precincts.
It was his custom to care very tenderly for the bones turned up by the sexton, and to wait with an awful solicitude until, after the reading of the funeral service, he saw them gently replaced, as nearly as might be, in their old bed; and discouraging all idle curiosity or levity respecting them, with a solemn rebuke, which all respected. Therefore it was, that so soon as he appeared the skull was, in Hibernian phrase, ‘dropt like a hot potato,’ and the grave-digger betook himself to his spade so nimbly.
‘Oh! Uncle Charles,’ I said, taking his hand, and leading him towards the foot of the grave; ‘such a wonderful skull has come up! It is shot through with a bullet, and cracked with a poker besides.’
‘’Tis thrue for him, your raverence; he was murthered twiste over, whoever he was — rest his sowl;’ and the sexton, who had nearly completed his work, got out of the grave again, with a demure activity, and raising the brown relic with great reverence, out of regard for my good uncle, he turned it about slowly before the eyes of the curate, who scrutinised it, from a little distance, with a sort of melancholy horror.
‘Yes, Lemuel,’ said my uncle, still holding my hand, ‘’twas undoubtedly a murder; ay, indeed! He sustained two heavy blows, beside that gunshot through the head.’
‘‘Twasn’t gunshot, Sir; why the hole ‘id take in a grape-shot,’ said an old fellow, just from behind my uncle, in a pensioner’s cocked hat, leggings, and long old-world red frock-coat, speaking with a harsh reedy voice, and a grim sort of reserved smile.
I moved a little aside, with a sort of thrill, to give him freer access to my uncle, in the hope that he might, perhaps, throw a light upon the history of this remarkable memorial. The old fellow had a rat-like gray eye — the other was hid under a black patch — and there was a deep red scar across his forehead, slanting from the patch that covered the extinguished orb. His face was purplish, the tinge deepening towards the lumpish top of his nose, on the side of which stood a big wart, and he carried a great walking-cane over his shoulder, and bore, as it seemed to me, an intimidating, but caricatured resemblance to an old portrait of Oliver Cromwell in my Whig grandfather’s parlour.
‘You don’t think it a bullet wound, Sir?’ said my uncle, mildly, and touching his hat — for coming of a military stock himself, he always treated an old soldier with uncommon respect.
‘Why, please your raverence,’ replied the man, reciprocating his courtesy; ‘I know it’s not.’
‘And what is it, then, my good man?’ interrogated the sexton, as one in authority, and standing on his own dunghill.
‘The trepan,’ said the fogey, in the tone in which he’d have cried ‘attention’ to a raw recruit, without turning his head, and with a scornful momentary skew-glance from his gray eye.
‘And do you know whose skull that was, Sir?’ asked the curate.
‘Ay do I, Sir, well,’ with the same queer smile, he answered. ‘Come, now, you’re a grave-digger, my fine fellow,’ he continued, accosting the sexton cynically; ‘how long do you suppose that skull’s been under ground?’
‘Long enough; but not so long, my fine fellow, as yours has been above ground.’
‘Well, you’re right there, for I seen him buried,’ and he took the skull from the sexton’s hands; ‘and I’ll tell you more, there was some dry eyes, too, at his funeral — ha, ha, ha!’
‘You were a resident in the town, then?’ said my uncle, who did not like the turn his recollections were taking.
‘Ay, Sir, that I was,’ he replied; ‘see that broken tooth, there — I forgot ’twas there — and the minute I seen it, I remembered it like this morning — I could swear to it — when he laughed; ay, and that sharp corner to it — hang him,’ and he twirled the loose tooth, the last but two of all its fellows, from’ its socket, and chucked it into the grave.
‘And were you — you weren’t in the army, then?’ enquired the curate, who could not understand the sort of scoffing dislike he seemed to bear it.
‘Be my faith I was so, Sir — the Royal Irish Artillery,’ replied he, promptly.
‘And in what capacity?’ pursued his reverence.
‘Drummer,’ answered the mulberry-faced veteran.
‘Ho! — Drummer? That’s a good time ago, I dare say,’ said my uncle, looking on him reflectively.
‘Well, so it is, not far off fifty years,’ answered he. ‘He was a hard-headed