By the time he
came to a corner of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so
lingered by the way that the first psalm was finishing. The nasal
psalmody, full of turns and trills and graceless graces, seemed the
essential voice of the kirk itself upraised in thanksgiving,
"Everything's alive," he said; and again cries it aloud, "thank God,
everything's alive!" He lingered yet a while in the kirk-yard. A tuft
of primroses was blooming hard by the leg of an old black table
tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the random apologue. They
stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of contrast; and he was
struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day, the season, and the
beauty that surrounded him - the chill there was in the warmth, the
gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp earthy smell
that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The voice of the aged
Torrance within rose in an ecstasy. And he wondered if Torrance also
felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the spring morning;
Torrance, or the shadow of what once was Torrance, that must come so
soon to lie outside here in the sun and rain with all his rheumatisms,
while a new minister stood in his room and thundered from his own
familiar pulpit? The pity of it, and something of the chill of the
grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.
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