The Altar Steps

Mark rarely visited his uncle and aunt after he went to live at Meade Cantorum; and the break was made complete soon afterward when the living of Wych-on-the-Wold was accepted by Mr. Ogilvie, so complete indeed that he never saw his relations again. Uncle Henry died five years later; Aunt Helen went to live at St. Leonard's, where she took up palmistry and became indispensable to the success of charitable bazaars in East Sussex.

Wych, a large village on a spur of the Cotswold hills, was actually in Oxfordshire, although by so bare a margin that all the windows looked down into Gloucestershire, except those in the Rectory; they looked out across a flat country of elms and willow-bordered streams to a flashing spire in Northamptonshire reputed to be fifty miles away. It was a high windy place, seeming higher and windier on account of the numbers of pigeons that were always circling round the church tower. There was hardly a house in Wych that did not have its pigeon-cote, from the great round columbary in the Rectory garden to the few holes in a gable-end of some steep-roofed cottage. Wych was architecturally as perfect as most Cotswold villages, and if it lacked the variety of Wychford in the vale below, that was because the exposed position had kept its successive builders too intent on solidity to indulge their fancy. The result was an austere uniformity of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape whose beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an old wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to the transient observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the builders to be sparing with their windows; the result of such solicitude for the comfort of the inmates was a succession of blank spaces of freestone that delighted the eye with an effect of strength and leisure, of cleanliness and tranquillity.

The Rectory, dating from the reign of Charles II, did not arrogate to itself the right to retire behind trees from the long line of the single village street; but being taller than the other houses it brought the street to a dignified conclusion, and it was not unworthy of the noble church which stood apart from the village, a landmark for miles, upon the brow of the rolling wold. There was little traffic on the road that climbed up from Wychford in the valley of the swift Greenrush five miles away, and there was less traffic on the road beyond, which for eight miles sent branch after branch to remote farms and hamlets until itself became no more than a sheep track and faded out upon a hilly pasturage. Yet even this unfrequented road only bisected the village at the end of its wide street, where in the morning when the children were at school and the labourers at work in the fields the silence was cloistral, where one could stand listening to the larks high overhead, and where the lightest footstep aroused curiosity, so that one turned the head to peep and peer for the cause of so strange a sound.

Mr. Ogilvie's parish had a large superficial area; but his parishioners were not many outside the village, and in that country of wide pastures the whole of his cure did not include half-a-dozen farms. There was no doctor and no squire, unless Will Starling of Rushbrooke Grange could be counted as the squire.

Halfway to Wychford and close to the boundary of the two parishes an infirm signpost managed with the aid of a stunted hawthorn to keep itself partially upright and direct the wayfarer to Wych Maries. Without the signpost nobody would have suspected that the grassgrown track thus indicated led anywhere except over the top of the wold.

"You must go and explore Wych Maries," the Rector had said to Mark soon after they arrived. "You'll find it rather attractive. There's a disused chapel dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. My predecessor took me there when we drove round the parish on my first visit; but I haven't yet had time to go again. And you ought to have a look at the gardens of Rushbrooke Grange. The present squire is away. In the South Seas, I believe. But the housekeeper, Mrs. Honeybone, will show you round."

It was in response to this advice that Mark and Esther set out on a golden May evening to explore Wych Maries. Esther had continued to be friendly with Mark after the Pomeroy affair; and when he came to live at Meade Cantorum she had expressed her pleasure at the prospect of having him for a brother.

"But you'll keep off religion, won't you?" she had demanded.

Mark promised that he would, wondering why she should suppose that he was incapable of perceiving who was and who was not interested in it.

"I suppose you've guessed my fear?" she had continued. "Haven't you? Haven't you guessed that I'm frightened to death of becoming religious?"

The reassuring contradiction that one naturally gives to anybody who voices a dread of being overtaken by some misfortune might perhaps have sounded inappropriate, and Mark had held his tongue.

"My father was very religious. My mother is more or less religious. Stephen is religious. Miriam is religious. Oh, Mark, and I sometimes feel that I too must fall on my knees and surrender. But I won't. Because it spoils life. I shall be beaten in the end of course, and I'll probably get religious mania when I am beaten. But until then—" She did not finish her sentence; only her blue eyes glittered at the challenge of life.

That was the last time religion was mentioned between Mark and Esther, and since both of them enjoyed the country they became friends. On this May evening they stood by the signpost and looked across the shimmering grass to where the sun hung in his web of golden haze above the edge of the wold.

"If we take the road to Wych Maries," said Mark, "we shall be walking right into the sun."

Esther did not reply, but Mark understood that she assented to his truism, and they walked on as silent as the long shadows that followed them. A quarter of a mile from the high road the path reached the edge of the wold and dipped over into a wood which was sparse just below the brow, but which grew denser down the slope with many dark evergreens interspersed, and in the valley below became a jungle. After the bare upland country this volume of May verdure seemed indescribably rich and the valley beyond, where the Greenrush flowed through kingcups toward the sun, indescribably alluring. Esther and Mark forgot that they were exploring Wych Maries and thinking only of reaching that wide valley they ran down through the wood, rejoicing in the airy green of the ash-trees above them and shouting as they ran. But presently cypresses and sombre yews rose on either side of the path, and the road to Wych Maries was soft and silent, and the serene sun was lost, and their whispering footsteps forbade them to shout any more. At the bottom of the hill the trees increased in number and variety; the sun shone through pale oak-leaves and the warm green of sycamores. Nevertheless a sadness haunted the wood, where the red campions made only a mist of colour with no reality of life and flowers behind.

"This wood's awfully jolly, isn't it?" said Mark, hoping to gain from Esther's agreement the dispersal of his gloom.

"I don't care for it much," she replied. "There doesn't seem to be any life in it."

"I heard a cuckoo just now," said Mark.

"Yes, out of tune already."

"Mm, rather out of tune. Mind those nettles," he warned her.

"I thought Stephen said he drove here."

"Perhaps we've come the wrong way. I believe the road forked by the ash wood above. Anyway if we go toward the sun we shall come out in the valley, and we can walk back along the banks of the river to Wychford."

"We can always go back through the wood," said Esther.

"Yes, if you don't mind going back the way you came."

"Come on," she snapped. She was not going to be laughed at by Mark, and she dared him to deny that he was not as much aware as herself of an eeriness in the atmosphere.

"Only because it seems dark in here after that dazzling sunlight on the wold. Hark! I hear the sound of water."

They struggled through the undergrowth toward the sound; soon from a steep wooded bank they were gazing down into a millpool, the surface of which reflected with a gloomy deepening of their hue the colour but not the form of the trees above. Water was flowing through a rotten sluice gate down from the level of the stream upon a slimy water-wheel that must have been out of action for many years.

"The dark tarn of Auber in the misty mid region of Weir!" Mark exclaimed. "Don't you love Ulalume? I think it's about my favourite poem."

"Never heard of it," Esther replied indifferently. He might have taken advantage of this confession to give her a lecture on poetry, if the millpool and the melancholy wood had not been so affecting as to make the least attempt at literary exposition impertinent.

"And there's the chapel," Mark exclaimed, pointing to a ruined edifice of stone, the walls of which were stained with the damp of years rising from the pool. "But how shall we reach it? We must have come the wrong way."

"Let's go back! Let's go back!" Esther exclaimed, surrendering to the command of an intuition that overcame her pride. "This place is unlucky."

Mark looking at her wild eyes, wilder in the dark that came so early in this overshadowed place, was half inclined to turn round at her behest; but at that moment he perceived a possible path through the nettles and briers at the farther end of the pool and unwilling to go back to the Rectory without having visited the ruined chapel of Wych Maries he called on her to follow him. This she did fearfully at first; but gradually regaining her composure she emerged on the other side as cool and scornful as the Esther with whom he was familiar.

"What frightened you?" he asked, when they were standing on a grassgrown road that wound through a rank pasturage browsed on by a solitary black cow and turned the corner by a clump of cedars toward a large building, the presence of which was felt rather than seen beyond the trees.

"I was bored by the brambles," Esther offered for explanation.

"This must be the driving road," Mark proclaimed. "I say, this chapel is rather ripping, isn't it?"

But Esther had wandered away across the rank meadow, where her meditative form made the solitary black cow look lonelier than ever. Mark turned aside to examine the chapel. He had been warned by the Rector to look at the images of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene that had survived the ruin of the holy place of which they were tutelary and to which they had given their name. The history of the chapel was difficult to trace. It was so small as to suggest that it was a chantry; but there was no historical justification for linking its fortunes with the Starlings who owned Rushbrooke Grange, and there was no record of any lost hamlet here. That it was called Wych Maries might show a connexion either with Wychford or with Wych-on-the-Wold; it lay about midway between the two, and in days gone by there had been controversy on this point between the two parishes. The question had been settled by a squire of Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth century, since when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward as they had gazed for six hundred years. The curiosity of the few antiquarians who visited the place and speculated upon its past had kept the images clear of the ivy that covered the rest of the fabric. Mark did not put this to the credit of the antiquarians; but now perceiving for the first time these two austere shapes of divine women under conditions of atmosphere that enhanced their austerity and unearthliness he ascribed their freedom from decay to the interposition of God. To Mark's imagination, fixed upon the images while Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the chapel, there was granted another of those moments of vision which marked like milestones his spiritual progress. He became suddenly assured that he would neither marry nor beget children. He was astonished to find himself in the grip of this thought, for his mind had never until this evening occupied itself with marriage or children, nor even with love. Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite purpose in the scheme of the world. He could not, he said to himself, be considered credulous if he sought for the explanation of his state of mind in the images of the two Maries. He looked at them resolved to illuminate with reason's eye the fluttering shadows of dusk that gave to the stone an illusion of life's bloom.

"Did their lips really move?" he asked aloud, and from the field beyond the black cow lowed a melancholy negative. Whether the stone had spoken or not, Mark accepted the revelation of his future as a Divine favour, and thenceforth he regarded the ruined chapel of Wych Maries as the place where the vow he made on that Whit-sunday was accepted by God.

"Aren't you ever coming?" the voice of Esther called across the field, and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on the grassgrown drive that led round the cedar grove to Rushbrooke Grange.

"It's too late now to go inside," he objected.

They were standing before the house.

"It's not too late at all," she contradicted eagerly. "Down here it seems later than it really is."

Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of the average Cotswold manor. Being a one-storied building it occupied a large superficial area, and its tumbling irregular roofs of freestone, the outlines of which were blurred by the encroaching mist of vegetation that overhung them, gave the effect of water, as if the atmosphere of this dank valley had wrought upon the substance of the building and as if the architects themselves had been confused by the rivalry of the trees by which it was surrounded. The owners of Rushbrooke Grange had never occupied a prominent position in the county, and their estates had grown smaller with each succeeding generation. There was no conspicuous author of their decay, no outstanding gamester or libertine from whose ownership the family's ruin could be dated. There was indeed nothing of interest in their annals except an attack upon the Grange by a party of armed burglars in the disorderly times at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the squire's wife and two little girls were murdered while the squire and his sons were drinking deep in the Stag Inn at Wychford four miles away. Mark did not feel much inclined to blunt his impression of the chapel by perambulating Rushbrooke Grange under the guidance of Mrs. Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther perversely insisted upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit. By now it was a pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy with moths' wings, heavy with the scent of apple blossom.

"Well, you must explain who we are," said Mark while the echoes of the bell died away on the silence within the house and they waited for the footsteps that should answer their summons. The answer came from a window above the porch where Mrs. Honeybone's face, wreathed in wistaria, looked down and demanded in accents that were harsh with alarm who was there.

"I am the Rector's sister, Mrs. Honeybone," Esther explained.

"I don't care who you are," said Mrs. Honeybone. "You have no business to go ringing the bell at this time of the evening. It frightened me to death."

"The Rector asked me to call on you," she pressed.

Mark had already been surprised by Esther's using her brother as an excuse to visit the house and he was still more surprised by hearing her speak so politely, so ingratiatingly, it seemed, to this grim woman embowered in wistaria.

"We lost our way," Esther explained, "and that's why we're so late. The Rector told me about the water-lily pool, and I should so much like to see it."

Mrs. Honeybone debated with herself for a moment, until at last with a grunt of disapproval she came downstairs and opened the front door. The lily pool, now a lily pool only in name, for it was covered with an integument of duckweed which in twilight took on the texture of velvet, was an attractive place set in an enclosure of grass between high grey walls.

"That's all there is to see," said Mrs. Honeybone.

"Mr. Starling is abroad?" Esther asked.

The housekeeper nodded.

"And when is he coming back?" she went on.

"That's for him to say," said the housekeeper disagreeably. "He might come back to-night for all I know."

Almost before the sentence was out of her mouth the hall bell jangled, and a distant voice shouted:

"Nanny, Nanny, hurry up and open the door!"

Mrs. Honeybone could not have looked more startled if the voice had been that of a ghost. Mark began to talk of going until Esther cut him short.

"I don't think Mr. Starling will mind our being here so much as that," she said.

Mrs. Honeybone had already hurried off to greet her master; and when she was gone Mark looked at Esther, saw that her face was strangely flushed, and in an instant of divination apprehended either that she had already met the squire of Rushbrooke Grange or that she expected to meet him here to-night; so that, when presently a tall man of about thirty-five with brick-dust cheeks came into the close, he was not taken aback when Esther greeted him by name with the assurance of old friendship. Nor was he astonished that even in the wan light those brick-dust cheeks should deepen to terra-cotta, those hard blue eyes glitter with recognition, and the small thin-lipped mouth lose for a moment its immobility and gape, yes, gape, in the amazement of meeting somebody whom he never could have expected to meet at such an hour in such a place.

"You," he exclaimed. "You here!"

By the way he quickly looked behind him as if to intercept a prying glance Mark knew that, whatever the relationship between Esther and the squire had been in the past, it had been a relationship in which secrecy had played a part. In that moment between him and Will Starling there was enmity.

"You couldn't have expected him to make a great fuss about a boy," said Esther brutally on their way back to the Rectory.

"I suppose you think that's the reason why I don't like him," said Mark. "I don't want him to take any notice of me, but I think it's very odd that you shouldn't have said a word about knowing him even to his housekeeper."

"It was a whim of mine," she murmured. "Besides, I don't know him very well. We met at Eastbourne once when I was staying there with Mother."

"Well, why didn't he say 'How do you do, Miss Ogilvie?' instead of breathing out 'you' like that?"

Esther turned furiously upon Mark.

"What has it got to do with you?"

"Nothing whatever to do with me," he said deliberately. "But if you think you're going to make a fool of me, you're not. Are you going to tell your brother you knew him?"

Esther would not answer, and separated by several yards they walked sullenly back to the Rectory.

ST. MARK'S DAY

Mark tried next day to make up his difference with Esther; but she repulsed his advances, and the friendship that had blossomed after the Pomeroy affair faded and died. There was no apparent dislike on either side, nothing more than a coolness as of people too well used to each other's company. In a way this was an advantage for Mark, who was having to apply himself earnestly to the amount of study necessary to win a scholarship at Oxford. Companionship with Esther would have meant considerable disturbance of his work, for she was a woman who depended on the inspiration of the moment for her pastimes and pleasures, who was impatient of any postponement and always avowedly contemptuous of Mark's serious side. His classical education at Haverton House had made little of the material bequeathed to him by his grandfather's tuition at Nancepean. None of his masters had been enough of a scholar or enough of a gentleman (and to teach Latin and Greek well one must be one or the other) to educate his taste. The result was an assortment of grammatical facts to which he was incapable of giving life. If the Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold was not a great scholar, he was at least able to repair the neglect of, more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to Mark's education by the meanness of Haverton House; moreover, after Mark had been reading with him six months he did find a really first-class scholar in Mr. Ford, the Vicar of Little Fairfield. Mark worked steadily, and existence in Oxfordshire went by without any great adventures of mind, body, or spirit. Life at the Rectory had a kind of graceful austerity like the well-proportioned Rectory itself. If Mark had bothered to analyze the cause of this graceful austerity, he might have found it in the personality of the Rector's elder sister Miriam. Even at Meade Cantorum, when he was younger, Mark had been fully conscious of her qualities; but here they found a background against which they could display themselves more perfectly. When they moved from Buckinghamshire and the new rector was seeing how much Miriam appreciated the new surroundings, he sold out some stock and presented her with enough ready money to express herself in the outward beauty of the Rectory's refurbishing. He was luckily not called upon to spend a great deal on the church, both his predecessors having maintained the fabric with care, and the fabric itself being sound enough and magnificent enough to want no more than that. Miriam, though shaking one of those capable and well-tended fingers at her beloved brother's extravagance, accepted the gift with an almost childish determination to give full value of beauty in return, so that there should not be a servant's bedroom nor a cupboard nor a corridor that did not display the evidence of her appreciation in loving care. The garden was handed over to Mrs. Ogilvie, who as soon as May warmed its high enclosures bloomed there like one of her own favourite peonies, rosy of face and fragrant, ample of girth, golden-hearted.

Outside the Rectory Mark spent most of his time with Richard Ford, the son of the Vicar of Little Fairfield, with whom he went to work in the autumn after his arrival in Oxfordshire. Here again Mark was lucky, for Richard, who was a year or two older than himself and a student at Cooper's Hill whence he would emerge as a civil engineer bound for India, was one of those entirely admirable young men who succeed in being saintly without any rapture or righteousness.

Mark said one day:

"Rector, you know, Richard Ford really is a saint; only for goodness' sake don't tell him I said so, because he'd be furious."

The Rector stopped humming a joyful Miserere to give Mark an assurance of his discretion. But Mark having said so much in praise of Richard could say no more, and indeed he would have found it hard to express in words what he felt about his friend.

Mark accompanied Richard on his visits to Wychford Rectory where in this fortunate corner of England existed a third perfect family. Richard was deeply in love with Margaret Grey, the second daughter, and if Mark had ever been intended to fall in love he would certainly have fallen in love with Pauline, the youngest daughter, who was fourteen.

"I could look at her for ever," he confided in Richard. "Walking down the road from Wych-on-the-Wold this morning I saw two blue butterflies on a wild rose, and they were like Pauline's eyes and the rose was like her cheek."

"She's a decent kid," Richard agreed fervently.

Mark had had such a limited experience of the world that the amenities of the society in which he found himself incorporated did not strike his imagination as remarkable. It was in truth one of those eclectic, somewhat exquisite, even slightly rarefied coteries which are produced partly by chance, partly by interests shared in common, but most of all, it would seem, by the very genius of the place. The genius of Cotswolds imparts to those who come beneath his influence the art of existing appropriately in the houses that were built at his inspiration. They do not boast of their privilege like the people of Sussex. They are not living up to a landscape so much as to an architecture, and their voices lowered harmoniously with the sigh of the wind through willows and aspens have not to compete with the sea-gales or the sea.

Mark accepted the manners of the society in which good fortune had set him as the natural expression of an inward orderliness, a traditional respect for beauty like the ritual of Christian worship. That the three daughters of the Rector of Wychford should be critical of those who failed to conform to their inherited refinement of life did not strike him as priggish, because it never struck him for a moment that any other standard than theirs existed. He felt the same about people who objected to Catholic ceremonies; their dislike of them did not present itself to him as arising out of a different religious experience from his own; but it appeared as a propensity toward unmannerly behaviour, as a kind of wanton disregard of decency and good taste. He was indeed still at the age when externals possess not so much an undue importance, but when they affect a boy as a mould through which the plastic experience of his youth is passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was the revulsion from the arid ugliness of Haverton House and the ambition to make up for those years of beauty withheld, both of which urged him on to take the utmost advantage of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of those years to the fine etching of the present. Miriam at home, the Greys at Wychford, and in some ways most of all Richard Ford at Fairfield gave him in a few months the poise he would have received more gradually from a public school education.

So Mark read Greek with the Vicar of Little Fairfield and Latin with the Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold, who, amiable and holy man, had to work nearly twice as hard as his pupil to maintain his reserve of instruction. Mark took long walks with Richard Ford when Richard was home in his vacations, and long walks by himself when Richard was at Cooper's Hill. He often went to Wychford Rectory, where he learnt to enjoy Schumann and Beethoven and Bach and Brahms.

"You're like three Saint Cecilias," he told them. "Monica is by Luini and Margaret is by Perugino and Pauline. . . ."

"Oh, who am I by?" Pauline exclaimed, clapping her hands.

"I give it up. You're just Saint Cecilia herself at fourteen."

"Isn't Mark foolish?" Pauline laughed.

"It's my birthday to-morrow," said Mark, "so I'm allowed to be foolish."

"It's my birthday in a week," said Pauline. "And as I'm two years younger than you I can be two years more foolish."

Mark looked at her, and he was filled with wonder at the sanctity of her maidenhood. Thenceforth meditating upon the Annunciation he should always clothe Pauline in a robe of white samite and set her in his mind's eye for that other maid of Jewry, even as painters found holy maids in Florence or Perugia for their bright mysteries.

While Mark was walking back to Wych and when on the brow of the first rise of the road he stood looking down at Wychford in the valley below, a chill lisping wind from the east made him shiver and he thought of the lines in Keats' Eve of St. Mark:

The sky in the west was an unmatured green valley tonight, where Venus bloomed like a solitary primrose; and on the dark hills of Heaven the stars were like daisies. He turned his back on the little town and set off up the hill again, while the wind slipped through the hedge beside him in and out of the blackthorn boughs, lisping, whispering, snuffling, sniffing, like a small inquisitive animal. He thought of Monica, Margaret, and Pauline playing in their warm, candle-lit room behind him, and he thought of Miriam reading in her tall-back chair before dinner, for Evensong would be over by now. Yes, Evensong would be over, he remembered penitently, and he ought to have gone this evening, which was the vigil of St. Mark and of his birthday. At this moment he caught sight of the Wych Maries signpost black against that cold green sky. He gave a momentary start, because seen thus the signpost had a human look; and when his heart beat normally it was roused again, this time by the sight of a human form indeed, the form of Esther, the wind blowing her skirts before her, hurrying along the road to which the signpost so crookedly pointed. Mark who had been climbing higher and higher now felt the power of that wind full on his cheeks. It was as if it had found what it wanted, for it no longer whispered and lisped among the boughs of the blackthorn, but blew fiercely over the wide pastures, driving Esther before it, cutting through Mark like a sword. By the time he had reached the signpost she had disappeared in the wood.

Mark asked himself why she was going to Rushbrooke Grange.

"To Rushbrooke Grange," he said aloud. "Why should I think she is going to Rushbrooke Grange?"

Though even in this desolate place he would not say it aloud, the answer came back from this very afternoon when somebody had mentioned casually that the Squire was come home again. Mark half turned to follow Esther, but in the moment of turning he set his face resolutely in the direction of home. If Esther were really on her way to meet Will Starling, he would do more harm than good by appearing to pry.

Esther was the flaw in Mark's crystal clear world. When a year ago they had quarrelled over his avowed dislike of Will Starling, she had gone back to her solitary walks and he conscious, painfully conscious, that she regarded him as a young prig, had with that foolish pride of youth resolved to be so far as she was concerned what she supposed him to be. His admiration for the Greys and the Fords had driven her into jeering at them; throughout the year Mark and she had been scarcely polite to each other even in public. The Rector and Miriam probably excused Mark's rudeness whenever he let himself give way to it, because their sister did not spare either of them, and they were made aware with exasperating insistence of the dullness of the country and of the dreariness of everybody who lived in the neighbourhood. Yet, Mark could never achieve that indifference to her attitude either toward himself or toward other people that he wished to achieve. It was odd that this evening he should have beheld her in that relation to the wind, because in his thoughts about her she always appeared to him like the wind, restlessly sighing and fluttering round a comfortable house. However steady the candle-light, however bright the fire, however absorbing the book, however secure one may feel by the fireside, the wind is always there; and throughout these tranquil months Esther had always been most unmistakably there.

In the morning Mark went to Mass and made his Communion. It was a strangely calm morning; through the unstained windows of the clerestory the sun sloped quivering ladders of golden light. He looked round with half a hope that Esther was in the church; but she was absent, and throughout the service that brief vision of her dark transit across the cold green sky of yester eve kept recurring to his imagination, so that for all the rich peace of this interior he was troubled in spirit, and the intention to make this Mass upon his seventeenth birthday another spiritual experience was frustrated. In fact, he was worshipping mechanically, and it was only when Mass was over and he was kneeling to make an act of gratitude for his Communion that he began to apprehend how he was asking fresh favours from God without having moved a step forward to deserve them.

"I think I'm too pleased with myself," he decided, "I think I'm suffering from spiritual pride. I think. . . ."

He paused, wondering if it was blasphemous to have an intuition that God was about to play some horrible trick on him. Mark discussed with the Rector the theological aspects of this intuition.

"The only thing I feel," said Mr. Ogilvie, "is that perhaps you are leading too sheltered a life here and that the explanation of your intuition is your soul's perception of this. Indeed, once or twice lately I have been on the point of warning you that you must not get into the habit of supposing you will always find the onset of the world so gentle as here."

"But naturally I don't expect to," said Mark. "I was quite long enough at Haverton House to appreciate what it means to be here."

"Yes," the Rector went on, "but even at Haverton House it was a passive ugliness, just as here it is a passive beauty. After our Lord had fasted forty days in the desert, accumulating reserves of spiritual energy, just as we in our poor human fashion try to accumulate in Lent reserves of spiritual energy that will enable us to celebrate Easter worthily, He was assailed by the Tempter more fiercely than ever during His life on earth. The history of all the early Egyptian monks, the history indeed of any life lived without losing sight of the way of spiritual perfection displays the same phenomena. In the action and reaction of experience, in the rise and fall of the tides, in the very breathing of the human lungs, you may perceive analogies of the divine rhythm. No, I fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing more than one of those movements which warn us that the sleeper will soon wake."

Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector dissatisfied. He wanted something more than analogies taken from the experience of spiritual giants, Titans of holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh seemed as remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might appear to a captain of the local volunteers. What he had gone to ask the Rector was whether it was blasphemous to suppose that God was going to play a horrible trick on him. He had not wanted a theological discussion, an academic question and reply. Anything could be answered like that, probably himself in another twenty years, when he had preached some hundreds of sermons, would talk like that. Moreover, when he was alone Mark understood that he had not really wanted to talk about his own troubles to the Rector at all, but that his real preoccupation had been and still was Esther. He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will Starling, or if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther had not come in till nine o'clock last night because she had been to Wych Maries? Mark, remembering those wild eyes and that windblown hair when she stood for a moment framed in the doorway of the Rector's library, could not believe that none of her family had guessed that something more than the whim to wander over the hills had taken her out on such a night. Did Mrs. Ogilvie, promenading so placidly along her garden borders, ever pause in perplexity at her daughter's behaviour? Calling them all to mind, their attitudes, the expressions of their faces, the words upon their lips, Mark was sure that none of them had any idea what Esther was doing. He debated now the notion of warning Miriam in veiled language about her sister; but such an idea would strike Miriam as monstrous, as a mad and horrible nightmare. Mark shivered at the mere fancy of the chill that would come over her and of the disdain in her eyes. Besides, what right had he on the little he knew to involve Esther with her family? Superficially he might count himself her younger brother; but if he presumed too far, with what a deadly retort might she not annihilate his claim. Most certainly he was not entitled to intervene unless he intervened bravely and directly. Mark shook his head at the prospect of doing that. He could not imagine anybody's tackling Esther directly on such a subject. Seventeen to-day! He looked out of the window and felt that he was bearing upon his shoulders the whole of that green world outspread before him.

The serene morning ripened to a splendid noontide, and Mark who had intended to celebrate his birthday by enjoying every moment of it had allowed the best of the hours to slip away in a stupor of indecision. More and more the vision of Esther last night haunted him, and he felt that he could not go and see the Greys as he had intended. He could not bear the contemplation of the three girls with the weight of Esther on his mind. He decided to walk over to Little Fairfield and persuade Richard to make a journey of exploration up the Greenrush in a canoe. He would ask Richard his opinion of Will Starling. What a foolish notion! He knew perfectly well Richard's opinion of the Squire, and to lure him into a restatement of it would be the merest self-indulgence.

"Well, I must go somewhere to-day," Mark shouted at himself. He secured a packet of sandwiches from the Rectory cook and set out to walk away his worries.

"Why shouldn't I go down to Wych Maries? I needn't meet that chap. And if I see him I needn't speak to him. He's always been only too jolly glad to be offensive to me."

Mark turned aside from the high road by the crooked signpost and took the same path down under the ash-trees as he had taken with Esther for the first time nearly a year ago. Spring was much more like Spring in these wooded hollows; the noise of bees in the blossom of the elms was murmurous as limes in June. Mark congratulated himself on the spot in which he had chosen to celebrate this fine birthday, a day robbed from time like the day of a dream. He ate his lunch by the old mill dam, feeding the roach with crumbs until an elderly pike came up from the deeps and frightened the smaller fish away. He searched for a bullfinch's nest; but he did not find one, though he saw several of the birds singing in the snowberry bushes; round and ruddy as October apples they looked. At last he went to the ruined chapel, where after speculating idly for a little while upon its former state he fell as he usually did when he visited Wych Maries into a contemplation of the two images of the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. While he sat on a hummock of grass before the old West doorway he received an impression that since he last visited these forms of stone they had ceased to be mere relics of ancient worship unaccountably preserved from ruin, but that they had somehow regained their importance. It was not that he discerned in them any miraculous quality of living, still less of winking or sweating as images are reputed to wink and sweat for the faithful. No, it was not that, he decided, although by regarding them thus entranced as he was he could easily have brought himself to the point of believing in a supernatural manifestation. He was too well aware of this tendency to surrender to it; so, rousing himself from the rapt contemplation of them and forsaking the hummock of grass, he climbed up into the branches of a yew-tree that stood beside the chapel, that there and from that elevation, viewing the images and yet unviewed by them directly, he could be immune from the magic of fancy and discover why they should give him this impression of having regained their utility, yes, that was the word, utility, not importance. They were revitalized not from within, but from without; and even as his mind leapt at this explanation he perceived in the sunlight, beyond the shadowy yew-tree in which he was perched, Esther sitting upon that hummock of grass where but a moment ago he had himself been sitting.

For a moment, as if to contradict a reasonable explanation of the strange impression the images had made upon him, Mark supposed that she was come there for a tryst. This vanished almost at once in the conviction that Esther's soul waited there either in question or appeal. He restrained an impulse to declare his presence, for although he felt that he was intruding upon a privacy of the soul, he feared to destroy the fruits of that privacy by breaking in. He knew that Esther's pride would be so deeply outraged at having been discovered in a moment of weakness thus upon her knees, for she had by now fallen upon her knees in prayer, that it might easily happen she would never in all her life pray more. There was no escape for Mark without disturbing her, and he sat breathless in the yew-tree, thinking that soon she must perceive his glittering eye in the depths of the dark foliage as in passing a hedgerow one may perceive the eye of a nested bird. From his position he could see the images, and out of the spiritual agony of Esther kneeling there, the force of which was communicated to himself, he watched them close, scarcely able to believe that they would not stoop from their pedestals and console the suppliant woman with benediction of those stone hands now clasped aspiringly to God, themselves for centuries suppliant like the woman at their feet. Mark could think of nothing better to do than to turn his face from Esther's face and to say for her many Paternosters and Aves. At first he thought that he was praying in a silence of nature; but presently the awkwardness of his position began to affect his concentration, and he found that he was saying the words mechanically, listening the while to the voices of birds. He compelled his attention to the prayers; but the birds were too loud. The Paternosters and the Aves were absorbed in their singing and chirping and twittering, so that Mark gave up to them and wished for a rosary to help his feeble attention. Yet could he have used a rosary without falling out of the yew-tree? He took his hands from the bough for a moment and nearly overbalanced. Make not your rosary of yew berries, he found himself saying. Who wrote that? Make not your rosary of yew berries. Why, of course, it was Keats. It was the first line of the Ode to Melancholy. Esther was still kneeling out there in the sunlight. And how did the poem continue? Make not your rosary of yew berries. What was the second line? It was ridiculous to sit astride a bough and say Paternosters and Aves. He could not sit there much longer. And then just as he was on the point of letting go he saw that Esther had risen from her knees and that Will Starling was standing in the doorway of the chapel looking at her, not speaking but waiting for her to speak, while he wound a strand of ivy round his fingers and unwound it again, and wound it round again until it broke and he was saying:

"I thought we agreed after your last display here that you'd give this cursed chapel the go by?"

"I can't escape from it," Esther cried. "You don't understand, Will, what it means. You never have understood."

"Dearest Essie, I understand only too well. I've paid pretty handsomely in having to listen to reproaches, in having to dry your tears and stop your sighs with kisses. Your damned religion is a joke. Can't you grasp that? It's not my fault we can't get married. If I were really the scoundrel you torment yourself into thinking I am, I would have married and taken the risk of my strumpet of a wife turning up. But I've treated you honestly, Essie. I can't help loving you. I went away once. I went away again. And a third time I went just to relieve your soul of the sin of loving me. But I'm sick of suffering for the sake of a myth, a superstition."

Esther had moved close to him, and now she put a hand upon his arm.

"To you, Will. Not to me."

"Look here, Essie," said her lover. "If you knew that you were liable to these dreadful attacks of remorse and penitence, why did you ever encourage me?"

"How dare you say I encouraged you?"

"Now don't let your religion make you dishonest," he stabbed. "No man seduces a woman of your character without as much goodwill as deserves to be called encouragement, and by God is encouragement," he went on furiously. "Let's cut away some of the cant before we begin arguing again about religion."

"You don't know what a hell you're making for me when you talk like that," she gasped. "If I did encourage you, then my sin is a thousand times blacker."

"Oh, don't exaggerate, my dear girl," he said wearily. "It isn't a sin for two people to love each other."

"I've tried my best to think as you do, but I can't. I've avoided going to church. I've tried to hate religion, I've mocked at God . . ." she broke off in despair of explaining the force of grace, against the gift of which she had contended in vain.

"I always thought you were brave, Essie. But you're a real coward. The reason for all this is your fear of being pitchforked into a big bonfire by a pantomime demon with horns and a long tail." He laughed bitterly. "To think that you, my adored Essie, should really have the soul of a Sunday school teacher. You, a Bacchante of passion, to be puling about your sins. You! You! Girl, you're mad! I tell you there is no such thing as damnation. It's a bogey invented by priests to enchain mankind. But if there is and if that muddle-headed old gentleman you call God really exists and if he's a just God, why then let him damn me and let him give you your harp and your halo while I burn for both. Essie, my mad foolish frightened Essie, can't you understand that if you give me up for this God of yours you'll drive me to murder. If I must marry you to hold you, why then I'll kill that cursed wife of mine. . . ."

It was his turn now to break off in despair of being able to express his will to keep Esther for his own, and because argument seemed so hopeless he tried to take her in his arms, whereupon Mark who was aching with the effort to maintain himself unobserved upon the bough of the yew-tree said his Paternosters and Aves faster than ever, that she might have the strength to resist that scoundrel of Rushbrooke Grange. He longed to have the eloquence to make some wonderful prayer to the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene so that a miracle might happen and their images point accusing hands at the blasphemer below.

And then it seemed as if a miracle did happen, for out of the jangle of recriminations and appeals that now signified no more than the noise of trees in a storm he heard the voice of Esther gradually gain its right to be heard, gradually win from its rival silence until the tale was told.

"I know that I am overcome by the saving grace of God," she was saying. "And I know that I owe it to them." She pointed to the holy women above the door. The squire shook his fist; but he still kept silence. "I have run away from God since I knew you, Will. I have loved you as much as that. I have gone to church only when I had to go for my brother's sake, but I have actually stuffed my ears with cotton wool so that no word there spoken might shake my faith in my right to love you. But it was all to no purpose. You know that it was you who told me always to come to our meetings through the wood and past the chapel. And however fast I went and however tight I shut myself up in thoughts of you and your love and my love I have always felt that these images spoke to me reproachfully in passing. It's not mere imagination, Will. Why, before we came to Wych-on-the-Wold when you went away to the Pacific that I might have peace of mind, I used always to be haunted by the idea that God was calling me back to Him, and I would run, yes, actually run through the woods until my legs have been torn by brambles."

"Madness! Madness!" cried Starling.

"Let it be madness. If God chooses to pursue a human soul with madness, the pursuit is not less swift and relentless for that. And I shook Him off. I escaped from religion; I prayed to the Devil to keep me wicked, so utterly did I love you. Then when my brother was offered Wych-on-the-Wold I felt that the Devil had heard my prayer and had indeed made me his own. That frightened me for a moment. When I wrote to you and said we were coming here and you hurried back, I can't describe to you the fear that overcame me when I first entered this hollow where you lived. Several times I'd tried to come down before you arrived here, but I'd always been afraid, and that was why the first night I brought Mark with me."

"That long-legged prig and puppy," grunted the squire.

Mark could have shouted for joy when he heard this, shouted because he was helping with his Paternosters and his Aves to drive this ruffian out of Esther's life for ever, shouted because his long legs were strong enough to hold on to this yew-tree bough.

"He's neither a prig nor a puppy," Esther said. "I've treated him badly ever since he came to live with us, and I treated him badly on your account, because whenever I was with him I found it harder to resist the pursuit of God. Now let's leave Mark out of this. Everything was in your favour, I tell you. I was sure that the Devil. . . ."

"The Devil!" Starling interrupted. "Your Devil, dear Essie, is as ridiculous as your God. It's only your poor old God with his face painted black like the bogey man of childhood."

"I was sure that the Devil," Esther repeated without seeming to hear the blasphemy, "had taken me for his own and given us to each other. You to me. Me to you, my darling. I didn't care. I was ready to burn in Hell for you. So, don't call me coward, for mad though you think me I was ready to be damned for you, and I believe in damnation. You don't. Yet the first time I passed by this chapel on my way to meet you again after that endless horrible parting I had to run away from the holy influence. I remember that there was a black cow in the field near the gates of the Grange, and I waited there while Mark poked about in this chapel, waited in the twilight afraid to go back and tell him to hurry in case I should be recaptured by God and meet you only to meet you never more."

"I suppose you thought my old Kerry cow was the Devil, eh?" he sneered.

She paid no attention, but continued enthralled by the passion of her spiritual adventure.

"It was no use. I couldn't come by here every day and not go back. Why, once I opened the Bible at hazard just to show my defiance and I read Her sins which are many are forgiven for she loved much. This must be the end of our love, my lover, for I can't go on. Those two stone Maries have brought me back to God. No more with you, my own beloved. No more, my darling, no more. And yet if even now with one kiss you could give me strength to sin I should rejoice. But they have made my lips as cold as their own, and my arms that once knew how to clasp you to my heart they have lifted up to Heaven like their own. I am going into a convent at once, where until I die I shall pray for you, my own love."

The birds no longer sang nor twittered nor cheeped in the thickets around, but all passion throbbed in the voice of Esther when she spoke these words. She stood there with her hair in disarray transfigured like a tree in autumn on which the sunlight shines when the gale has died, but from which the leaves will soon fall because winter is at hand. Yet her lover was so little moved by her ordeal that he went back to mouthing his blasphemies.

"Go then," he shouted. "But these two stone dolls shall not have power to drive my next mistress into folly. Wasn't Mary Magdalene a sinner? Didn't she fall in love with Christ? Of course, she did! And I'll make an example of her just as Christians make an example of all women who love much."

The squire pulled himself up by the ivy and struck the image of St. Mary Magdalene on the face.

"When you pray for me, dear Essie, in your convent of greensick women, don't forget that your patron saint was kicked from her pedestal by your lover."

Starling was as good as his word; but the effort he made to overthrow the saint carried him with it; his foot catching in the ivy fell head downward and striking upon a stone was killed.

Mark hesitated before he jumped down from his bough, because he dreaded to add to Esther's despair the thought of his having overheard all that went before. But seeing her in the sunlight now filled again with the voices of birds, seeing her blue eyes staring in horror and the nervous twitching of her hands he felt that the shock of his irruption might save her reason and in a moment he was standing beside her looking down at the dead man.

"Let me die too," she cried.

Mark found himself answering in a kind of inspiration:

"No, Esther, you must live to pray for his soul."

"He was struck dead for his blasphemy. He is in Hell. Of what use to pray for his soul?"

"But Esther while he was falling, even in that second, he had time to repent. Live, Esther. Live to pray for him."

Mark was overcome with a desire to laugh at the stilted way in which he was talking, and, from the suppression of the desire, to laugh wildly at everything in the scene, and not least at the comic death of Will Starling, even at the corpse itself lying with a broken neck at his feet. By an effort of will he regained control of his muscles, and the tension of the last half hour finding no relief in bodily relaxation was stamped ineffaceably upon his mind to take its place with that afternoon in his father's study at the Lima Street Mission which first inspired him with dread of the sexual relation of man to woman, a dread that was now made permanent by what he had endured on the bough of that yew-tree.

Thanks to Mark's intervention the business was explained without scandal; nobody doubted that the squire of Rushbrooke Grange died a martyr to his dislike of ivy's encroaching upon ancient images. Esther's stormy soul took refuge in a convent, and there it seemed at peace.