IT was Gertie’s birthday at the Rectory, and there was a sound of
merry-making in the air, but what form it would take was held a secret
from all of us who were not required to take an active part in its
celebration. Only I saw great signs of preparation in progress both at
the Rectory and the Manor House. Peggy’s aid was called in to help in
the cutting and sewing of many mysterious garments. Music, too, I saw
was to be held in requisition, for there was a sound of constant
rehearsals in the Rectory and Manor House drawing-rooms.
But what puzzled me most was the refurbishing of an enormous array of old
lanterns—not adapted to illumination or calculated to add lustre to the
festivities of the day. No; lanterns these of a past and antiquated
type, resembling in some degree the lanterns of horn which, as
illuminators, have long ago passed out of fashion, and are only to be
found occasionally in some stable or cowshed that has lapsed far behind
the progress of the age.
Never did I imagine that female tongues—girlish tongues more
especially—could keep a secret so rigidly. Not a word was let slip by
Marion or the Rectory party in explanation of their proceedings, so all I
could do was to possess my soul in patience, thankful that my own
presence was not a necessary part in the due performance of these
mysteries.
I have told you, I think, something of the position of the Manor House.
But of its greatest, and perhaps unique attraction, I have said nothing.
In olden times a monastery of large dimensions had held possession of the
ground that lay between the Manor House and the Rectory. Of this the
Refectory was the only perfect fragment, a magnificent vaulted building
just visible from the Manor House windows where it lay in the valley
beneath. Built of some fine grey stone that had taken to itself all the
colouring of which lichens are capable, it was tinted now with soft-toned
yellows in every possible gradation, and, in the sunlight of an autumn
evening, literally glowed in the warmth of the reflected rays. Only a
barn now, and the labourers who went in and out of it, to store and stack
the produce of the glebe, never bethought themselves of the glory from
which it had fallen.
The river that brought us the Rectory trout lower down in its course had
been arrested on its way by the monks, and formed a lake, with a
tree-clad island in the midst, from which they supplied themselves with
Lenten fare. On the ground that rose between the lake and the Manor,
scattered fragments of ruins—here an unsupported arch, hard by a standing
column or fragment of wall—with sarcophagi, at intervals, that had been
removed from their niches and desecrated of their contents, all testified
to the power and wide extent of the original community. These ruins lay
within the precincts of the Manor House. But just outside the boundary,
on the summit of an adjoining hill, there rose into the thin air the
wondrous shape of a tiny chapel, beside the perfection of which even the
Refectory itself looked coarse and material. Coloured by a growth of
lichen of the same soft tones, and with all its delicate tracery
untouched by the lapse of some five hundred years, it seemed the product
of some fairy hand. But the hand must have known its business well, for,
in spite of the delicate workmanship, every needless point and pinnacle
had been rigidly cut down, that the gales which fell full upon it from
the broad Atlantic might find no grip or holding ground. Even the
buttresses and gargoyles had been allowed no useless ornamentation or
finish; all the adornment had wisely been lavished on the interior. It
had been fashioned in one single nave, and the fans which sprang from the
columns on either side gave a lightness and delicacy to the roof that
minuter decoration would have only impaired, while a tiny tower, uprising
at the end that over-looked the sea and pierced by a narrow winding
stair, supplied just what was needed to break the monotony of the
exterior outline.
It was to this wondrous place, I found, that the birthday festivities
were directed.
As evening approached, all who were to take part in the ceremonial
assembled at the Refectory. In what took place within, no outsider was
allowed to participate. But at eight o’clock, and just as the moon was
rising, a long procession of robed and cowled monks issued from the
building, and holding, each of them, a lantern in his hand, entered on
the slow and winding ascent that led to the chapel on the hill. And as
they wended their way round and round the grass-clad cone, their voices
came to us in slow and solemn hymns for the sailors on the sea. The
course of time had been reversed, and once again, as in the days when the
chapel was built, we saw re-enacted before us the ritual for which it was
intended. It was difficult even for ourselves, who knew well and
intimately every one of those cowled monks, to believe that we were not
living five centuries before our time, and assisting once again in a
ceremonial that, in the early days of the monastery, must have taken
place again and again when storm and tempest were raging. Only to-night
there was no storm and tempest. The necessities of modern comfort and
convention had so far interfered with the celebration, that it was
re-enacted at a time when the chief requirements for its enactment were
obtrusively wanting. And when the summit of the hill had been reached,
we watched and waited till the final development came.
On a sudden from the tower that crowned the chapel a light flashed out
and burned steadily from a brazier on its summit. Any sailors who were
voyaging along that calm and moonlit sea must have been startled by a
light that warned them they were approaching a rough and inhospitable
coast, of which, in a brightness that was clear as the day, no ship could
by any possibility have been ignorant, unless the look-out had been
hopelessly and disgracefully incapable.
The light burned on for an hour, then vanished.
And the festivities of Gertie’s birthday were ended.
* * * * *
I was beginning to descend the hill among the more belated of the
revellers, when a gentle hand was laid on my shoulder, and I turned and
saw Marion.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Harold,” she said, “but in all the
crowd and confusion you were undiscoverable. Birthday festivities for
Gertie, and birthday festivities for you and me, dear—the birthday of our
love.”
And then we dropped purposely behind the crowd, who were sweeping in all
directions down the hill.
“Let us go back to the chapel, Harold,” she whispered. “We may never see
the view on such a night again. Even the tropics couldn’t supply a scene
to smile more sweetly on our love.”
“No, that they couldn’t, dearest. What is it the poet says?—
‘Come away! the heavens above
Just have light enough for love.’
Well, the heavens have been kinder still to you and me, Marion, and
lighted us a lamp by which I can read every glance in your eye, and every
smile on your lips. And are you really happy, dear, I wonder? I can
never hear you say it too often.”
“Yes, Harold, happy as I never expected or deserved to be.” And then she
would say no more—only drew closer to my side—for she was new and strange
to the expression of her love. “By the way,” she added, “don’t you
wonder how they got up the turret-stairs to light the lamp? I’ve tried
them again and again and could never manage more than half of them, even
in the daylight. Many of them are gone altogether, and all of them are
crumbling and dangerous.”
“Ah! that was part of the secret, dear, they kept so well, though I
thought that you at any rate had been entrusted with it. The girls, you
see, wanted a man to manage that for them, and so they condescended to
trust me with the business. There have been carpenters at work in the
tower for days, but always in the late evening and when no one was about.
And they’ve made quite a decent flight of wooden steps. Suppose we try
them. The view from the top will be finer even than this; and, better
still, we shall be alone together for once in the day.”
We did well to climb the turret, for the panorama all around us was clear
as on the clearest day.
The chapel hill, on which we stood, rose from the centre of a valley
which was itself encompassed by a ring of distant hills, except on the
side towards the sea, on which two or three small steamers were passing,
like flies across a silver shield.
All the deep places of the valley were shrouded in a moonlit mist. Only
here and there a tree-top, or some ruined fragment of the monastery
beneath, rose high enough to pierce the silver cloud. In the distance
the hills shone bright and clear, their smooth and regular outline broken
at intervals by rounded tumuli, fit emblems of the Mighty Mother who had
taken her children back again to her bosom for their last sleep.
On the velvet sward below us lay the form of another chapel, designed, or
so it might have seemed, in ebony or jet. So black and well-defined was
the shadow that it seemed more real and substantial than the fabric on
which we stood. Each point and parapet of the building was reproduced in
clearest silhouette, even to the outline of the hideous gargoyles, of
which our own two figures where we leaned upon the parapet might have
been modern imitations in a less outlandish form.
At our feet stood the brazier, its weird and slender form reprinted on
the platform of the tower, wherein a few live coals, remnant of the spent
beacon-fire, still showed a dull and lurid glare. In the moonlight they
shone like coloured fruits piled in a basket of ribbed and frosted
silver.
“It might be the tripod of the Delphic shrine,” I said, “ready prepared
for some solemn incantation. Suppose we try its efficacy, Marion, by
swearing fealty to our love.” And then, with only the solemn hills
around us and the silence of the moonlit night, my love and I crossed
hands above the glowing embers and prayed that the flame of our love
might burn undimmed till the change which men call death should renew it
in another and more perfect form.
“Love’s pious flame for ever burneth;
From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth,”
quoted Marion, “which is true enough, though Southey was no poet; else
he’d have put such a pretty idea in more poetic form.”
“I wonder how you came to love me, Marion,” I said, “especially as I am
sure that Eric was my rival. And you know I’m nothing to him in looks or
prospects or anything.”
“What, fishing for compliments already, are you? Though perhaps it’s
true. He’s a dear old fellow and I love him almost as much as I do you.
Only, you see, in another way. And perhaps for a husband one wants
something to lean upon—something more manly, it may be, and less
picturesque. You aren’t offended, are you, by the implied compliment?
And there was the wreck, and that settled it. You didn’t give me a
chance. Why, I never look at Bruno,”—this was the name of the dog, for
the captain had given him to her—“without thinking how you risked your
life to please my idle fancy. Though indeed it was no fancy, for I
should always have been dreaming of him if that poor dog had died. And
yet, perhaps—_perhaps_—I cannot tell. Sometimes I think I might have
ended by marrying Eric, if you had stayed away.”
A footstep sounded on the platform behind us, and there, confronting us
as we turned to go, stood Riverdale himself. He had heard, I felt sure,
Marion’s concluding words.