MORE ABOUT KILKHAVEN.
Our dining-room was one story below the level at which we had entered
the parsonage; for, as I have said, the house was built into the face of
the cliff, just where it sunk nearly to the level of the shores of the
bay. While at dinner, on the evening of our arrival, I kept looking
from the window, of course, and I saw before me, first a little bit of
garden, mostly in turf, then a low stone wall; beyond, over the top of
the wall, the blue water of the bay; then beyond the water, all alive
with light and motion, the rocks and sand-hills of the opposite side
of the little bay, not a quarter of a mile across. I could likewise see
where the shore went sweeping out and away to the north, with rock after
rock standing far into the water, as if gazing over the awful wild,
where there was nothing to break the deathly waste between Cornwall and
Newfoundland. But for the moment I did not regard the huge power lying
outside so much as the merry blue bay between me and those rocks and
sand-hills. If I moved my head a little to the right, I saw, over the
top of the low wall already mentioned, and apparently quite close to it
the slender yellow masts of a schooner, her mainsail hanging loose from
the gaff, whose peak was lowered. We must, I thought, be on the very
harbour-quay. When I went out for my walk with Wynnie, I had turned from
the bay, and gone to the brow of the cliffs overhanging the open sea on
our own side of it.
When I came down to breakfast in the same room next morning, I stared.
The blue had changed to yellow. The life of the water was gone. Nothing
met my eyes but a wide expanse of dead sand. You could walk straight
across the bay to the hills opposite. From the look of the rocks, from
the perpendicular cliffs on the coast, I had almost, without thinking,
concluded that we were on the shore of a deep-water bay. It was
high-water, or nearly so, then; and now, when I looked westward, it was
over a long reach of sands, on the far border of which the white fringe
of the waves was visible, as if there was their _hitherto_, and further
towards us they could not come. Beyond the fringe lay the low hill of
the Atlantic. To add to my confusion, when I looked to the right, that
is, up the bay towards the land, there was no schooner there. I went out
at the window, which opened from the room upon the little lawn, to look,
and then saw in a moment how it was.
“Do you know, my dear,” I said to my wife, “we are just at the mouth
of that canal we saw as we came along? There are gates and a lock just
outside there. The schooner that was under this window last night must
have gone in with the tide. She is lying in the basin above now.”
“O, yes, papa,” Charlie and Harry broke in together. “We saw it go up
this morning. We’ve been out ever so long. It was so funny,” Charlie
went on--everything was _funny_ with Charlie--“to see it rise up like
a Jack-in-the-box, and then slip into the quiet water through the other
gates!”
And when I thought about the waves tumbling and breaking away out there,
and the wide yellow sands between, it was wonderful--which was what
Charlie meant by funny--to see the little vessel lying so many feet
above it all, in a still plenty of repose, gathering strength, one
might fancy to rush out again, when its time was come, into the turmoil
beyond, and dash its way through the breasts of the billows.
After breakfast we had prayers, as usual, and after a visit to Connie,
whom I found tired, but wonderfully well, I went out for a walk by
myself, to explore the neighbourhood, find the church, and, in a word,
do something to shake myself into my new garments. The day was glorious.
I wandered along a green path, in the opposite direction from our walk
the evening before, with a fir-wood on my right hand, and a belt of
feathery tamarisks on my left, behind which lay gardens sloping steeply
to a lower road, where stood a few pretty cottages. Turning a corner,
I came suddenly in sight of the church, on the green down above me--a
sheltered yet commanding situation; for, while the hill rose above it,
protecting it from the east, it looked down the bay, and the Atlantic
lay open before it. All the earth seemed to lie behind it, and all its
gaze to be fixed on the symbol of the infinite. It stood as the church
ought to stand, leading men up the mount of vision, to the verge of the
eternal, to send them back with their hearts full of the strength that
springs from hope, by which alone the true work of the world can
be done. And when I saw it I rejoiced to think that once more I was
favoured with a church that had a history. Of course it is a happy thing
to see new churches built wherever there is need of such; but to the
full idea of the building it is necessary that it should be one in which
the hopes and fears, the cares and consolations, the loves and desires
of our forefathers should have been roofed; where the hearts of those
through whom our country has become that which it is--from whom not
merely the life-blood of our bodies, but the life-blood of our spirits,
has come down to us, whose existence and whose efforts have made it
possible for us to be that which we are--have before us worshipped that
Spirit from whose fountain the whole torrent of being flows, who ever
pours fresh streams into the wearying waters of humanity, so ready to
settle down into a stagnant repose. Therefore I would far rather, when
I may, worship in an old church, whose very stones are a history of how
men strove to realise the infinite, compelling even the powers of nature
into the task--as I soon found on the very doorway of this church, where
the ripples of the outspread ocean, and grotesque imaginations of the
monsters of its deeps, fixed, as it might seem, for ever in stone, gave
a distorted reflex, from the little mirror of the artist’s mind, of that
mighty water, so awful, so significant to the human eye, which yet lies
in the hollow of the Father’s palm, like the handful that the weary
traveller lifts from the brook by the way. It is in virtue of the truth
that went forth in such and such like attempts that we are able to hold
our portion of the infinite reality which God only knows. They have
founded our Church for us, and such a church as this will stand for the
symbol of it; for here we too can worship the God of Abraham, of Isaac,
and of Jacob--the God of Sidney, of Hooker, of Herbert. This church of
Kilkhaven, old and worn, rose before me a history in stone--so beaten
and swept about by the “wild west wind,”
“For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms,”
and so streamed upon, and washed, and dissolved, by the waters lifted
from the sea and borne against it on the upper tide of the wind, that
you could almost fancy it one of those churches that have been buried
for ages beneath the encroaching waters, lifted again, by some mighty
revulsion of nature’s heart, into the air of the sweet heavens, there to
stand marked for ever with the tide-flows of the nether world--scooped,
and hollowed, and worn like aeonian rocks that have slowly, but for
ever, responded to the swirl and eddy of the wearing waters. So, from
the most troublous of times, will the Church of our land arise, in
virtue of what truth she holds, and in spite, if she rises at all,
of the worldliness of those who, instead of seeking her service, have
sought and gained the dignities which, if it be good that she have it
in her power to bestow them, need the corrective of a sharply wholesome
persecution which of late times she has not known. But God knows, and
the fire will come in its course--first in the form of just indignation,
it may be, against her professed servants, and then in the form of the
furnace seven times heated, in which the true builders shall yet walk
unhurt save as to their mortal part.
I looked about for some cottage where the sexton might be supposed to
live, and spied a slated roof, nearly on a level with the road, at a
little distance in front of me. I could at least inquire there. Before
I reached it, however, an elderly woman came out and approached me. She
was dressed in a white cap and a dark-coloured gown. On her face lay a
certain repose which attracted me. She looked as if she had suffered but
had consented to it, and therefore could smile. Her smile lay near the
surface. A kind word was enough to draw it up from the well where it lay
shimmering: you could always see the smile there, whether it was born or
not. But even when she smiled, in the very glimmering of that moonbeam,
you could see the deep, still, perhaps dark, waters under. O! if one
could but understand what goes on in the souls that have no words,
perhaps no inclination, to set it forth! What had she endured? How had
she learned to have that smile always near? What had consoled her, and
yet left her her grief--turned it, perhaps, into hope? Should I ever
know?
She drew near me, as if she would have passed me, as she would have
done, had I not spoken. I think she came towards me to give me the
opportunity of speaking if I wished, but she would not address me.
“Good morning,” I said. “Can you tell me where to find the sexton?”
“Well, sir,” she answered, with a gleam of the smile brightening
underneath her old skin, as it were, “I be all the sexton you be likely
to find this mornin’, sir. My husband, he be gone out to see one o’
Squire Tregarva’s hounds as was took ill last night. So if you want to
see the old church, sir, you’ll have to be content with an old woman to
show you, sir.”
“I shall be quite content, I assure you,” I answered. “Will you go and
get the key?”
“I have the key in my pocket, sir; for I thought that would be what
you’d be after, sir. And by the time you come to my age, sir, you’ll
learn to think of your old bones, sir. I beg your pardon for making so
free. For mayhap, says I to myself, he be the gentleman as be come to
take Mr. Shepherd’s duty for him. Be ye now, sir?”
All this was said in a slow sweet subdued tone, nearly of one pitch.
You would have felt that she claimed the privilege of age with a kind of
mournful gaiety, but was careful, and anxious even, not to presume upon
it, and, therefore, gentle as a young girl.
“Yes,” I answered. “My name is Walton I have come to take the place of
my friend Mr. Shepherd; and, of course, I want to see the church.”
“Well, she be a bee-utiful old church. Some things, I think, sir, grows
more beautiful the older they grows. But it ain’t us, sir.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Well, sir, there’s my little grandson in the cottage there: he’ll never
be so beautiful again. Them children du be the loves. But we all grows
uglier as we grows older. Churches don’t seem to, sir.”
“I’m not so sure about all that,” I said again.
“They did say, sir, that I was a pretty girl once. I’m not much to look
at now.”
And she smiled with such a gracious amusement, that I felt at once that
if there was any vanity left in this memory of her past loveliness,
it was sweet as the memory of their old fragrance left in the withered
leaves of the roses.
“But it du not matter, du it, sir? Beauty is only skin-deep.”
“I don’t believe that,” I answered. “Beauty is as deep as the heart at
least.”
“Well to be sure, my old husband du say I be as handsome in his eyes
as ever I be. But I beg your pardon, sir, for talkin’ about myself. I
believe it was the old church--she set us on to it.”
“The old church didn’t lead you into any harm then,” I answered. “The
beauty that is in the heart will shine out of the face again some
day--be sure of that. And after all, there is just the same kind of
beauty in a good old face that there is in an old church. You can’t say
the church is so trim and neat as it was the day that the first blast of
the organ filled it as with, a living soul. The carving is not quite so
sharp, the timbers are not quite so clean. There is a good deal of mould
and worm-eating and cobwebs about the old place. Yet both you and I
think it more beautiful now than it was then. Well, I believe it is, as
nearly as possible, the same with an old face. It has got stained, and
weather-beaten, and worn; but if the organ of truth has been playing on
inside the temple of the Lord, which St. Paul says our bodies are, there
is in the old face, though both form and complexion are gone, just the
beauty of the music inside. The wrinkles and the brownness can’t spoil
it. A light shines through it all--that of the indwelling spirit. I wish
we all grew old like the old churches.”
She did not reply, but I thought I saw in her face that she understood
my mysticism. We had been walking very slowly, had passed through the
quaint lych-gate, and now the old woman had got the key in the lock of
the door, whose archway was figured and fashioned as I have described
above, with a dozen mouldings or more, most of them “carved so
curiously.”