All over the pavement of the church spread the exaggerated
cross-hatching of the old pews' oak, a Smithfield market of intersecting
lines such as children made with cards in the old days when kings and
knaves had fat legs bulging above their serviceable feet, and queens had
skirts to their gowns and were not cut across their royal middles by
mirrors reflecting only the bedizened torso of them and the
charge--heart, trefoil, or the like--in the right-hand top corner of the
oblong that framed them.
The pew had qualities: tall fat hassocks, red cushions, a comparative
seclusion, and, in the case of the affluent, red curtains drawn at
sermon-time.
The child wearied by the spectacle of a plump divine, in black gown and
Geneva bands, thumping the pulpit-cushions in the madness of
incomprehensible oratory, surrendered his ears to the noise of
intonations which, in his own treble, would have earned the reprimand,
'Naughty temper.' His eyes, however, were, through some oversight of the
gods of his universe, still his own. They found their own pasture: not,
to be sure, the argent and sable of gown and bands, still less the gules
of flushed denunciatory gills.
There is fair pasture in an old church which, when Norman work was
broken down, men loved and built again as from the heart, with pillars
and arches, which, to their rude time, symbolized all that the heart
desires to materialize, in symbolic stone. The fretted tombs where the
effigies of warrior and priest lay life-like in dead marble, the
fretted canopies that brooded above their rest. Tall pillars like the
trunks of the pine woods that smelt so sweet, the marvel of the timbered
roof--turned upside down it would be like a ship. And what could be
easier than to turn it upside down? Imagination shrank bashfully from
the pulpit already tightly tenanted, but the triforium was plainly and
beautifully empty; there one could walk, squeezing happily through the
deep thin arches and treading carefully by the unguarded narrow ledge.
Only if one played too long in the roof aunts nudged, and urgent
whispers insisted that one must not look about like that in church. When
this moment came it came always as a crisis foreseen, half dreaded, half
longed-for. After that the child kept his eyes lowered, and looked only
at the faded red hassocks from which the straw bulged, and in brief,
guarded, intimate moments, at the other child.
The other child was kneeling, always, whether the congregation knelt or
stood or sat. Its hands were clasped. Its face was raised, but its back
bowed under a weight--the weight of the font, for the other child was of
marble and knelt always in the church, Sundays and week-days. There had
been once three marble figures holding up the shallow basin, but two had
crumbled or been broken away, and now it seemed that the whole weight of
the superimposed marble rested on those slender shoulders.
The child who was not marble was sorry for the other. He must be very
tired.
The child who was not marble,--his name was Ernest,--that child of weary
eyes and bored brain, pitied the marble boy while he envied him.
'I suppose he doesn't really feel, if he's stone,' he said. 'That's what
they mean by the stony-hearted tyrant. But if he does feel-- How jolly it
would be if he could come out and sit in my pew, or if I could creep
under the font beside him. If he would move a little there would be
just room for me.'
The first time that Ernest ever saw the marble child move was on the
hottest Sunday in the year. The walk across the fields had been a
breathless penance, the ground burned the soles of Ernest's feet as
red-hot ploughshares the feet of the saints. The corn was cut, and stood
in stiff yellow stooks, and the shadows were very black. The sky was
light, except in the west beyond the pine trees, where blue-black clouds
were piled.
'Like witches' feather-beds,' said Aunt Harriet, shaking out the folds
of her lace shawl.
'Not before the child, dear,' whispered Aunt Emmeline.
Ernest heard her, of course. It was always like that: as soon as any one
spoke about anything interesting, Aunt Emmeline intervened. Ernest
walked along very melancholy in his starched frill. The dust had
whitened his strapped shoes, and there was a wrinkle in one of his white
socks.
'Pull it up, child, pull it up,' said Aunt Jessie; and shielded from the
world by the vast silk-veiled crinolines of three full-sized aunts, he
pulled it up.
On the way to church, and indeed, in all walks abroad, you held the hand
of an aunt; the circumferent crinolines made the holding an arm's-length
business, very tiring. Ernest was always glad when, in the porch, the
hand was dropped. It was just as the porch was reached that the first
lonely roll of thunder broke over the hills.
'I knew it,' said Aunt Jessie, in triumph; 'but you would wear your blue
silk.'
There was no more thunder till after the second lesson, which was hardly
ever as interesting as the first, Ernest thought. The marble child
looked more tired than usual, and Ernest lost himself in a dream-game
where both of them got out from prison and played hide-and-seek among
the tombstones. Then the thunder cracked deafeningly right over the
church. Ernest forgot to stand up, and even the clergyman waited till it
died away.
It was a most exciting service, well worth coming to church for, and
afterwards people crowded in the wide porch and wondered whether it
would clear, and wished they had brought their umbrellas. Some went back
and sat in their pews till the servants should have had time to go home
and return with umbrellas and cloaks. The more impetuous made clumsy
rushes between the showers, bonnets bent, skirts held well up. Many a
Sunday dress was ruined that day, many a bonnet fell from best to
second-best.
And it was when Aunt Jessie whispered to him to sit still and be a good
boy and learn a hymn, that he looked to the marble child with, 'Isn't it
a shame?' in his heart and his eyes, and the marble child looked back,
'Never mind, it will soon be over,' and held out its marble hands.
Ernest saw them come toward him, reaching well beyond the rim of the
basin under which they had always, till now, stayed.
'Oh!' said Ernest, quite out loud; and, dropping the hymn-book, held out
his hands, or began to hold them out. For before he had done more than
sketch the gesture, he remembered that marble does not move and that one
must not be silly. All the same, marble _had_ moved. Also Ernest had
'spoken out loud' in church. Unspeakable disgrace!
He was taken home in conscious ignominy, treading in all the puddles to
distract his mind from his condition.
He was put to bed early, as a punishment, instead of sitting up and
learning his catechism under the charge of one of the maids while the
aunts went to evening church. This, while it was terrible to Ernest, was
in the nature of a reprieve to the housemaid, who found means to modify
her own consequent loneliness. Far-away whispers and laughs from the
back or kitchen windows assured Ernest that the front or polite side of
the house was unguarded. He got up, simulated the appearance of the
completely dressed, and went down the carpeted stairs, through the
rosewood-furnished drawing-room, rose-scented and still as a deathbed,
and so out through the French windows to the lawn, where already the
beginnings of dew lay softly.
His going out had no definite aim. It was simply an act of rebellion
such as, secure from observation, the timid may achieve; a demonstration
akin to putting the tongue out behind people's backs.
Having got himself out on the lawn, he made haste to hide in the
shrubbery, disheartened by a baffling consciousness of the futility of
safe revenges. What is the tongue put out behind the back of the enemy
without the applause of some admirer?
The red rays of the setting sun made splendor in the dripping shrubbery.
'I wish I hadn't,' said Ernest.
But it seemed silly to go back now, just to go out and to go back. So he
went farther into the shrubbery and got out at the other side where the
shrubbery slopes down into the wood, and it was nearly dark there--so
nearly that the child felt more alone than ever.
And then quite suddenly he was not alone. Hands parted the hazels and a
face he knew looked out from between them.
He knew the face, and yet the child he saw was not any of the children
he knew.
'Well,' said the child with the face he knew; 'I've been watching you.
What did you come out for?'
'I was put to bed.'
'Do you not like it?'
'Not when it's for punishment.'
'If you'll go back now,' said the strange child, 'I'll come and play
with you after you're asleep.'
'You daren't. Suppose the aunts catch you?'
'They won't,' said the child, shaking its head and laughing. 'I'll race
you to the house!'
Ernest ran. He won the race. For the other child was not there at all
when he reached the house.
'How odd!' he said. But he was tired and there was thunder again and it
was beginning to rain, large spots as big as pennies on the step of the
French window. So he went back to bed, too sleepy to worry about the
question of where he had seen the child before, and only a little
disappointed because his revenge had been so brief and inadequate.
Then he fell asleep and dreamed that the marble child had crept out from
under the font, and that he and it were playing hide-and-seek among the
pews in the gallery at church. It was a delightful dream and lasted all
night, and when he woke he knew that the child he had seen in the wood
in yesterday's last light was the marble child from the church.
This did not surprise him as much as it would surprise you: the world
where children live is so full of amazing and incredible-looking things
that turn out to be quite real. And if Lot's wife could be turned into a
pillar of salt, why should not a marble child turn into a real one? It
was all quite plain to Ernest, but he did not tell any one: because he
had a feeling that it might not be easy to make it plain to them.
'That child doesn't look quite the thing,' said Aunt Emmeline at
breakfast. 'A dose of Gregory's, I think, at eleven.'
Ernest's morning was blighted. Did you ever take Gregory's powder? It is
worse than quinine, worse than senna, worse than anything except castor
oil.
But Ernest had to take it--in raspberry jam.
'And don't make such faces,' said Aunt Emmeline, rinsing the spoon at
the pantry sink. 'You know it's all for your own good.'
As if the thought that it is for one's own good ever kept any one from
making faces!
The aunts were kind in their grown-up crinolined way. But Ernest wanted
some one to play with. Every night in his dreams he played with the
marble child. And at church on Sunday the marble child still held out
its hands, farther than before.
'Come along then,' Ernest said to it, in that voice with which heart
speaks to heart; 'come and sit with me behind the red curtains. Come!'
The marble child did not look at him. Its head seemed to be bent farther
forward than ever before.
When it came to the second hymn Ernest had an inspiration. All the rest
of the churchful, sleepy and suitable, were singing,--
'The roseate hues of early dawn,
The brightness of the day,
The crimson of the sunset sky,
How fast they fade away.'
Ernest turned his head towards the marble child and softly mouthed,--you
could hardly call it singing,--
'The rosy tews of early dawn,
The brightness of the day;
Come out, come out, come out, come out,
Come out with me and play.'
And he pictured the rapture of that moment when the marble child should
respond to this appeal, creep out from under the font, and come and sit
beside him on the red cushions beyond the red curtains. The aunts would
not see, of course. They never saw the things that mattered. No one
would see except Ernest. He looked hard at the marble child.
'You must come out,' he said; and again, 'You must come, you must.'
And the marble child did come. It crept out and came to sit by him,
holding his hand. It was a cold hand certainly, but it did not feel like
marble.
And the next thing he knew, an aunt was shaking him and whispering with
fierceness tempered by reverence for the sacred edifice,--
'Wake up, Ernest. How can you be so naughty?'
And the marble child was back in its place under the font.
When Ernest looks back on that summer it seems to have thundered every
time he went to church. But of course this cannot really have been the
case.
But it was certainly a very lowering purple-skied day which saw him
stealthily start on the adventure of his little life. He was weary of
aunts--they were kind yet just; they told him so and he believed them.
But their justice was exactly like other people's nagging, and their
kindness he did not want at all. He wanted some one to play with.
'May we walk up to the churchyard?' was a request at first received
graciously as showing a serious spirit. But its reiteration was
considered morbid, and his walks took the more dusty direction of the
County Asylum.
His longing for the only child he knew, the marble child, exacerbated by
denial, drove him to rebellion. He would run away. He would live with
the marble child in the big church porch; they would eat berries from
the wood near by, just as children did in books, and hide there when
people came to church.
So he watched his opportunity and went quietly out through the French
window, skirted the side of the house where all the windows were blank
because of the old window-tax, took the narrow strip of lawn at a
breathless run, and found safe cover among the rhododendrons.
The church-door was locked, of course, but he knew where there was a
broken pane in the vestry window, and his eye had marked the lop-sided
tombstone underneath it. By climbing upon that and getting a knee in the
carved water-spout-- He did it, got his hand through, turned the catch of
the window, and fell through upon the dusty table of the vestry.
The door was ajar and he passed into the empty church. It seemed very
large and gray now that he had it to himself. His feet made a loud
echoing noise that was disconcerting. He had meant to call out, 'Here I
am!' But in the face of these echoes he could not.
He found the marble child, its head bent more than ever, its hands
reaching out quite beyond the edge of the font; and when he was quite
close he whispered,--
'Here I am.--Come and play!'
But his voice trembled a little. The marble child was so plainly marble.
And yet it had not always been marble. He was not sure. Yet--
'I _am_ sure,' he said. 'You did talk to me in the shrubbery, didn't
you?'
But the marble child did not move or speak.
'You did come and hold my hand last Sunday,' he said, a little louder.
And only the empty echoes answered him.
'Come out,' he said then, almost afraid now of the church's insistent
silence. 'I've come to live with you altogether. Come out of your
marble, do come out!'
He reached up to stroke the marble cheek. A sound thrilled him, a loud
everyday sound. The big key turning in the lock of the south door. The
aunts!
'Now they'll take me back,' said Ernest; 'you might have come.'
But it was not the aunts. It was the old pew-opener, come to scrub the
chancel. She came slowly in with pail and brush; the pail slopped a
little water on to the floor close to Ernest as she passed him, not
seeing.
Then the marble child moved, turned toward Ernest with speaking lips and
eyes that saw.
'You can stay with me forever if you like,' it said, 'but you'll have to
see things happen. I have seen things happen.'
'What sort of things?' Ernest asked.
'Terrible things.'
'What things shall I have to see?'
'_Her_,'--the marble child moved a free arm to point to the old woman on
the chancel steps,--'and your aunt who will be here presently, looking
for you. Do you hear the thunder? Presently the lightning will strike
the church. It won't hurt us, but it will fall on them.'
Ernest remembered in a flash how kind Aunt Emmeline had been when he was
ill, how Aunt Jessie had given him his chessmen, and Aunt Harriet had
taught him how to make paper rosettes for picture-frames.
'I must go and tell them,' he said.
'If you go, you'll never see me again,' said the marble child, and put
its arms round his neck.
'Can't I come back to you when I've told them?' Ernest asked, returning
the embrace.
'There will be no coming back,' said the marble child.
'But I want you. I love you best of everybody in the world,' Ernest
said.
'I know.'
'I'll stay with you,' said Ernest.
The marble child said nothing.
'But if I don't tell them I shall be the same as a murderer,' Ernest
whispered. 'Oh! let me go, and come back to you.'
'I shall not be here.'
'But I must go. I must,' said Ernest, torn between love and duty.
'Yes.'
'And I shan't have you any more?' the living child urged.
'You'll have me in your heart,' said the marble child--'that's where I
want to be. That's my real home.'
They kissed each other again.
'It was certainly a direct Providence,' Aunt Emmeline used to say in
later years to really sympathetic friends, 'that I thought of going up
to the church when I did. Otherwise nothing could have saved dear
Ernest. He was terrified, quite crazy with fright, poor child, and he
rushed out at me from behind our pew shouting, "Come away, come away,
auntie, come away!" and dragged me out. Mrs. Meadows providentially
followed, to see what it was all about, and the next thing was the
catastrophe.'
'The church was struck by a thunder-bolt was it not?' the sympathetic
friend asks.
'It was indeed--a deafening crash, my dear--and then the church slowly
crumbled before our eyes. The south wall broke like a slice of cake when
you break it across--and the noise and the dust! Mrs. Meadows never had
her hearing again, poor thing, and her mind was a little affected too.
I became unconscious, and Ernest--well, it was altogether too much for
the child. He lay between life and death for weeks. Shock to the system,
the physician said. He had been rather run down before. We had to get a
little cousin to come and live with us afterwards. The physicians said
that he required young society.'
'It must indeed have been a shock,' says the sympathetic friend, who
knows there is more to come.
'His intellect was quite changed, my dear,' Aunt Emmeline resumes; 'on
regaining consciousness he demanded the marble child! Cried and raved,
my dear, always about the marble child. It appeared he had had fancies
about one of the little angels that supported the old font, not the
present font, my dear. We presented that as a token of gratitude to
Providence for our escape. Of course we checked his fancifulness as well
as we could, but it lasted quite a long time.'
'What became of the little marble angel?' the friend inquires as in
friendship bound.
'Crushed to powder, dear, in the awful wreck of the church. Not a trace
of it could be found. And poor Mrs. Meadows! So dreadful those
delusions.'
'What form did her delusions take?' the friend, anxious to be done with
the old story, hastily asks.
'Well, she always declared that _two_ children ran out to warn me and
that one of them was very unusual looking. "It wasn't no flesh and
blood, ma'am," she used to say in her ungrammatical way; "it was a
little angel a-taking care of Master Ernest. It 'ad 'old of 'is 'and.
And I say it was 'is garden angel, and its face was as bright as a lily
in the sun."'
The friend glances at the India cabinet, and Aunt Emmeline rises and
unlocks it.
'Ernest must have been behaving in a very naughty and destructive way in
the church--but the physician said he was not quite himself probably,
for when they got him home and undressed him they found this in his
hand.'
Then the sympathizing friend polishes her glasses and looks, not for the
first time, at the relic from the drawer of the India cabinet. It is a
white marble finger.
Thus flow the reminiscences of Aunt Emmeline. The memories of Ernest run
as this tale runs.