The ‘New Sabbath’ still proceeded line by line, with all the emotional
swells and cadences that had of old characterized the tune: and the body
of vocal harmony that it evoked implied a large congregation within, to
whom it was plainly as familiar as it had been to church-goers of a past
generation. With a whimsical sense of regret at the secession of his
once favourite air Somerset moved away, and would have quite withdrawn
from the field had he not at that moment observed two young men with
pitchers of water coming up from a stream hard by, and hastening with
their burdens into the chapel vestry by a side door. Almost as soon as
they had entered they emerged again with empty pitchers, and proceeded
to the stream to fill them as before, an operation which they repeated
several times. Somerset went forward to the stream, and waited till the
young men came out again.
‘You are carrying in a great deal of water,’ he said, as each dipped his
pitcher.
One of the young men modestly replied, ‘Yes: we filled the cistern this
morning; but it leaks, and requires a few pitcherfuls more.’
‘Why do you do it?’
‘There is to be a baptism, sir.’
Somerset was not sufficiently interested to develop a further
conversation, and observing them in silence till they had again vanished
into the building, he went on his way. Reaching the brow of the hill he
stopped and looked back. The chapel was still in view, and the shades
of night having deepened, the lights shone from the windows yet more
brightly than before. A few steps further would hide them and the
edifice, and all that belonged to it from his sight, possibly for ever.
There was something in the thought which led him to linger. The chapel
had neither beauty, quaintness, nor congeniality to recommend it: the
dissimilitude between the new utilitarianism of the place and the scenes
of venerable Gothic art which had occupied his daylight hours could not
well be exceeded. But Somerset, as has been said, was an instrument
of no narrow gamut: he had a key for other touches than the purely
aesthetic, even on such an excursion as this. His mind was arrested by
the intense and busy energy which must needs belong to an assembly that
required such a glare of light to do its religion by; in the heaving of
that tune there was an earnestness which made him thoughtful, and the
shine of those windows he had characterized as ugly reminded him of the
shining of the good deed in a naughty world. The chapel and its shabby
plot of ground, from which the herbage was all trodden away by busy
feet, had a living human interest that the numerous minsters and
churches knee-deep in fresh green grass, visited by him during the
foregoing week, had often lacked. Moreover, there was going to be a
baptism: that meant the immersion of a grown-up person; and he had
been told that Baptists were serious people and that the scene was most
impressive. What manner of man would it be who on an ordinary plodding
and bustling evening of the nineteenth century could single himself out
as one different from the rest of the inhabitants, banish all shyness,
and come forward to undergo such a trying ceremony? Who was he that
had pondered, gone into solitudes, wrestled with himself, worked up his
courage and said, I will do this, though few else will, for I believe it
to be my duty?
Whether on account of these thoughts, or from the circumstance that
he had been alone amongst the tombs all day without communion with his
kind, he could not tell in after years (when he had good reason to think
of the subject); but so it was that Somerset went back, and again stood
under the chapel-wall.
Instead of entering he passed round to where the stove-chimney came
through the bricks, and holding on to the iron stay he put his toes on
the plinth and looked in at the window. The building was quite full of
people belonging to that vast majority of society who are denied the
art of articulating their higher emotions, and crave dumbly for a
fugleman--respectably dressed working people, whose faces and forms were
worn and contorted by years of dreary toil. On a platform at the end
of the chapel a haggard man of more than middle age, with grey whiskers
ascetically cut back from the fore part of his face so far as to be
almost banished from the countenance, stood reading a chapter. Between
the minister and the congregation was an open space, and in the floor of
this was sunk a tank full of water, which just made its surface visible
above the blackness of its depths by reflecting the lights overhead.
Somerset endeavoured to discover which one among the assemblage was to
be the subject of the ceremony. But nobody appeared there who was at all
out of the region of commonplace. The people were all quiet and settled;
yet he could discern on their faces something more than attention,
though it was less than excitement: perhaps it was expectation. And as
if to bear out his surmise he heard at that moment the noise of wheels
behind him.
His gaze into the lighted chapel made what had been an evening scene
when he looked away from the landscape night itself on looking back;
but he could see enough to discover that a brougham had driven up to
the side-door used by the young water-bearers, and that a lady in
white-and-black half-mourning was in the act of alighting, followed by
what appeared to be a waiting-woman carrying wraps. They entered the
vestry-room of the chapel, and the door was shut. The service went on as
before till at a certain moment the door between vestry and chapel was
opened, when a woman came out clothed in an ample robe of flowing white,
which descended to her feet. Somerset was unfortunate in his position;
he could not see her face, but her gait suggested at once that she
was the lady who had arrived just before. She was rather tall than
otherwise, and the contour of her head and shoulders denoted a girl in
the heyday of youth and activity. His imagination, stimulated by this
beginning, set about filling in the meagre outline with most attractive
details.
She stood upon the brink of the pool, and the minister descended the
steps at its edge till the soles of his shoes were moistened with the
water. He turned to the young candidate, but she did not follow him:
instead of doing so she remained rigid as a stone. He stretched out his
hand, but she still showed reluctance, till, with some embarrassment, he
went back, and spoke softly in her ear.
She approached the edge, looked into the water, and turned away shaking
her head. Somerset could for the first time see her face. Though humanly
imperfect, as is every face we see, it was one which made him think that
the best in woman-kind no less than the best in psalm-tunes had gone
over to the Dissenters. He had certainly seen nobody so interesting
in his tour hitherto; she was about twenty or twenty-one--perhaps
twenty-three, for years have a way of stealing marches even upon
beauty’s anointed. The total dissimilarity between the expression of
her lineaments and that of the countenances around her was not a little
surprising, and was productive of hypotheses without measure as to
how she came there. She was, in fact, emphatically a modern type of
maidenhood, and she looked ultra-modern by reason of her environment: a
presumably sophisticated being among the simple ones--not wickedly so,
but one who knew life fairly well for her age. Her hair, of good
English brown, neither light nor dark, was abundant--too abundant for
convenience in tying, as it seemed; and it threw off the lamp-light in
a hazy lustre. And though it could not be said of her features that this
or that was flawless, the nameless charm of them altogether was only
another instance of how beautiful a woman can be as a whole without
attaining in any one detail to the lines marked out as absolutely
correct. The spirit and the life were there: and material shapes could
be disregarded.
Whatever moral characteristics this might be the surface of, enough
was shown to assure Somerset that she had some experience of things far
removed from her present circumscribed horizon, and could live, and was
even at that moment living, a clandestine, stealthy inner life which had
very little to do with her outward one. The repression of nearly every
external sign of that distress under which Somerset knew, by a sudden
intuitive sympathy, that she was labouring, added strength to these
convictions.
‘And you refuse?’ said the astonished minister, as she still stood
immovable on the brink of the pool. He persuasively took her sleeve
between his finger and thumb as if to draw her; but she resented this by
a quick movement of displeasure, and he released her, seeing that he had
gone too far.
‘But, my dear lady,’ he said, ‘you promised! Consider your profession,
and that you stand in the eyes of the whole church as an exemplar of
your faith.’
‘I cannot do it!’
‘But your father’s memory, miss; his last dying request!’
‘I cannot help it,’ she said, turning to get away.
‘You came here with the intention to fulfil the Word?’
‘But I was mistaken.’
‘Then why did you come?’
She tacitly implied that to be a question she did not care to answer.
‘Please say no more to me,’ she murmured, and hastened to withdraw.
During this unexpected dialogue (which had reached Somerset’s ears
through the open windows) that young man’s feelings had flown hither and
thither between minister and lady in a most capricious manner: it had
seemed at one moment a rather uncivil thing of her, charming as she was,
to give the minister and the water-bearers so much trouble for
nothing; the next, it seemed like reviving the ancient cruelties of the
ducking-stool to try to force a girl into that dark water if she had not
a mind to it. But the minister was not without insight, and he had seen
that it would be useless to say more. The crestfallen old man had to
turn round upon the congregation and declare officially that the baptism
was postponed.
She passed through the door into the vestry. During the exciting
moments of her recusancy there had been a perceptible flutter among the
sensitive members of the congregation; nervous Dissenters seeming to be
at one with nervous Episcopalians in this at least, that they heartily
disliked a scene during service. Calm was restored to their minds by the
minister starting a rather long hymn in minims and semibreves, amid the
singing of which he ascended the pulpit. His face had a severe and
even denunciatory look as he gave out his text, and Somerset began to
understand that this meant mischief to the young person who had caused
the hitch.
‘In the third chapter of Revelation and the fifteenth and following
verses, you will find these words:--
‘“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou
wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold
nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.... Thou sayest, I am rich,
and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that
thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.”’
The sermon straightway began, and it was soon apparent that the
commentary was to be no less forcible than the text. It was also
apparent that the words were, virtually, not directed forward in
the line in which they were uttered, but through the chink of the
vestry-door, that had stood slightly ajar since the exit of the young
lady. The listeners appeared to feel this no less than Somerset did, for
their eyes, one and all, became fixed upon that vestry door as if they
would almost push it open by the force of their gazing. The preacher’s
heart was full and bitter; no book or note was wanted by him; never
was spontaneity more absolute than here. It was no timid reproof of
the ornamental kind, but a direct denunciation, all the more vigorous
perhaps from the limitation of mind and language under which the speaker
laboured. Yet, fool that he had been made by the candidate, there was
nothing acrid in his attack. Genuine flashes of rhetorical fire
were occasionally struck by that plain and simple man, who knew what
straightforward conduct was, and who did not know the illimitable
caprice of a woman’s mind.
At this moment there was not in the whole chapel a person whose
imagination was not centred on what was invisibly taking place within
the vestry. The thunder of the minister’s eloquence echoed, of course,
through the weak sister’s cavern of retreat no less than round the
public assembly. What she was doing inside there--whether listening
contritely, or haughtily hastening to put on her things and get away
from the chapel and all it contained--was obviously the thought of each
member. What changes were tracing themselves upon that lovely face: did
it rise to phases of Raffaelesque resignation or sink so low as to flush
and frown? was Somerset’s inquiry; and a half-explanation occurred when,
during the discourse, the door which had been ajar was gently pushed to.
Looking on as a stranger it seemed to him more than probable that this
young woman’s power of persistence in her unexpected repugnance to the
rite was strengthened by wealth and position of some sort, and was
not the unassisted gift of nature. The manner of her arrival, and her
dignified bearing before the assembly, strengthened the belief. A woman
who did not feel something extraneous to her mental self to fall back
upon would be so far overawed by the people and the crisis as not to
retain sufficient resolution for a change of mind.
The sermon ended, the minister wiped his steaming face and turned down
his cuffs, and nods and sagacious glances went round. Yet many, even of
those who had presumably passed the same ordeal with credit, exhibited
gentler judgment than the preacher’s on a tergiversation of which they
had probably recognized some germ in their own bosoms when in the lady’s
situation.
For Somerset there was but one scene: the imagined scene of the girl
herself as she sat alone in the vestry. The fervent congregation rose
to sing again, and then Somerset heard a slight noise on his left hand
which caused him to turn his head. The brougham, which had retired
into the field to wait, was back again at the door: the subject of his
rumination came out from the chapel--not in her mystic robe of white,
but dressed in ordinary fashionable costume--followed as before by the
attendant with other articles of clothing on her arm, including the
white gown. Somerset fancied that the younger woman was drying her eyes
with her handkerchief, but there was not much time to see: they quickly
entered the carriage, and it moved on. Then a cat suddenly mewed, and
he saw a white Persian standing forlorn where the carriage had been. The
door was opened, the cat taken in, and the carriage drove away.
The stranger’s girlish form stamped itself deeply on Somerset’s soul. He
strolled on his way quite oblivious to the fact that the moon had just
risen, and that the landscape was one for him to linger over, especially
if there were any Gothic architecture in the line of the lunar rays. The
inference was that though this girl must be of a serious turn of mind,
wilfulness was not foreign to her composition: and it was probable that
her daily doings evinced without much abatement by religion the unbroken
spirit and pride of life natural to her age.
The little village inn at which Somerset intended to pass the night
lay a mile further on, and retracing his way up to the stile he rambled
along the lane, now beginning to be streaked like a zebra with the
shadows of some young trees that edged the road. But his attention was
attracted to the other side of the way by a hum as of a night-bee,
which arose from the play of the breezes over a single wire of telegraph
running parallel with his track on tall poles that had appeared by the
road, he hardly knew when, from a branch route, probably leading from
some town in the neighbourhood to the village he was approaching. He did
not know the population of Sleeping-Green, as the village of his search
was called, but the presence of this mark of civilization seemed to
signify that its inhabitants were not quite so far in the rear of their
age as might be imagined; a glance at the still ungrassed heap of earth
round the foot of each post was, however, sufficient to show that it was
at no very remote period that they had made their advance.
Aided by this friendly wire Somerset had no difficulty in keeping his
course, till he reached a point in the ascent of a hill at which the
telegraph branched off from the road, passing through an opening in the
hedge, to strike across an undulating down, while the road wound round
to the left. For a few moments Somerset doubted and stood still. The
wire sang on overhead with dying falls and melodious rises that invited
him to follow; while above the wire rode the stars in their courses, the
low nocturn of the former seeming to be the voices of those stars,
‘Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim.’
Recalling himself from these reflections Somerset decided to follow the
lead of the wire. It was not the first time during his present tour that
he had found his way at night by the help of these musical threads which
the post-office authorities had erected all over the country for quite
another purpose than to guide belated travellers. Plunging with it
across the down he came to a hedgeless road that entered a park or
chase, which flourished in all its original wildness. Tufts of rushes
and brakes of fern rose from the hollows, and the road was in places
half overgrown with green, as if it had not been tended for many years;
so much so that, where shaded by trees, he found some difficulty in
keeping it. Though he had noticed the remains of a deer-fence further
back no deer were visible, and it was scarcely possible that there
should be any in the existing state of things: but rabbits were
multitudinous, every hillock being dotted with their seated figures till
Somerset approached and sent them limping into their burrows. The road
next wound round a clump of underwood beside which lay heaps of faggots
for burning, and then there appeared against the sky the walls and
towers of a castle, half ruin, half residence, standing on an eminence
hard by.
Somerset stopped to examine it. The castle was not exceptionally large,
but it had all the characteristics of its most important fellows.
Irregular, dilapidated, and muffled in creepers as a great portion of it
was, some part--a comparatively modern wing--was inhabited, for a light
or two steadily gleamed from some upper windows; in others a reflection
of the moon denoted that unbroken glass yet filled their casements. Over
all rose the keep, a square solid tower apparently not much injured by
wars or weather, and darkened with ivy on one side, wherein wings could
be heard flapping uncertainly, as if they belonged to a bird unable
to find a proper perch. Hissing noises supervened, and then a hoot,
proclaiming that a brood of young owls were residing there in the
company of older ones. In spite of the habitable and more modern wing,
neglect and decay had set their mark upon the outworks of the pile,
unfitting them for a more positive light than that of the present hour.
He walked up to a modern arch spanning the ditch--now dry and
green--over which the drawbridge once had swung. The large door under
the porter’s archway was closed and locked. While standing here the
singing of the wire, which for the last few minutes he had quite
forgotten, again struck upon his ear, and retreating to a convenient
place he observed its final course: from the poles amid the trees
it leaped across the moat, over the girdling wall, and thence by
a tremendous stretch towards the keep where, to judge by sound, it
vanished through an arrow-slit into the interior. This fossil of
feudalism, then, was the journey’s-end of the wire, and not the village
of Sleeping-Green.
There was a certain unexpectedness in the fact that the hoary memorial
of a stolid antagonism to the interchange of ideas, the monument of hard
distinctions in blood and race, of deadly mistrust of one’s neighbour in
spite of the Church’s teaching, and of a sublime unconsciousness of
any other force than a brute one, should be the goal of a machine which
beyond everything may be said to symbolize cosmopolitan views and the
intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind. In that light the little
buzzing wire had a far finer significance to the student Somerset than
the vast walls which neighboured it. But the modern fever and fret which
consumes people before they can grow old was also signified by the wire;
and this aspect of to-day did not contrast well with the fairer side
of feudalism--leisure, light-hearted generosity, intense friendships,
hawks, hounds, revels, healthy complexions, freedom from care, and such
a living power in architectural art as the world may never again see.
Somerset withdrew till neither the singing of the wire nor the hisses of
the irritable owls could be heard any more. A clock in the castle struck
ten, and he recognized the strokes as those he had heard when sitting
on the stile. It was indispensable that he should retrace his steps and
push on to Sleeping-Green if he wished that night to reach his lodgings,
which had been secured by letter at a little inn in the straggling line
of roadside houses called by the above name, where his luggage had by
this time probably arrived. In a quarter of an hour he was again at the
point where the wire left the road, and following the highway over a
hill he saw the hamlet at his feet.