They entered the church, where they could scarcely have found their
way about had it not been for the light of the lantern that Luce
carried.
“I am afraid,” he said, “that it will be, after all, too dark to see
anything, and we had best be turning towards Sellar’s Mead, lest we be
benighted on the road.”
The Countess Fanny said she wished to stay, and remarked how beautiful
the beams of the lantern were--like the long, regular rays of a
star--playing upon the pillars, the funeral hatchments that hung
thereon, and the mural tablets beyond, just picked out, gleaming with
a black or white lustre of marble in the almost complete darkness of
the long aisle.
“But you will not be able to see anything,” remarked Lucius; and he
held the lantern a little higher, so that he, at least, could see
something; and that was the face of the Countess Fanny, which seemed
to have a peculiar and glowing radiance in this funereal darkness.
“How odd,” he thought uneasily, “that she should wish to stay here now
at an hour so sombre and in a place so gloomy, alone with a stranger.
And more peculiar yet that she should not appear in the least
distressed by this experience, but elated--almost joyful.”
He asked her if she had been here before; he had noted that she had
not attended last Sunday’s service, and he had thought, at the time,
that this must have been a matter of some vexation to Oliver Sellar,
and even to Amy. It was rather conspicuous for them to come to church
without their very notable guest, who was to be of such importance in
the social life of St. Nite’s.…
“No, I have never been here before,” replied the Italian girl; and
then she, also, referred to last Sunday. “I would not come to the
service, you know; I knew how I should be stared at, and that is
rather disagreeable, is it not? I do not think that anyone really
approves me--they think that I am peculiar. Miss Drayton almost said
so, and so did the vicar’s wife. They asked me if I were going to
continue to wear these foreign clothes, and they did not say it very
kindly; although I think they were trying hard to be kind all the
time.”
“I am sure,” replied the young man warmly, “that nothing in the way of
unkindness could have been meant; but, of course, no one here has ever
seen anything like you.” (“Nor I either,” he added to himself,
“neither in London nor in Paris.”)
It was not peculiar that she startled a Cornish village, when she
would have been remarked in the finest society of any capital.
“Oliver should take you away,” he added uneasily. “You will find it
very dull here.”
“Everyone says that,” smiled the Countess Fanny, “but indeed I do not
find it dull at all.”
At this moment she had no air of finding anything dull. She seemed to
illuminate even this lugubrious and dreary building. She showed, in
those long, dim lantern rays, with all the poise and grace and vivid
loveliness of a spring-time flower against the dark lines of the
pillar and the darker lozenges of the funeral hatchments.
“Where are the Flimwel graves?” she asked, as lightly as if she spoke
of some pleasing and commonplace object.
Lucius Foxe winced from this careless expression, which seemed to show
him how little she understood of anything. Even he, not so much older
than she was in years, was startled, almost repelled, by such a light
and indifferent attitude to life and death; an attitude even more
careless than that of a child who is unfrightened by the dark, and
tales of ghosts and goblins.
But the Countess Fanny seemed impervious to any such fanciful or
mysterious terrors. She moved with her light, buoyant step down the
gloomy aisle, and Lucius Foxe followed her, holding the lantern.
She glanced at the mural tablets, the urns and draperies, the skulls
and crossbones, the weeping figures, the long Latin inscriptions;
sometimes she paused, and with a fine finger traced the half-effaced
letters, striving to discover the name of Flimwel.
It was there often enough, and he must pause and hold the lantern up,
that she could read the lists of the pieties, charities, and virtues
of her ancestors pompously engraved on tablet and scroll; and his name
was there also--frequently enough, too--and she must read that out
aloud, again and again, half laughing: “‘Lucius Foxe,’ ‘Lucius Foxe’;
how many of them, eh?”
“This is a sad place,” replied the young man, “and I seldom come
here--and never with pleasure!”
The Countess Fanny replied that she did not think it sad at all.
“We all of us must die,” she remarked, with her brilliant smile, “and
why should we fear to contemplate death?”
“But these”--he was surprised into a familiar and intimate form of
address--“but these are curious sentiments for so young a woman!”
“I have been well educated,” said the Countess Fanny. “Madame de
Mailly taught me many things that young women do not usually know.”
She had reached the altar now, and stood there curious, glancing up
and down the steps--at the tablets with the Commandments, the
alabaster statue of the knight in armour who knelt here in perpetual
adoration, the altar itself, which cast now a feeble glimmer from the
gold metal and candlesticks thereon. Hot-house flowers from Lefton
Park drooped in the chill, bleak air. Their whiteness had a ghastly
and a deathlike look.
“So this is a Protestant church,” mused the girl; “and I am a
Protestant now. When we stopped in Paris, Oliver insisted on that. I
went to the Protestant church there, at the Embassy, you know. It was
all odd, and Madame de Mailly was very angry indeed. But what does it
matter? Madame de Mailly herself always taught me that one should
never be a bigot.”
The young man endeavoured to rouse himself from a state of drowsy
fascination; the scene and the girl seemed alike unreal. Never before
had he been in the church at such an hour, alone with such a
companion. He had always been sensitive to the thought of death, which
thought was associated very intimately in this peculiar spot--in this
church where all his ancestors lay beneath his feet when he came there
to a service.
He had, in his extreme youth, often been assailed by terrible visions
of what lay beneath those smooth stones: mouldering coffins, decaying
skeletons--all the hideous panoply of decay; and it was astonishing to
him to behold this foreign girl, a stranger, so unaffected by an
atmosphere which to him had always been full of dread and gloom. So
serene was she, so flashing with life, that she seemed to the young
man like a symbol of resurrection herself--a flower, a lily-bell,
growing from a grave. Standing on the altar steps, and glancing round
at the half-hidden memorials of the past, she said:
“Is it not strange to think that, with them, it is all over, and with
us, scarcely begun?”
“That thought does not depress you?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “Madame de Mailly used to say that if one permitted
oneself to be depressed by the thought of death, who could ever be
joyful? These people all had their day; and now it is your turn and
mine.” She must unintentionally have coupled their names, yet the fact
that she had done so gave the young man a curious pang, a deep thrill.
He moved away from the altar steps, and the withdrawal of the lantern
left her in darkness; and from that darkness he heard her voice:
“So little time for any of us--eh, Lucius? Such a small life!”
“But we can plan it,” he answered uneasily. “We can plan our lives so
as to make the best of them.”
“But we cannot,” she said, descending from the altar steps and coming
beside him. “We cannot plan our love.”
She looked at him without embarrassment, and added almost immediately:
“Tell me about the lighthouse.”
“The lighthouse?” repeated Lucius stupidly. “This is hardly the place
in which to talk about the lighthouse.”
“But I want to hear; and what time do we ever get alone?” she
answered. “There was a promise that you should take me to the
lighthouse, but with every day the weather’s more stormy. Don’t you
want to take me there?”
He parried that, and said:
“Why are you so fascinated with the lighthouse?”
“Why are you?” she countered.
“Oh, with me it is different! My family first built that
lighthouse--quite a long time ago. It was theirs, you know; and they
made a great deal of money out of it, with dues and tolls: and that
seemed wrong to me--almost like blood money. Well, that was before my
time, then the place was bought by Trinity House. It is one of the
wildest and most lonely in the kingdom, you know, once it had been
swept away.” He began to talk with some animation, forgetting the
place in which he stood. “There is nothing, I think,” he continued,
“like the ocean, nothing quite so grand and mysterious. I have felt a
different man when I have been out on the rocks or in the lighthouse;
and what more sublime symbol could anyone wish than that light, held
aloft through the storm, giving protection and safety? I am interested
in engineering also,” he continued hurriedly, as if making an
explanation which must be made. “I should like to build bridges, and
palaces--yes, and hospitals also, great buildings of all kinds, but I
have had very little training, and my schemes are not at all
practicable.”
The girl did not answer, and Lucius Foxe concluded hastily:
“But, of course, you cannot be interested in all this--to you the
lighthouse is just a curiosity.”
“No,” she said, “no! Why will you not take me there?”
“I will take you there if you wish,” replied the young man uneasily.
“We must ask Oliver about it.”
“Oliver!” said the Countess Fanny. “Is Oliver to be the master in
everything?”
“I suppose,” answered Lucius Foxe, “that so you have decided, since
you are to marry him.”
“I can make him do as I wish,” replied the girl with animation.
“Then make him bring you to the lighthouse,” said Lucius, and added
immediately: “It is getting very cold here, we’d better return.”
She followed him slowly down the aisle between the high pews and the
higher pillars, and the funeral hatchments and the mural tablets, all
emblazoned with the arms and names of the dead.
“Do you think there will be any great storms this winter?” she asked.
“Everyone says as much,” he replied. “There is hardly a winter here
when there are not storms. Two oceans meet round this point, and it is
most exposed to winds.”
“I want to be in a storm!” said the Countess Fanny. “All my life, you
know, I have lived in the sun, and peacefulness.”
“You won’t care for it,” he smiled. “Oliver ought to take you to
London: you have friends there, of course?”
“Oh, yes--and in Paris, too; but I wish to remain here.”
They had left the church, and come out into the little porch, which
darkened over them. The last bleak, lurid light of day glimmered on
innumerable white headstones and stone vases, swathed with stone
drapery, on the railings round ponderous altar tombs, and on the
immemorial blackness of the mighty yew, which blotted out in its
shadow yet more glimmering graves.
“I suppose,” said the Countess Fanny, “that they will bury me here. I
shall be ‘Fanny Sellar’--a name on one of these stones.”
“Do not say that,” cried the young man at once; “don’t talk of such a
thing!”
“Why not--did you think I was immortal?”
And he replied:
“Just now, it seemed to me you were! At least, I cannot think of you
and death in the same breath.”
“But I shall be old,” she answered, “and not pretty any more; and then
no one will regret me.”
“I wish you would not stay here!” he murmured. “I really cannot endure
for you to stay here!”
“Amy,” she reminded him, “has been here all her life.”
“Amy belongs to the place,” he answered. “She is part of St. Nite’s.
But you come from another country--almost from another world, I
think.”
The Countess Fanny serenely accepted this extravagant speech:
“I believe I do!” she said. “But Amy--yes, of course, you are taking
Amy away, are you not, in the spring? And I am staying behind.”
He did not answer, but preceded her down the brick path, lighting her
way by that raised lantern. The long beams picked out tombs, one tomb
after another, during their progress. He observed the names, the
dates, the bleak harshness of the grey stone. The wind met them, and
fluttered her long ringlets and the plume in her hat. He heard her
laugh excitedly in the gathering twilight, which to him was so full of
menace and even spite.
“It is too dark for us to ride home,” he said, in rising agitation.
“You must go and stay with the Spragges, while I send for a carriage.”
“I should like to ride home through the dark,” said the Countess
Fanny, pausing at the lych-gate.
The little yellow crude lights of the village gleamed, scattered
beneath them; the village street wound down to the cove. Above them,
light vaporous clouds whirled to a stormy confusion, and as they
paused, looking upwards both together, by a common impulse, these
clouds were torn apart, and in the rift appeared the crescent of the
new moon, icy cold and unutterably far away.
“A gate,” murmured the Countess Fanny; “we are standing in a gate--at
the entrance to something--and holding a lantern. True, is it not?”
“You are very fanciful,” replied the young man uneasily; and then,
after both looking at the moon together, they looked at each other in
that dim, uncertain and treacherous light, just touched with colour by
the edges of the lantern beams which shone from a down-hung hand. His
life had always been very quiet and monotonous; neither at home, at
school, nor at college had he made many friends nor attracted much
attention towards himself; and, even when he had gone abroad, it had
been in a modest manner, for he was neither much impressed nor much
impressed anyone else. Everything about him had always been ordinary;
he had been restricted by the lack of means suitable to his position,
and by a lack of energy and vigour in his own character: content with
Lefton Park of his ancestor; content with attendance on a sick father,
and dutiful visits to dutiful relatives; content with his dreams,
clustering round the lighthouse, his fancies and caprices and whims,
gathering round the lighthouse; content to drift into that engagement
to Ambrosia Sellar.
As he lingered here now, gazing at the dark foreign girl, whose
brilliant face was so near to his own, all these reflections rushed on
him, bringing with them an amazing sense of his own futility, his own
stupidity. He felt as if he had hitherto lived in a dream or trance,
and that the awakening was painful unto agony.
The girl watched his clear grey eyes falter under the reddish brows,
and a faint colour stain that long, smooth, pale face, so precisely
set off by the exact folds of the white neckband.
“How the wind is rising!” she cried joyously. “It is rising high, high
above the clouds. Look--it seems as if it would sweep even the moon
out of place.”
As if he were painfully endeavouring to break a spell, the young man
withdrew his fascinated regard from her.
“We cannot ride back now,” he said; “it would be too dangerous.”
“But the danger is all!” she answered. “What is anything if there is
not a risk to it? Why, we are risking all in even being alive!”
This was a new philosophy to Lucius Foxe. He had always been taught,
and had always accepted, the doctrines of prudence and safety. He had
always believed, as he had told the Countess Fanny, just now in the
church, that a man can plan his life; and she had countered with the
remark, “We cannot plan our love.” His blood had stirred to that, as
it stirred now to her speech of risk and danger. It might be that she
was right, and he a sluggish fool, with his conventions and
prejudices, with his prudence and foresight, with his acceptance of
the easiest and most immediate path.
“But I cannot risk your safety,” he smiled, with an effort to cover
his own roused emotion, “by taking you home now through the darkness
and the wind, the road is not too good, and we might easily have an
accident.”
“Are you always so cautious?” she flashed. “I should not have thought
it, you know! Cautious and young--that is not admirable in you.”
“They will be wondering what has become of you,” murmured Lucius.
“See, the blacksmith is at his door, with the horses: he also is
surprised that we have been so long in the church.”
“And yet we have not been long enough,” said the Countess Fanny. “We
have really seen nothing, and I must come again.”
They crossed the steep village street down which the wind was rushing
in its impetuous travelling to the sea. They could just hear the boom
of the surf on the rocks beyond the cove.
“You must go and stay with Mrs. Spragge,” said Lucius, “while I send
for the carriage.”
She did not appear to hear these words; at least she took no heed of
them, but stood there in the rough street, listening to the wind and
looking up at the wild storm clouds, the cold serenity of the night
heavens beyond, and the icy slip of moon, like a splinter of ice
indeed in those remote regions beyond the clouds.
She had taken off her hat with the long white plume, and her hair was
fluttering away from her face, down towards the sea--caught in the
tempestuous passage of the wind. Lucius would not look at her. He went
to the blacksmith’s door, and spoke to him hasty and ill-considered
words about the horses, suggesting first that they rode at once, and
then that it was not fit for a lady to return at this hour.
“She can wait in the vicarage,” he said confusedly, “and I will go to
Sellar’s Mead and have the carriage sent.”
And then he decided differently from that, and asked if there was a
messenger--someone who could ride at once to Sellar’s Mead.
The blacksmith stood humbly, listening with an air of deference to
these contradictory orders; yet for all that Lucius thought he
detected a leer in the man’s coarse face, and he blamed himself
bitterly for this predicament. Of course they should never have
stopped to go into the church. Of course he should have taken her home
immediately. This careless, brilliant girl had induced him to act most
foolishly. His present dilemma was solved for him by the sudden
appearance of Oliver Sellar, who had ridden up to the village to
discover the whereabouts of the Countess Fanny. He had taken the
precaution to bring the carriage with him. As he drew rein at the
blacksmith’s, Lucius beheld at once that he was in a violent temper.