Читать книгу A Sovereign Remedy - Flora Annie Webster Steel - Страница 7

Finally a precipitous bluff blocked the view, but round this at a sharp turn Ted paused.

"Hullo!" he said. "Why, here we are again!"

They were at the bridge by the cross-roads where they had parted with Dr. Ramsay the day before. On the bare hillside stood the school, deserted this Sunday morning; below them lay the village. Over yonder was hidden the hundred pounds of floating deposit--(Ted's eyes sought this out immediately.) Over there, still shrugging that high shoulder of his in the sunshine, was Llwggd-y-Brydd disclaiming--so Ned thought--all responsibility for their last night's adventure. A real Midsummer Eve's dream, indeed! And to-night?--Midsummer night--would the adventure continue?

"It was two o'clock, was it, he said, for dinner?" asked Ted irrelevantly. He knew the hour perfectly, but he wanted to discuss the question.

"Two o'clock if the cycles couldn't be got," corrected Ned gravely.

"Of course," replied Ted impatiently, "and we will go and ask----"

Ned suddenly burst out laughing. "Why the deuce should we ask? You'd rather dine and so would I. That's simplicity itself; besides, we can go to church or chapel and confess the sin of omission meanwhile--if you like."

Ted looked at him with gloomy virtue. "Of course we must ask--at any rate I shall," he replied haughtily. He felt in his way exactly as his companion did, that is, as if every atom of life in him had been stirred to its depths; but conventional morality and solid fact meant more to him than they did to Ned.

The smith, mercifully, was kind. It had been too late to finish repairs on Saturday; they must wait over till Monday.

So, in a blissful state of relief, they sat on the bridge parapet again and watched the country folk come in to chapel.

"The Calvinists take the cake in dress," remarked Ned. "Half the big drapery shops in Blackborough belong to them, I'm told, and they give a percentage to their assistants. So I expect Miss--what's her name?--Jones is responsible for half the hats here. Ye gods! what a superstructure for one soul!" As he spoke he watched a carrotty-haired girl with a brick-red burnt face, who wore, both inside and outside a leghorn hat, a wreath of crushed roses shaded from beetroot to carrots.

"Myfanwy," said Ted lightly, "is equal to the burden. Here she comes with the parson, and Miss Alicia has the beauty-boy Mervyn. How happy could both be with either--I wonder how they grow those curls."

He spoke with lazy scorn; but by and by the sound of part-singing instinct with swing and go roused him, for he had sung in a choir all his life, and, after vainly trying to persuade Ned to accompany him, he went off to listen, leaving the latter stretched out full length on the parapet watching for invisible trout.

After a time, however, the old churchyard in its turn attracted Ned's lazy interest, and he strolled off to examine the tombstones. They stood cheek by jowl, and to judge by the dates on many, must represent a perfect battlefield of dead, if all the parish came thither to rest. Some lettering over a low round arch of a sunk door in the church arrested him. Fourteen hundred and fifty-two! No wonder the place looked ruinous, and that he had to step down into the porch! Here his eye took in various framed regulations in red and black, signed "Gawain Meredith, Rector." Evidently the Reverend Gawain was high. And was that a smell of incense?

He set aside the curtain, and stood under the organ-loft. Here surprise held him motionless. Everything was so new, so gilded, so flawless. There was a blaze of red and white on the altar, before which a tall figure in red and white attended by two acolytes, knelt reading the ante-communion service. From them, scattered sparsely over regulation oak benches, was a surpliced choir, four boys on either side coming down, as it were, to meet a huge brass lectern and a red embroidered faldstool.

But the congregation? Six or seven may be in dark corners, or rather since some one must play the organ, eight! No! for the celebrant, after giving out a hymn, strode to a harmonium close to the pulpit, and thereinafter, upborne by his strong baritone, a long-drawn sacramental chant wavered in the aisles, and died away in the rafters of the roof.

What then of the organ? Ned turned, crept up the stair without waking an old man--the bell-ringer no doubt--who was asleep in his long-accustomed seat beside the blow-handle, and found himself before the usual red-curtain screen. Seating himself on the organ stool he looked out, unseen, on the church below.

It was quaint. There was the Reverend Gawain in the pulpit giving out his text, "There came a mighty rushing wind," and looking out over his church as if it had been full instead of empty.

There were some, said the preacher, who expected signs and wonders direct from the Almighty, but the great rushing mighty wind was the teaching of the Church which had begun on Whit Sunday and would go on throughout the year. It was a mighty voice, indeed, sounding in the ears of all his parishioners, even those who were absent. And it spoke through him, their priest, responsible to the Church for the soul of every man, woman, and child, in the parish of Dinas. Seven minutes, by Ned's watch, of unbounded authority, of absolute priesthood, of the Middle Ages. Ned, watching the dignity of the Reverend Gawain Meredith's denial of the passage of Time became admiring. And he was such a fine figure of a man. The old type, chief, medicine man, Druid, Archbishop--Archangel if you will--always the same, in all ages.

Ned wandered off into thoughts such as men of his type have had since the beginning of time, and was roused from them by seeing the priest, holding a huge sacrificial brass platter, awaiting the sheepish sidesman at the chancel steps.

By all that was holy!--one penny--only one, the sidesman's own; but its poverty was covered the next instant by the Rector's sovereign. Well done to the Rector!

What an imagination, what a magnificent make-believe. Something in Ned's innermost soul leapt up to meet this escape from deadly reality. It deserved a recognition. Yes! as the man couldn't play himself out of church, he would--the organ was there!

In sudden impulse he laid an awakening hand on the drowsy sexton. "Blow!" he whispered strenuously, "Blow, I tell you, for all you're worth."

The man, half--asleep, obeyed; Ned opened the keyboard, and not knowing his instrument put on full diapason. Thus, when the last Amen had echoed out from the Rector, for the choir appeared to be dummies, and the cope and the brass platter began to follow the little white surplices, the whole procession paused in amazement, as, with many a note dumb, many a dissonance overborne by the full burst of sound, Handel's "Lift up your heads, oh! ye gates," crashed into every corner of the old church. Crashed for the first two bars, then, the pressure on leaky bellows yielding, wavered and sank.

Ned, realising his failure, was down the loft stairs, through the graves, and over the back of the churchyard wall, where he lay convulsed with inextinguishable laughter at his own mad prank, before curiosity followed the amazement in the church as the last breath of air escaped in a long-drawn pipe from a stuck note in the treble.

It was some time ere, seeing the chapel folk coming out, he made his way round at the back of the Rectory wood and joined Ted, whom he found enthusiastic about the singing, and glad to have heard the Reverend Morris Pugh's "hwl," the bardic note. It was really rather impressive, that constant iteration of the A-flat, and even to one ignorant of Welsh gave a feeling of something being desperately wrong, of something needing desperately to be set right.

But there had been no outpouring--nothing out of the common.

"You should have----" said Ned, and paused.

"What?" asked Ted.

"Nothing, except that it must be about time for us to be going back--to Paradise!"