Our Lady of Darkness

by Bernard Capes

At its foot, however, he seemed to come upon the actual furnace-floor of noon—a broad Place that bickered, as it were, throughout its length with iridescent embers. These were figured in crates of Russian cranberries glowing like braziers, in pomegranates bleeding fire, in burning globes of oranges, in apricots pearly-pink as balls of white-hot glass; and over all, the long looped awnings of olive and stone-blue and cinnamon served to the emphasising of such a galaxy of hot dyes as made a core of flame in the heart of the blazing city.

The close air prickled with a multitudinous patter of voices like blisters of fat breaking on a grill. Old Burgundian houses—baked to a terra-sienna, drowzing and nodding as they took the warmth about their knees—retained and multiplied the heat like the walls of an oven. The shop windows were so many burning-glasses; the market-women fried amongst their cabbages like bubble-and-squeak; the very dogs of draught, hauling their gridirons of carts, had red-hot cinders for tongues. There seemed in the whole width of the square no shadow of which a devil could have taken solace.

Exhaling some little of the breath that remained to him in an appropriately volcanic interjection, Ned mounted the steps of the church he had looked down upon, brushed past the outstretched hand of a fly-blown beggar, and dived into the sequestered obscurity of amber-scented aisles.

Here the immediate fall of temperature took him by the throat like a shower-bath. “If I shiver,” he thought, “there is a goose walking over my grave.” So he stood still and hugged himself till his blood was accommodated to the change. Then he penetrated into the heart of the place.

He had visited many churches in the course of his travels, dispassionately, but with no irreverence. It interested him no less to note the expressions of faith than of faces. Generally, it seemed to him, religious ideals were not transmissible. There was seldom evidence that the spirit that had conceived and executed some noble monument yet informed its own work through tradition. The builders of cathedrals wrought, it was obvious, for little clans that, through all the ages, had never learned the respect of soul. They, the latter, had stuffed their heritages with trash, because their religion must come home to them in the homely sense. They could not think but that the God of their understanding must be gratified to have His houses adorned after the fashion of the best parlour.

Now, to see a fine interior vulgarised by the introduction of barbaric images, of artificial flowers, and of pictures hung in incongruous places, offended Mr Murk as a fooling elephant in a circus offended him. He recognised and condemned the solecism in the present instance, yet at the same time was conscious of an atmosphere foreign to his accustomed experience—an atmosphere so like the faint breath of a revived paganism that he looked about him in wonder to see whence it emanated.

There could be, however, no doubt as to its source. The whole church was a grove of orange, oleander, and myrtle trees. They stood in tubs, filling the intercolumniations of the stone avenues, climbing the steps of the altar, thronging about the pulpit. The quiet air held their fragrance like smoke. They could fatten and bloom unvexed of any wind but the sweet gales blown from the organ.

And even as Ned looked, this wind rose and wooed them. Some one was at the keys, and the soft diapasons flowed forth and rolled in thunder along the roof.

The young man strolled down the nave. Music of itself held no particular charms for him. Its value here was in its subscription to other influences—to the cool perfume of flowers, to the sense of serene isolation, to the feeling of mysticism engendered of foggy vastness traversed by the soft moted dazzle of sunbeams. Such, spanning gulfs of shadow, propping the gross mechanism of the organ itself, seemed the very fabric of which the floating harmonies were compound. There needed only a living expression of this poem of mingled scent and sound and colour, and to Ned this was vouchsafed of a sudden, in a luminous corner he came upon, where a painted statue of the Virgin standing sentry in a niche looked down upon a figure prostrate before it in devotion.

A little lamp, burning with a motionless light like a carbuncle, was laid at the Mother’s feet. About her shoulders, suspended from the neighbouring walls, were a half-dozen certificates of miracles approuvés—decorated placards recording the processes and dates, some of them quite recent, of extraordinary recoveries. One of these related how to a Marie Cornelis was restored the sight of an eye that had been skewered by a thorn. Faith here had at least made its appeal in a sure direction. Who could forget how that other woman had worn a crown of thorns about her heart?