Our Lady of Darkness

by Bernard Capes

Now the gazer would have liked to know what manifestation of the supernatural was craved by the young girl, fair and quiet as the image itself, who knelt before the shrine. She, this dévote, reverencing, with her mouth pressed to the clasped knuckles of her hands, had so much of the Madonna in her own appearance as to suggest that she might perform, rather than demand, miracles. Her eyes—Ned fancied, but could not convince himself—were closed, as in a rapture of piety. She was very pure and colourless, apart from an accidentalism of tinted rays; for over her soft brown hair, from which a folded chaperon of white linen had slipped backwards, wings of parti-coloured light, entering through a stained window, played like butterflies. Lower down, the violet haze that slept upon her cheek gave her something of a phantasmal character; but her fingers were steeped in crimson as if they were bloody.

At her side knelt a little lad, five or six years of age, with a most wistful small face expressive of as great a humility of weariness as the girl’s was of worship. He looked at the stranger with curiosity, and with the dumb appeal of the petty to the great and independent; and as he looked he lifted, one after the other, his poor chafed knees and rubbed them. His round, pale eyes were underscored for emphasis of this appeal, but without effect on Mr Murk, who had indeed no fondness for children.

Presently the girl rose. With the action the wings of light fled from her hair; her passionless face revealed itself a sunless white fruit. There was no consciousness of the observant stranger under her lowered lids.

“Viens, donc, Baptiste!” she whispered; and the little boy, gazing up at her in a breathless manner, got to his feet.

The two genuflected to the High Altar, and stole reverently from the building. Mr Murk followed immediately. He had a desire to win into the confidence of this butterfly Madonna.

Outside he saw the girl and child go down into the blazing market as into a lake of fire. Giving them fair law, he started in pursuit.

Arrived at the level, he found he had for the moment lost sight of his quarry. He strolled up and down, gathering what shade he could from the awnings. Voluble market-women, waxing tropically gross in their vegetable hotbeds, rallied him on his insensibility to their cajolery. Stolid Flemish farmers, with great pipes pendulous from their mouths, like tongues lolling and smoking with drought, winked to one another as he passed in appreciation of the rich joke that here was a foreigner.

The gentler classes, it seemed, were all in siesta. Low life, vehement, motley, and picturesque, held the square as if it were a fortress under fire.

Now, whether as a consequence or, in spite of, this gregal plebeianism, a strange unusual atmosphere, Ned fancied, was abroad in the town. He had been conscious of a similar atmosphere in other cities he had visited en route, and of an increase in its density in steady ratio with his march southwards. It was not to be defined. It might have been called an inflection rather than any expression, like the change of note in the respiration of a sleeper who is near waking. It only seemed to him that he moved in an element compounded of shadows—the shadow of watchfulness; the shadow of insolence; the shadow of an evil humour cursing its own century-long blindness; the shadow of a more wickedly merry humour, rallying itself upon that old desperate screwing-up of its courage to attack a boggart Blunderbore that had fallen to pieces at the first stroke; the shadow, embracing all others, of a certain Freemasonry that was deadlily exclusive in the opposite to a conventional sense.

“And this is for no dispassionate soul to resent,” thought Mr Murk, who as a child had set his feet square upon the basis of an independent impartiality, and, at the first age of reason, had pledged himself to forego impulse as being the above-proof of ardent spirits and fatal to sobriety.