As soon as we were settled, I began at once to go to Mr. Sant’s for my daily lesson, the scope of which imperceptibly enlarged itself from Catechism to the Classics. The rectory stood inland beyond the Playstow, in a rather lonely position under the drop of the hill. It was a dark, mossy old building, shrouded in trees, and a by-road went past its gates up to the woods beyond, in the depths of whose shadows lay the Court Manor-house and its bed-ridden old squire.
Mr. Sant was a bachelor, a tough militant Churchman and Church reformer. He taught me the uses of my fists as well as of the Decalogue. No doubt it was this constitution of his which made such way with the villagers, for Englishmen respect piety the better for its being knocked into them. I took my share of his excellent influence, and I trust it helped to make a man of me. You shall hear by-and-by about the first practical use to which I put it.
He had the motto from Cicero framed and hung over the mantelpiece in his study. I will quote it to you, because it speaks the man more perfectly than I can do. Quidquid agas, agere pro viribus! Whatever you do, to do with your whole strength—that was it. It was a maxim very apt to one whose own strength, both of will and body, was of tempered steel.
One among his many characteristic innovations was “The Feast of Lanterns,” as he called it. A lecture, to combine instruction with amusement, would be called for delivery in the church after dark. Whosoever listed might, on a single condition, attend this. He would find set up, spectrally discernible in the chancel, which, like the rest of the building, would be unlighted, a screen of white linen, on which had been roughly sketched in crayon, by the courageous lecturer himself, a number of objects—to become, in their turn, subjects—which might range, say, from a leg of mutton to the dome of St. Paul’s. The condition of attendance was simply that each comer should bring his or her own lantern, with the natural consequence that the greater the company the brighter the illumination. Now, with the first arrival began hymns, and were so continued until sufficient lights were congregated to reveal the drawings on the screen, a right identification of any one of which, by any member of the audience, at the close of any verse, put a period to the singing and started a disquisition on the object named. It must be said that the identification was not always accurate, in which case the singing was continued. For religious and artistic fervour are not necessarily associated, and the splendid daring which Mr. Sant put into his work sometimes obscured its intentions, as when his bellows, designed to introduce a dissertation on pulmonics, were taken for a ham. But the vigour and resourcefulness of the lecturer neither allowed an impasse, nor, while he was always quite ready to join in the laughter over his own artistic shortcomings, permitted criticism to degenerate into fooling. He did not object to laughter; on the contrary (I am afraid it will scandalize some people), he credited the Almighty with an almighty sense of humour, only he insisted upon its being tempered to the sacredness of the place in which it was evoked. And, for the rest, he had a fund of bright and ready information at his constant disposal.
Such is an example of his methods, and, if any pious reactionaries object, I can only say that in the result it was educational; that it won tavern-loafers to at least one wholesome evening in the week; that, in short, it attained such popularity, that any dissipated seceder attempting to sneak out of the church, and thereby obscure the light by so much as the loss of a taper, would be roughly grabbed back by his fellows, and forced, willy-nilly, to hear the lecture out.
Mr. Sant, to sum him up, was a zealot without being a bigot, and a devoted servant to his Master without prejudice to human nature. He was also a capable boxer. I came to love as much as to respect him.
CHAPTER VIII.
TREASURE-HUNTING.
For a fortnight succeeding our arrival the weather remained calm and bright, so that Uncle Jenico and I were able to explore the locality with great comfort and satisfaction. The coast, which we followed up both north and south for miles, was extremely desolate and unvisited, though bearing at intervals all along it the traces of former settlements. It would seem to have been quite thickly populated once, during a period which dated probably from the incursions, first, of the Roman legions, and, after, of those salt sea-wolves who preferred squatting round the fringes of their conquered island—with the open door of the sea beside them, and its smell in their briny nostrils—to penetrating into the traps of the close-shut valleys. Later, Christianity had come to fret these windy, foam-whipped settlements with pinnacles, and monastic walls, and stone fanes with jewelled windows and airy bell-towers, so that church might peal to church all down this long front line of the position it had won. But corruption creeping in with prosperity, and lawlessness with the tides, God had withdrawn His countenance from the temples that abused His service, and had permitted the ocean to break in their defences and one by one devour them. The priest who had evaded his vows had ages ago tucked up his cassock and fled; the parson who succeeded him, and to the reversion of his benefices, could not so hoodwink Heaven by taking his tithes of smuggled tobacco and brandy, as to stay for one season the hunger of the gluttonous waters. Year by year, century by century, the storms had fed on these devoted sand-built coasts, and were still feeding when we came to know them. Towns and once-flourishing colonies had disappeared as utterly as if they had never existed. Not only they, but the very soil on which they had been planted, paved the floor of the ocean for miles out. There were legends of foundered bells rung by unseen mermen at incredible distances from shore. There were stories of treasure chests and sculptured marbles revealed to storm-belated fishermen in the deep troughs of monstrous, bottom-scouring waves. So far away as the Weary Sands themselves, it was said, traces of the ancient Dunberry could be spelt out, in calm seasons, by those who gazed intently enough and long enough into the green, deep waters. It was a fable, probably, in a land of fables; yet it served to emphasize the wreck of time, and will show upon what a haunted border-land of ghosts we had come to make our home. The modern village itself was old. How ancient, then, those grey ruins on the cliff, which had survived to see the last of the glory, of which they had once been a part, claimed by the deep, and their own hoary traditions engulfed into the pettier traditions of a little clan!
These same ruins consisted of the great tower of the abbey, with a mass of tumbled and complicated masonry at its foot; of the line of the nave, picked out in an avenue of shattered arches which ran seawards until stopped by the upward and outward sweep of the cliff; and, finally, of a maze of huge fragments, mostly on the inland side, which marked the sites of monastic buildings, lazar house, boundary walls, and so forth. Elsewhere were traces of aisles, cloisters and supernumerary offices uncountable, the whole buttressed with ivy. But the most significant ruin of all, to my thinking, was one which stood under the cliff, and for three-fourths of its depth apart from it. This was no other than the abbey well, which generations of storms had gnawed out of its deep bed in the ground without being able to crunch and devour the sturdy relic itself. There it stood, a Titan of the vanished race, sprouting stubborn from the littered sand below, cemented, as it seemed, by the very drift which was yearly flung upon it to destroy. Exposed and isolated, choked with parching rubbish as it was, how thrilling was the thought of the monks who had once drunk from it; of the waters it had drained from the hill; of the hill itself with its one-time springs lying under the salt sea! It was the very gaunt dead monument to the desolation of this land, and as such, it seemed, would endure when all else was vanished. The storms which took the rest stone by stone, could do no more than stone by stone reveal this; the earthquake, which at a blow had rent the massive tower and tumbled half the remaining walls, had left this unshaken. It was a wonderful and impressive relic.
The first time I had entered among the ruins was by myself. I climbed the slope early on the morning before breakfast, and stood in the midst of them, thrilled and awestricken. A little grassy valley divided me from the hill which concealed the village, of which not so much as a roof was visible from where I stood. I seemed entirely cut off and alone, a pigmy in the stupendous shadows of these “ruined choirs.” The ground swept in a steepish curve to the cliff edge, and again, inland, in one slightly shallower. These were the “Old and New Testaments” of the Mitre; and in the “Valley of Knowledge” that lay between, was built the abbey, its monastery, chapter-house, refectory and other buildings taking and topping the western slope, which, on its further side, went shelving down to the Cemeterium Fratrum, and the confines of the old grounds.