Such were the inscriptions below the wintry dates of two hundred years, and for each one Mark's mother had a moving legend of fortune's malice. She had tales too of treasure, from the golden doubloons of a Spanish galleon wrecked on the Rose Bar in the sixteenth century to the silver dollars of Portugal, a million of them, lost in the narrow cove on the other side of the Castle Cliff in the lee of which was built St. Tugdual's Church. At low spring tides it was possible to climb down and sift the wet sand through one's fingers on the chance of finding a dollar, and when the tide began to rise it was jolly to climb back to the top of the cliff and listen to tales of mermaids while a gentle wind blew the perfume of the sea-campion along the grassy slopes. It was here that Mark first heard the story of the two princesses who were wrecked in what was now called Church Cove and of how they were washed up on the cliff and vowed to build a church in gratitude to God and St. Tugdual on the very spot where they escaped from the sea, of how they quarrelled about the site because each sister wished to commemorate the exact spot where she was saved, and of how finally one built the tower on her spot and the other built the church on hers, which was the reason why the church and the tower were not joined to this day. When Mark went home that afternoon, he searched among his grandfather's books until he found the story of St. Tugdual who, it seemed, was a holy man in Brittany, so holy that he was summoned to be Pope of Rome. When he had been Pope for a few months, an angel appeared to him and said that he must come back at once to Brittany, because since he went to Rome all the women were become barren.
"But how am I to go back all the way from Rome to Brittany?" St. Tugdual asked.
"I have a white horse waiting for you," the angel replied.
And sure enough there was a beautiful white horse with wings, which carried St. Tugdual back to Brittany in a few minutes.
"What does it mean when a woman becomes barren?" Mark inquired of his mother.
"It means when she does not have any more children, darling," said Mrs. Lidderdale, who did not believe in telling lies about anything.
And because she answered her son simply, her son did not perplex himself with shameful speculations, but was glad that St. Tugdual went back home so that the women of Brittany were able to have children again.
Everything was simple at Nancepean except the parishioners; but Mark was still too young and too simple himself to apprehend their complicacy. The simplest thing of all was the Vicar's religion, and at an age when for most children religion means being dressed up to go into the drawing-room and say how d'you do to God, Mark was allowed to go to church in his ordinary clothes and after church to play at whatever he wanted to play, so that he learned to regard the assemblage of human beings to worship God as nothing more remarkable than the song of birds. He was too young to have experienced yet a personal need of religion; but he had already been touched by that grace of fellowship which is conferred upon a small congregation, the individual members of which are in church to please themselves rather than to impress others. This was always the case in the church of Nancepean, which had to contend not merely with the popularity of methodism, but also with the situation of the Chapel in the middle of the village. On the dark December evenings there would be perhaps not more than half a dozen worshippers, each one of whom would have brought his own candle and stuck it on the shelf of the pew. The organist would have two candles for the harmonium; the choir of three little boys and one little girl would have two between them; the altar would have two; the Vicar would have two. But when all the candle-light was put together, it left most of the church in shadow; indeed, it scarcely even illuminated the space between the worshippers, so that each one seemed wrapped in a golden aura of prayer, most of all when at Evensong the people knelt in silence for a minute while the sound of the sea without rose and fell and the noise of the wind scuttling through the ivy on the walls was audible. When the congregation had gone out and the Vicar was standing at the churchyard gate saying "good night," Mark used to think that they must all be feeling happy to go home together up the long hill to Pendhu and down into twinkling Nancepean. And it did not matter whether it was a night of clear or clouded moonshine or a night of windy stars or a night of darkness; for when it was dark he could always look back from the valley road and see a company of lanthorns moving homeward; and that more than anything shed upon his young spirit the grace of human fellowship and the love of mankind.