The sun is now low between the final walls of hill, where the valley ends, and it seems to belong to the city below, as if it were the city’s god descending there for once in answer to some especially rich altar or noble deed. The towers and their bells are as maidens pensively embroidering, and now and then dropping their embroidery to sing a melody of something far away; and long after the sun has gone and the city has disappeared their song is repeated in the fragrant and noiseless abysses of the far-stretched night.
CHAPTER XXXV
SUNDAY
The morning air of autumn smelt like the musky, wild white rose. The south wind had carried hither all the golden and brown savours from Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey; and the strong sweetness made the walker snuff deeply at it, with uplifted upper lip. Church bells two miles away, deep among the woods that lay around narrow gulfs of meadow on every side, called and called, as if they had wedded this perfume and all the gold and brown of the wide land. Not the last willow wren in the oak, nor the cooing dove, spoke more melodiously of autumn and repose than the bells. So when I came to the church, under a cavernous beech wood, I paused beneath the low tower and sate in the cool nave.
Parts of the windows were still rich with old colour, the rest might seem to have flown into the woods as the sounds from the genial bells were still flying thither and through the autumn land. The church was the lovely home of the dead of several fair families still living near. A helmet with motionless crest jutted over the nave. Several bright, crude effigies flaunted their crimson and blue in one aisle. The walls were still half covered by paintings of varying clearness. Here and there a sword stood out quite clear, or the head of a woman or a youth, a coat of armour, an aureole that some head had lost, a curve of vesture, or a mere whisper of colour, red like old blood, or a few words, such as “olim magnificus pulcherrimus”—“periit”—“resurget”; things that survived there much as events in human memories, and as incidents and expressions may actually survive our death, and painfully strive for integration in a dim world of fragments that shall be strangely arrayed again.
The clerk stood looking out of a little open window that revealed a piece of green meadow and yellow maple that might have belonged to the ancient glass.
One by one the men came in, two old labourers past work, a neighbouring farmer, his cowman and carter, a gamekeeper, and the women and children in twos and threes, and lastly the squire—perhaps twenty-five altogether. In hymn and psalm and prayer all voices save those of the rector and one sweet-voiced child were so faint that the church was undisturbed. The old men were still, the young restless, the women and children interested in one another; but they were fainter than the figures on the wall, being so like thousands of others, all but a red and fair-haired man of fifty who might have been a Bacchus hastily metamorphosed for some jolly purpose.
With the sermon the silence became immense, as if it must flower suddenly or crumble away in a roar. The preacher spoke slowly as one who scorned time, and in the intervals could be heard the masticating of horses in the meadow outside. He spoke of the necessity of “drawing near to God”—by a life of piety, by private prayer, by communion, by worshipping in this house. His rich, gentle voice saying murmurous things fell upon me as one of sleep’s forerunners, and I had just heard him asking the squire and the Bacchus and the rest whether they had not, at the Communion, had visions of “those tabernacles above,” when I began to dream a dream which the parson could not have inspired without the help of some very different elf who now lay under the pavement of the nave, or was painted on the wall, or had sat among the rushes when the church was beautiful and young as a country bride. For it seemed that I saw these men and women in a kind of heaven where all day long for ever they did those things which had pleased or most taken hold of them in life. I saw them like the figures painted on the wall, some bright and clear, some dim or broken, some known by hardly more than a defacement of the large light that dwelt there.
There the grave and cheerful carter went home at evening, looking ahead steadily, without sorrow, or alarm, or lassitude, and sometimes turning to his undulating team, noting their still bright harness and speaking to them by name: “Ho! Violet”—“Smiler”—“Darling”—“Swallow.” He was even now hungry, a little tired, thinking of his inn at nightfall. Heaven had caught him and made of him a picture of strength, contentment and evening which, in that luminous land, was pleasing yet to mortal men.
There the cowman was leading out the bull, and making the ring jar in its nostrils. Still his back and knees were bent as he cursed out “Jimmy,” his face still moulded and unmoulded by faint-hearted lust, vexation, fear, perplexed by the home where his eleven children were, with his pigs and his fledgling magpies.