“A malison on thee and thy order! Is there, then, no effigy in yon chancel, no tablet, no record of her—I mean of that noble lady and those comely little ones?”
“I know of none, Sir Saint.”
“Think again. She was a franklin, she had wide lands; she reverenced thy Church, and in her grief, being woman, she would turn devout. Surely she built some shrine, or made thee a portico, or blazoned a window to shame rough Fate with the evidence of her gentleness?”
“There is none such in St. Olaf’s. But, now thou speakest of shrines, I do remember one some hours’ ride from here; unroofed and rotten, but, nevertheless, such as you suggest, and in it there is a cenotaph, and a woman laid out straight. She is cracked across the middle and mossy, and there be two small kneeling figures by her head, but I never looked nicely to determine whether they were blessed cherubin or but common children. The shepherds who keep their flocks there and shelter from the showers under the crumbling walls call the place Voewood.”
“Enough, priest,” I said, as I paced hither and thither across the hall in gloomy grief, and then taking my hasty resolution I turned to him sternly—“Make what capital thou list of to-night’s adventure, but remember the next time thou seest a saint may Heaven pity thee if thou art not in better sort—turn thy face to the wall!”
The frightened Abbot obeyed; I shed in a white heap upon the floor my saintly vestments, my miter and crook on top, and then, stepping lightly down the hall, mounted upon a bench, unfastened and threw open a lattice, and, placing my foot upon the sill, sprang out into the night and open world again!
I walked and ran until the day came, southward constantly, now and again asking my way of an astonished hind, but for the most part guided by some strange instinct, and before the following noon I was at my old Saxon homestead.
But could it be Voewood? Not a vestige of a house anywhere in that wide grassy glade where Voewood stood, not a sign of life, not a sound to break the stillness! Near by there ran a little brook, and against it, just as the monk had said, were the four gray walls of a lonely roofless shrine. Over the shrine, on the very spot where Voewood stood—alas! alas!—was a long, grassy knoll, crowned with hawthorns and little flowers shining in the sunlight. I went into the ruined chapel, and there, stained and lichened and broken, in the thorny embrace of the brambles, lay the marble figure of my sweet Saxon wife, and by the pillow—green-velveted with the tapestry of nature—knelt her little ones on either side. I dropped upon my knee and buried my face in her crumbling bosom and wept. What mattered the eclipse while I slept of all those kingly planets that had shone in the English firmament compared to the setting of this one white star of mine? I rushed outside to the mound that hid the forgotten foundations of my home, and, as the passion swept up and engulfed my heart, I buried my head in my arms and hurled myself upon the ground and cursed that tender green moss that should have been so hard—cursed that golden English sunlight that suited so ill with my sorrows—and cursed again and again in my bitterness those lying blossoms overhead that showered down their petals on me, saying it was spring, when it was the blackest winter of desolation, the night-time of my disappointment.
CHAPTER IX
I am not of a nature to be long overwhelmed. All that night and far into the next day I lay upon Voewood, alternately sleeping and bewailing the chance which tossed me to and fro upon the restless ocean of time, and then I arose. I threw my arms round each in turn of those dear, callous ones in the chapel, and pushed back the brambles from them, and wept a little, and told myself the pleasure-store of life was now surely spent to the very last coin—then, with a mighty effort, tore myself away. Again and again, while the smooth swell of the grassy mound under which the foundations of the long-destroyed Saxon homestead with the little chapel by the rivulet were in sight, I turned and turned, loth and sad. But no sooner had the leafy screen hid them than I set off and ran whither I knew not, nor cared—indeed, I was so terribly drawn by that spot—so close in the meshes of its association, so thralled by the presence of the dust of all I had had to lose or live for, that I feared, if the best haste were not made, I should neither haste nor fly from that terribly sweet hillock of lamentations forever.