Sea Mew Abbey

by Florence Warden

“Safe! Of course I shall be safe!” laughed Freda.

But it occurred to her, as she turned and noted Nell’s furtive glance at her, that it was not with her personal safety that the housekeeper was concerned.

Freda cared little for this; she was half-crazy with the joy of being again by herself in the open air; and the ruins of the old church, as they rose above her in their worn majesty against the morning sky, filled her with delight and awe. She was approaching the old pile from the southwest, the quarter in which least of the building remained. Scarcely a trace was left of the south aisle or the south transept. Between the ruined west front and the pillars on the south side of the choir there was nothing left but grass-grown mounds of fallen masonry and one solitary pillar, massive and erect as when, seven hundred years ago, pious hands placed the stones which were to defy, through long centuries, the biting sea air, the keen north wind, the storms which beat upon the cliffs, and the waves which, decade by decade, had sapped and swallowed up, bit by bit, the once fertile Abbey lands. Nearer to the cliff’s edge now than in its prime, the dismantled church still filled one of its old offices, and formed, with its lofty choir and mouldering pinnacles, a landmark from the sea.

Freda began to cry as she stole reverently into the roofless choir. She had had no opportunity, in her secluded life, of visiting ruins as showplaces; to her this was still a church, as holy as when the monks kept watch before the altar. A sentiment of peace entered into her for the first time since her arrival in England as she wandered about, not heeding the fall of melting snow on her head and shoulders, and listened to the shriek of the sea-birds as they wheeled in the air above. She thought she had never seen anything so beautiful as the graceful succession of pointed arches, with their clustered shafts, and the triforium above, with the long-hidden beauties of its carving now exposed to the light of day. Time had mellowed the tint of the walls to a soft grey, deepening here and there into red. Crowned kings, winged angels, stern-faced saints still looked out to sea from the north side, with eager necks outstretched, all the deep meaning the old monkish sculptors knew how to express in stone still to be discerned in their weatherworn outlines. The gulls perched upon them; in summer the wallflowers grew about them; but still they kept watch and ward until, one by one, by storm and stress of weather they were loosened in their places, and fell, sentinels who had done their work, into the long grass underneath.

The north transept was still almost entire. An arcade ran round the lower part of the wall, and in one of the arches was an old pointed wooden door, leading by a circular staircase of steep steps, to the passages in the walls above. This door was locked. Yet it must still be used, thought Freda. For she noticed that the grass was worn away before it, and that a narrow track had been beaten thence as far as one of the windows on the north side of the nave. Here a gap had evidently been intentionally made in the stone, and looking through, Freda perceived that the foot-track went through the meadow outside as far as the stone wall which bordered the road.

As she was looking at this path, she caught sight of two young men on horseback whom, little as she could see of them above the stone wall, she at once recognised. They were Robert and Richard Heritage. Both saw her, raised their hats, and reined in their horses.

Freda pretended not to see them, yet she was conscious of a great uplifting of the heart when they dismounted, tied their horses up in the yard of a dismantled cottage at the other side of the road, and climbing over the stone wall with the agility of cats, came along the foot-path towards her.

“They have used that foot-path before,” thought Freda.

CHAPTER XVII.

To Freda’s perhaps rather prejudiced mind, the contrast between the two cousins seemed even stronger than when she had seen them a fortnight before at their own home. The fact that both were evidently harassed and anxious only emphasised the difference between them; for while Robert looked savage and sullen even under the smile with which he approached her, Dick seemed to Freda’s shy eyes to look haggard, downcast and depressed to an extent which sent a pang through her heart.