They had comfortable lodgings of extraordinary cheapness in one of the dullest streets of that most picturesque but dead‑alive little town, where the grass grew so thick between the paving‑stones here and there that the brewers' dray‑horses might have browsed in the "Grand Brul"—a magnificent but generally deserted thoroughfare leading from the railway station to the Place d'Armes, where rose still unfinished the colossal tower of one of the oldest and finest cathedrals in the world, whose chimes wafted themselves every half‑quarter of an hour across the dreamy flats for miles and miles, according to the wind, that one might realize how slow was the flight of time in that particular part of King Leopold's dominions.
"'And from a tall tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down!'"
"'And from a tall tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down!'"
said Barty to his aunt—quoting (or misquoting) a bard they were very fond of just then, as they slowly walked down the "Grand Brul" in solitude together, from the nineteenth century to the fourteenth in less than twenty minutes—or three chimes from St. Rombault, or fifty skrieks from the railway station.
But for these a spirit of stillness and mediæval melancholy brooded over the quaint old city and great archiepiscopal see and most important railway station in all Belgium. Magnificent old houses in carved stone with wrought‑iron balconies were to be had for rents that were almost nominal. From the tall windows of some of these a frugal, sleepy, priest‑ridden old nobility looked down on broad and splendid streets hardly ever trodden by any feet but their own, or those of some stealthy Jesuit priest, or Sister of Mercy.
Only during the Kermesse, or at carnival‑time, when noisy revellers of either sex and ungainly processions of tipsy masques and mummers waked Mechelen out of its long sleep, and all the town seemed one vast estaminet, did one feel one's self to be alive. Even at night, and in the small hours, frisky masques and dominoes walked the moonlit streets, and made loud old Flemish mediæval love, à la Teniers.
There was a beautiful botanical garden, through which a river flowed under tall trees, and turned the wheels of the oldest flour‑mills in Flanders. This was a favorite resort of Barty's,—and he had it pretty much to himself.
And for Lady Caroline there were, besides St. Rombault, quite half‑a‑dozen churches almost as magnificent if not so big, and in them as many as you could wish of old Flemish masters, beginning with Peter Paul Rubens, who pervades the land of his birth very much as Michael Angelo pervades Florence and Rome.
And these dim places of Catholic worship were generously open to all, every day and all day long, and never empty of worshippers, high and low, prostrate in the dust, or kneeling with their arms extended and their heads in the air, their wide‑open, immovable, unblinking eyes hypnotized into stone by the cross and the crown of thorns. Mostly peasant women, these: with their black hoods falling from their shoulders, and stiff little close white caps that hid the hair.
Out of cool shadowy recesses of fretted stone and admirably carved wood emanations seemed to rise as from the long‑forgotten past—tons of incense burnt hundreds of years ago, and millions of closely packed supplicants, rich and poor, following each other in secula seculorum! Lady Caroline spent many of her hours haunting these crypts—and praying there.