He got up, took a few restless paces up and down the room, and then stood still before a sketch in water-colours of Seville Cathedral, staring at it with unseeing eyes. Suddenly, he seemed to relax, and he returned to his chair.
“Well,” he said, “when one comes to think of it, you know, it would be hard to find a greater sin than ... feeling like that at mass.” Then a slow smile crept over his face: “I remember my father telling me that his father met a wee lad somewhere in the Highlands, and asked him what he’d had to his breakfast, and he said, “brose,”—and then what he’d had to his dinner, and he said “brose,” and then what he’d had to his tea, and it was brose again; so my grandfather said, “D’you not get tired of nothing but brose?” and the wee lad turned on him, quite indignant, and said, “Wud ye hae me weary o’ ma meat?” ... It’s not just exactly the same, I’ll admit—but it was a fine spirit the wee lad showed.”
A little wind blew in through one of the open windows, very balmy, fresh from its initiation into the secret of its clan,—a secret not unlike that of the Venetian glass-blowers, and whispered from wind to wind down the ages—the secret of blowing the earth into the colours and shapes of violets and daffodils. It made the summer cretonne curtains creak and the Hispano-Mauresque plates knock against the wall on which they were fastened and give out tiny ghostly chimes; as did also the pendent balls on the Venetian glass. Teresa suddenly thought of the late Pope listening to the chimes of St. Mark’s on a gramophone. All at once she became very conscious of the furniture—it was a whiff of that strange experience she had had in her Chelsea lodgings. Far away in the view a cock crowed. She suddenly wondered if the piano-tuner were coming that morning.
“The Presbyterians, you know,” he was saying, “they’re not like the Episcopalians; they feel things more ... well, more concretely ... for instance, they picture themselves taking their Sabbath walk some day down the golden streets ... they seem to ... well, it’s different.” He paused, and then went on, “My people were very poor, you know; it was just a wee parish and a very poor one, and it was just as much as my mother could do to make both ends meet. But one day she came into my father’s study—I remember, he was giving me my Latin lesson—and in her hand she held one of these savings boxes for deep-sea fishermen, and she said, “Donald”—that was my father’s name—“Donald, every cleric should go to the Holy Land; there’s a hundred pound in here I’ve saved out of the house-keeping money, so away with you as soon as you can get off.” How she’d managed it goodness only knows, and she’d never let us feel the pinch anywhere. You’d not find an Episcopal minister’s wife doing that!” and he looked at her defiantly.
“No; perhaps not ... that was very fine. Did your father like the Holy Land when he got there?”
There was something at once pathetic and grotesque in the sudden vision she had of the Presbyterian pilgrim, with a baggy umbrella for staff, and a voluminous and shabby portmanteau for script, meticulously placing his elastic-sided boots in his Master’s footprints.
“Oh yes, he liked it—he said it was a fine mountainous country with a rare light atmosphere—though Jerusalem was not as ‘golden’ as he had been led to understand! and he met some Russian pilgrims there, and he would often talk of their wonderful child-like faith ... but I think he thought it a pity, all the same, that Our Lord wasn’t born in Scotland,” and he smiled.
Her fancy played for a few seconds round the life, the mind, of that dead minister:
“... But to his lack-lustre eyes there appeared within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by the weight of the style, worn to the last fading thinness of the understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the patriarchal wanderings, with palm trees hovering in the horizon, and processions of camels at the distance of three thousand years; there was Moses with the Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes, types, shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets ... the great lapses of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet it was a slumber ill exchanged for all the sharpened realities of sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father’s life was comparatively a dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the resurrection, and a judgment to come!”
It was not that this passage word for word stalked through her head; it was just a sudden whiff of memory of this passage. And on its wings it wafted the perfume of all the melancholy eloquence of Hazlitt—the smell, the vision, of noble autumn woods between Salisbury and Andover. If ever a man had not walked dry-shod that man was Hazlitt; all his life he had waded up to the waist in Time and Change and Birth and Death, and they had been to him what he held green, blue, red, and yellow to have been to Titian: “the pabulum to his sense, the precious darlings of his eye,” which “sunk into his mind, and nourished and enriched it with the sense of beauty,” so that his pages glow with green, blue, red, and yellow.