Luke listened devoutly to these mysterious words, and repeated them twice, after the old woman. Their two figures, thus concerted in magical tutelage, might, for all the youth’s modern attire, have suggested to a scholarly observer some fantastic heathen scene out of Apuleius. The spacious August sunshine lay splendid upon the fields about them, and light-winged swallows skimmed the surface of the glittering railway-line as though it had been a flowing river.
When she was made assured in her mind that her pupil fully understood the healing incantation, Witch-Bessie shuffled off without further words. Her face, as she resumed her march in the direction of Hullaway, relapsed into such corpse-like rigidity, that, but for her mechanical movement, one might have expected the shameless flocks of starlings who hovered about her, to settle without apprehension upon her head.
The two brothers labored harmoniously side by side in their work-shop all that forenoon. It was Saturday, and their companions were anxious to throw down their tools and clear out of the place on the very stroke of the one o’clock bell.
James and Luke were both engaged upon a new stone font, the former meticulously chipping out its angle-mouldings, and the latter rounding, with chisel and file, the capacious lip of its deep basin. It was a cathedral font, intended for use in a large northern city.
Luke could not resist commenting to his brother, in his half-humorous half-sentimental way, upon the queer fact that they two—their heads full of their own anxieties and troubles—should be thus working upon a sacred font which for countless generations, perhaps as long as Christianity lasted, would be associated with so many strange and mingled feelings of perturbation and hope.
“It’s a comical idea,” he found himself saying, though the allusion was sufficiently unwise, “this idea of Gladys’ baptism.”
He regretted his words the moment they were out of his mouth; but James received them calmly.
“I once heard,” he answered, “I think it was on the sands at Weymouth, two old men discussing quite reverently and gravely whether an infant, baptized before it was born, would be brought under the blessing of the Church. I thought, as I listened to them, how vulgar and gross-minded our age had become, that I should have to tremble with alarm lest any flippant passer-by should hear their curious speculation. It seemed to me a much more important matter to discuss, than the merits of the black-faced Pierrots who were fooling and howling just beyond. This sort of seriousness, in regard to the strange borderland of the Faith, has always seemed to me a sign of pathetic piety, and the very reverse of anything blasphemous.”
Luke had made an involuntary movement when his brother’s anecdote commenced. The calmness and reasonableness with which James had spoken was balm and honey to the anxious youth; but he could not help speculating in his heart whether his brother was covertly girding at him. Did he, he wondered, realize how far things had gone between him and the fair-haired girl?