“The nave is the oldest part,” said the cicerone, “built about 1135 by Walter Le Bec.”
“I am very much afraid our friend is too young and inexperienced for the work here. What do you think?” he put in as a rapid aside to the doctor.
“Oh, I dare say if you take him in hand and coach him a little he will do all right,” replied the doctor, raising his eyebrows for the organist’s delectation.
“Yes, this is all Le Bec’s work,” the Rector went on, turning back to Westray. “So sublime the simplicity of the Norman style, is it not? The nave arcades will repay your close attention; and look at these wonderful arches in the crossing. Norman, of course, but how light; and yet strong as a rock to bear the enormous weight of the tower which later builders reared on them. Wonderful, wonderful!”
Westray recalled his Chief’s doubts about the tower, and looking up into the lantern saw on the north side a seam of old brick filling; and on the south a thin jagged fissure, that ran down from the sill of the lantern-window like the impress of a lightning-flash. There came into his head an old architectural saw, “The arch never sleeps”; and as he looked up at the four wide and finely-drawn semicircles they seemed to say:
“The arch never sleeps, never sleeps. They have bound on us a burden too heavy to be borne. We are shifting it. The arch never sleeps.”
“Wonderful, wonderful!” the Rector still murmured. “Daring fellows, these Norman builders.”
“Yes, yes,” Westray was constrained to say; “but they never reckoned that the present tower would be piled upon their arches.”
“What, you think them a little shaky?” put in the organist. “Well, I have fancied so, many a time, myself.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I dare say they will last our time,” Westray answered in a nonchalant and reassuring tone; for he remembered that, as regards the tower, he had been specially cautioned to let sleeping dogs lie, but he thought of the Ossa heaped on Pelion above their heads, and conceived a mistrust of the wide crossing-arches which he never was able entirely to shake off.