Lovers' Saint Ruth's, and Three Other Tales

by Louise Imogen Guiney

"And so it seemed to the only ones who sat tongue-tied amid the great rejoicing, as if the divine wrath had indeed spent itself upon their house; the doom of the iniquity of the forefathers, as the Lord Richard would say to himself. What fresh and mistaken thinking there was to do, the miserable lad, being sane, did for both, believing that a curse was upon them, and that they must endure it, and accept the torture of that alien child's presence for some purpose hidden from human eyes. Their pact and horrible habit of silence weighed upon their hearts; and had not one constrained the other, she was very fain at times to confess, and go, if needs be, into disgrace for the lie. They would wander sometimes on the terrace, hand-in-hand, without speech, looking like brother and sister under a common ban. It seems impossible to understand this deliberate choice of a wrong attitude towards life, except in the light of that mysticism,

'With shuddering, meek, submitted thought,'

which ruled the Lord Richard's nature. Meanwhile the infant changed to a noisy, bounding rogue with black eyes, whom his young mother hated. They called him Ralph, a name not borne before by any of the Langham race. From his cradle, the poor waif clung to the Lord Richard, as to his only friend; and that saintly soul, as one might take sweetly a bitter penance, reared him in right ways, and encouraged or chided him at need, and won from him an awe and gratitude affecting to see. But the Lady Eleanor would never have him so much as touch her gown, which the maids about the manor laid to her troubled wits, and felt sorry for, without more ado. The old Earl, who liked the boy's health and pluck, had the portrait painted for the gallery; and even there you will notice that Ralph is far away from her, and at her husband's feet. Years of dereliction, therefore, these were to the Lord Richard, having no child of his own, and watching his intruding heir gaining daily some virtue and seemly knowledge, and coming, either by nature or by his careful breeding, fully to deserve those things to which he had no right before God and the king. And the boy grew, and was worthy to be loved, so brave he was, and so truth-speaking, and so tractable, despite his fits of temper. When he had passed his tenth birthday, he was sent to Meldom School; and his first absence lifted, as it were, the black load from his mother's spirit; and the beginning of her recovery, after all that she had endured, was from that day. There came soon to her and the Lord Richard an unexpected happiness; for the year 1636 saw the birth of their own little Vivian. You may believe that his father, perplexed by the fresh aspect of the problem before him, tried to solve it by prayer and patience; the good heart, chastened ever with much sorrow, and melted away with thinking, thinking. His wife, free of his morbid scruples, cried out at last irresistibly for the vindication of her little one. But the Lord Richard was visited by a prophetic dream, and was wrung with misgivings, less like a man's than a woman's, in searching to divine his duty. For he foresaw, of a surety, in his sleep, what a poor vicious thing his son was to be. All the estates, being entailed, were to pass to the acknowledged eldest, passing, therefore, by unjust consent, in this case, to an interloper, to the detriment of the true inheritor; and to maintain Ralph's right would be a legal crime. On the other hand, the great power and responsibility of which he promised to make such fair use,—what if these should become, in the hands of that other to whom they would be intrusted, engines for havoc in the world, since then to disown Ralph were a moral crime? Lord Richard wrestled hard with his demon of doubt, to no avail. In good time, alas, as it was ordained, when Vivian was a bonny babe in his third summer, the unforeseen deliverance came. Ralph Langham was thrown from his pony at Long Meldom Cross, and brought home for dead. He never spoke a word, but passed to eternity with his fingers clasped tight on the Lord Richard's compassionate hand, and a great tear rolling down his round brown cheek. His short career had been like a cheerful cloud swimming in the sun, and itself casting damp and darkness on the hills below. The strangest thing of all was the ungoverned joy which came, at the news, upon the Lady Eleanor, a joy dreadful, at that time, to those about; but when it faded away, all the evil else linked with it seemed to fade too, and very shortly she was wholly restored, and became her own comely, gracious self again, even as she was when first the beardless Lord Richard had told her his love. So that the liberty of those hunted young spirits was established in the grave of him whom heraldry yet names as their first-born. They laid him yonder, in Lovers' Saint Ruth's. Where else but there? as if in unuttered thanksgiving that mercy had reached them at last upon its fatal threshold. There is the tower, Holden, and the broken top mullion (is it not graceful?) of the great west window."

We swung into the prettiest open space imaginable, close to a glassy lake, and found the fourteenth-century church, with its yews and leaning stones, before us. I went silently in at Nasmith's heels. The flooring was the perfect plush of English grass; the roof of the nave was living boughs. For a single huge ash-tree had rooted itself there generations ago, and grown much larger round than our four arms could span, and lifted its spread of leaves nearer heaven than the level of the walls. Ivy hung on the chancel arch, and many bright-colored wildflowers, whose seeds had lodged in the crevices and in the blank windows, filled the whole enclosure, bay after bay, with a riot of color and fragrance. Soft green daylight everywhere caressed the eye. The chancel roof, of exquisitely groined limestone, was still unfallen, though it had a rift or two; and on either side, where the monks' stalls must have stood a dozen deep, there were crumbling tombs, with effigies in alabaster. I went directly up one step to a plain small brass over against the piscina, and pushed the weeds aside. Nasmith knew I should not be able to decipher the inscription, on which the rain of three hundred summers had been sifted in. Leaning his head against one of the piers, a good distance down, he looked over at me, and began to recite, in an agreeable monotone: "'Here lieth Ralph, thirteen years old, heir while he lived to Orrinleigh and Gaynes; whom do thou, O Lord! receive among the innocent.

For Time still tries
The truth from lies,
And God makes open what the world doth blind.

A. D. 1639.' Do you recognize the verse? Robert Greene's. The choice of it was so significant it must have been the Lord Richard's doing. You will notice that the epitaph is sensitively worded; it is pure fact, and nothing else; and it has, too, an affectionate sound which has always been a sort of satisfaction to me." "How immensely dramatic the upshot might have been if he had lived!" I said. "The poor little fellow, infelix natu, felicior morte." I was astonished to find a slight mist over my eyes. "Tell me of these others next him, Nasmith: a knight and his lady side by side, recumbent, and therefore pre-Reformation." Nasmith's slow, radiant, indulgent smile was upon me, as he moved forward from the light to where I stood. "No," he said. "Look at the armor and the fashion of the dress, not at the attitude, which is unusual, of course, for the Caroline period. Those are the blessed twain of whom I have been telling you. See!" He pointed to the discolored raised Latin text which ran around the wide slabs beneath. I traced it out. "Pray for the souls of Richard Esme Vivian Langham, Viscount Gaynes, and of Eleanor his adored wife, neither of them ripe in years, who together, in this venerable sanctuary, suffered calamity, and sought repose in Christ." There were no dates. I waited for Nasmith to go on. He did so, in that tone of grave personal interest which he reserves for these "old, unhappy, far-off things."

"They had to lead very private lives, on account of their proscribed creed; a constraint which to them was not unwelcome. Their good works, however, were known over the whole countryside, which is loyal to their memory. She was the first to die, in 1640, contracting a fever, and fading gradually away. There were two young children to remember her and take pattern after her, (would that they had done so!) Vivian and Joan. When the civil wars began, the old Earl was feeble and near his end; and the Lord Richard, whose principles and natural sympathies were all for King Charles, joined the unanimous Catholic gentry, and sought with eagerness the only use that seemed left to him. His bright beloved presence graced the camp but a little while, for in his thirty-seventh year he was killed at the second battle of Newbury, while carrying the royal standard. They brought him back to the old chapel where he wished to be buried, and where none of his house have been buried since. Both these figures were made under his own eye, when his wife's dust was laid below. Are they not nobly and delicately wrought, and full of rest? His hand holds hers; he had always said they should lie so, as his namesake king and Anne of Bohemia, long ago, lay in the Abbey at Westminster. The ruin has taken its traditional distinctive name of Lovers' Saint Ruth's from them. All my parish maids steal in on Hallowe'en to kiss these joined hands, and wish themselves good fortune, and hundreds of ——shire sweethearts have plighted their troth here, under the stars. It has always been a place of pilgrimage, though its full history is not even guessed at. Saint Ruth's-on-the-Hill, my friend, can never buy or borrow such a charm as this."

As he paused, we heard the plaintive interruptive note of a pair of wood-doves in the ash. He looked at me again. "I forgot to say that they were content to die, my martyr hero and heroine of Orrinleigh, for they had won four years, at the end, of absolute unbroken bliss. They used to come down here every evening for a talk, or a hymn to Our Lady, arm in arm, and happy as children all the way. Their day of storms was brief, and it had a lovely sunset." "Ah, Nasmith," I exclaimed, like a sentimental girl, "I am glad of that. How did you know?" He drew his foot idly through the soft sward as he spoke. "I had the whole story in the Lord Richard's own hand. He wrote it out during the last night he spent at the manor, with his spurs and sword lying by him ready for the morrow: the whole tender, tragic story, with his curious mental struggles laid bare. He thought the truth due to his father, and to his dead stainless Eleanor, to clear her memory from erring rumor which had early got abroad. The manuscript was put away under a seal; and as soon as his son's will was opened, the Earl knew where to find it; I have seen it all scorched and stained with the old man's tears. No eye, from his to mine, has read it since. You see, the next and fourth Earl, Vivian, grew up a graceless cynic reprobate in London, never visited his estates, and cared nothing for his lineage. His sister was little better. I ought to spare her and her second husband any vituperations, since they did me the courtesy of becoming my great-great-great-great-grandparents! Did I never tell you? The Langhams, bad enough in the beginning, have been a worse crew than before, since the Lord Richard's time. Almost 'every inch that is not fool is rogue,' as Dryden says of his giant. Francis, the ninth of the line, lately dead, and his Countess, being my very distant relatives, and impressed with my virtues, which were then being wasted on the desert air, offered me the benefice. The first thing I did, after setting Saint Ruth's in order, was to look about for materials for a history of the parish from a period before the Conquest. During the summer, they put a world of papers, grants, charters, registries, and so on, into my way, which had been heaped in some old chests in the tool-house. One of these papers was that letter, a pearl in sea-kelp. I took it promptly over to Orrinleigh. The Earl was in his hunting-coat, swearing, over his glasses, at some excellent Liberal news in his morning journal. 'Read this,' I said; 'it is one of your ancestral romances, and ought to be reverently preserved.' He laid it by. A few days afterwards, while I was gathering fruit and vines for a Harvest Sunday, he pulled it from his pocket, and threw it at me over the garden wall, remarking that as my reverend appetite was for musty parchments, he did not know but what I had best have this one, especially as his wife and niece, having glanced at it, would not give it house-room! So I had the keepership of that mournful secret of the Lord Richard's wonderful love and patience, which came near altering the local annals I was to write. It was like the unburied dead; it tormented me. Not one of those vulgarians to whom it really belonged was fit to touch it, much less understand it; and I did not wish to add it to any collection, mine or another's. I hesitated a good bit, and then I stole off, on a chilly Martinmas eve, and piously burned it here in Lovers' Saint Ruth's, on this tomb, and scattered the ashes into the grass." A gust of wind came into the choir, and the clock half a mile away struck one. At the sound, we reached for our hats, which we had instinctively laid aside, and crossed the little transept to the door, Nasmith first, I following, as we had entered. Once more, as we left the porch, dark with ivy and weather-stains, we heard the wood-doves, over our heads in the nave, utter a slow musical moan, one to the other. "Their souls," I whispered suddenly. "Peace to all such, after pain," said poetic Cyril. "Amen," I answered. We both smiled. How we two were enjoying our renewed society, back in a bygone England!

Hardly had we gained the road, when a carriage rolled by, with a single figure on horseback clattering alongside. A black-bonneted girl in mourning, handsome, if furtive, under her parasol, and both her companions, the younger of whom sat beside her, saluted Nasmith in what I thought to be a cold, perfunctory manner. I guessed something, for his honest cheek flushed. "I fear these are the great folk of Orrinleigh," I remarked. "The men have selfish, stupid faces, more's the pity." "Yes," he replied; "you have seen some of the Lord Richard's degenerate descendants. I once meant to give his manuscript to Audrey—to the young lady in the carriage. I hoped she might value it. But, as I said, I destroyed it instead. You are the only person to whom I ever repeated the tale, and almost in the original words. Go put it in a book, if you like, Holden; make what you can of it; develop and proportion it; I trust your handling." I thanked him. "No. Your chivalrous Cavalier is too complex a subject for me," was my frank reply; "I feel safer with a history than with a mystery." I was a hardened republican novelist even then, and his senior, and not blind to the "human document," neither of the seventeenth century, nor of the nineteenth. "Nasmith," I began cunningly, "you were in love with the Honorable Audrey, and she refused you. How fortunate for you! Yours was the neatest and most spiritual revenge I ever heard of: to keep from her what might have helped transform her woman's nature, stifled in an ill atmosphere,—the knowledge that she was of the blood of the saints,

'Tho' fallen on evil days,
On evil days tho' fallen, and evil tongues.'"