They walked together up the aisle. "I don't care about them," said Barbara, "but I suppose Mr. Pryor would die happy if he could make them out."
"Then I suspect he is happy meanwhile, though perhaps he doesn't know it," Reynold replied, looking upward at the half effaced lettering.
"He can read some of it," said the girl, "but nobody can make out the interesting part."
Harding laughed, under his breath. Their remarks had been softly uttered ever since the closing of the door had shut them in to the imprisoned silence. He moved noiselessly a few steps further, and looked round.
Mitchelhurst Church, like Mitchelhurst Place, betrayed a long neglect. The pavement was sunken and uneven, cobwebs hung from the sombre arches, the walls, which had once been white, were stained and streaked, by damp and time, to a blending of melancholy hues. The half light, which struggled through small panes of greenish glass, fell on things blighted, tarnished, faded, dim. The pews with their rush-matted seats were worm-eaten, the crimson velvet of the pulpit was a dingy rag. There was but one bit of vivid modern colouring in the whole building—a slim lancet window at the west end, a discord sharply struck in the shadowy harmony. "To the memory of the vicar before last," said Barbara, when the young man's glance fell on it. Such gleams of sunlight as lingered yet in the stormy sky without irradiated Michael, the church's patron saint, in the act of triumphing over a small dragon. The contest revealed itself as a mere struggle for existence; a Quaker, within such narrow limits, must have fought for the upper hand as surely as an archangel. Harding as he looked at it could not repress a sigh. He fully appreciated the calmness of the saint, and the neatness with which the little dragon was coiled, but it seemed to him a pity that the vicar before last had happened to die; and he was glad to turn his back on the battle, and follow Miss Strange to the north chancel aisle. "These are all the Rothwell monuments," she said. "Their vault is just below. This is their pew, where we sit on Sunday."
Having said this she moved from his side, and left him gazing at the simple tablets which recorded the later generations of the old house, and the elaborate memorials of more prosperous days. More than one recumbent figure slept there, each with upturned face supported on a carven pillow; the bust of a Rothwell was set up in a dusty niche, with lean features peering out of a forest of curling marble hair; carefully graduated families of Rothwells, boys and girls, knelt behind their kneeling parents; the little window, half blocked by the florid grandeur of a grimy monument, had the Rothwell arms emblazoned on it in a dim richness of colour. In this one spot the dreariness of the rest of the building became a stately melancholy. Harding looked down. His foot was resting on the inscribed stone which marked the entrance to that silent, airless place of skeletons and shadows, compared to which even this dim corner, with its mute assemblage, was yet the upper world of light and life. If he worked, if fortune favoured him, if he succeeded beyond all reasonable hope, if he were indeed predestined to triumph, that little stone might one day be lifted for him.
The windows darkened momentarily with the coming of the tempest. Through the dim diamond panes the masses of the yew-trees were seen, and their movement was like the stirring of vast black wings. The effigies of the dead men frowned in the deepening gloom, and their young descendant folded his arms, and leaned against the high pew, with a slant gleam of light on his pale Rothwell face. Barbara went restlessly and yet cautiously up and down the central aisle, and paused by the reading-desk to turn the leaves of the great old-fashioned prayer-book which lay there. When its cover was lifted it exhaled a faint odour, as of the dead Sundays of a century and more. While she lingered, lightly conscious of the lapse of vague years, reading petitions for the welfare of "Thy servant GEORGE, our most gracious King and Governour," "her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, and all the Royal Family," the page grew indistinct in the threatening twilight, as if it would withdraw itself from her idle curiosity. She looked up with a shiver, as overhead and around burst the multitudinous noises of the storm, the rain gushing on the leaden roof, the water streaming drearily from the gutters to beat on the earth below, and, in a few moments, the quick, monotonous fall of drops through a leak close by. This lasted for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. Then the sky grew lighter, the downpour slackened, a sense of overshadowing oppression seemed to pass away, and St. Michael and his dragon brightened cheerfully. Barbara went to the door and threw it open, and a breath of fresh air came in with a chilly smell of rain.
As she stood in the low archway she heard Harding's step on the pavement behind her. It was more alert and decided than usual, and when she turned he met her glance with a smile.
"Well?" she said. "I didn't like to disturb you, you looked so serious."
"I was thinking," he admitted. "And it was a rather serious occasion. My people are not very cheerful company."