CHAPTER XXII
A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT
"I must become a borrower of the night,
For a dark hour or twain."—MACBETH.
Midnight has just sounded from the tower of St. Martin. It is a peaceful night, faintly lit with stars, and in the region round about Trafalgar Square a dream-like stillness broods over the darkened city, now slowly hushing itself to its brief and troubled rest. This is the centre of the heart of modern civilisation, the middle of the greatest city in the world—the vast, seething alembic of a grand future, the stately monument of a deathless past. Here, alone, in my quiet room of this old English inn, let me meditate a while on some of the scenes that are near me—the strange, romantic, sad, grand objects that I have seen, the memorable figures of beauty, genius, and renown that haunt this classic land.
How solemn and awful now must be the gloom within the walls of the Abbey! A walk of only a few minutes would bring me to its gates—the gates of the most renowned mausoleum on earth. No human foot to-night invades its sacred precincts. The dead alone possess it. I see, upon its gray walls, the marble figures, white and spectral, staring through the darkness. I hear the night-wind moaning around its lofty towers and faintly sobbing in the dim, mysterious spaces beneath its fretted roof. Here and there a ray of starlight, streaming through the sumptuous rose window, falls and lingers, in ruby or emerald gleam, on tomb, or pillar, or dusky pavement. Rustling noises, vague and fearful, float from those dim chapels where the great kings lie in state, with marble effigies recumbent above their bones. At such an hour as this, in such a place, do the dead come out of their graves? The resolute, implacable Queen Elizabeth, the beautiful, ill-fated Queen of Scots, the royal boys that perished in the Tower, Charles the Merry and William the Silent—are these, and such as these, among the phantoms that fill the haunted aisles? What a wonderful company it would be, for human eyes to behold! And with what passionate love or hatred, what amazement, or what haughty scorn, its members would look upon each other's faces, in this miraculous meeting? Here, through the glimmering, icy waste, would pass before the watcher the august shades of the poets of five hundred years. Now would glide the ghosts of Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Dryden, Cowley, Congreve, Addison, Prior, Campbell, Garrick, Burke, Sheridan, Newton, and Macaulay—children of divine genius, that here mingled with the earth. The grim Edward, who so long ravaged Scotland; the blunt, chivalrous Henry, who conquered France; the lovely, lamentable victim at Pomfret, and the harsh, haughty, astute victor at Bosworth; James with his babbling tongue, and William with his impassive, predominant visage—they would all mingle with the spectral multitude and vanish into the gloom. Gentler faces, too, might here once more reveal their loveliness and their grief—Eleanor de Bohun, brokenhearted for her murdered lord; Elizabeth Claypole, the meek, merciful, beloved daughter of Cromwell; Matilda, Queen to Henry the First, and model of every grace and virtue; and sweet Anne Neville, destroyed—if his enemies told the truth—by the politic craft of Gloster. Strange sights, truly, in the lonesome Abbey to-night!
In the sombre crypt beneath St. Paul's cathedral how thrilling now must be the heavy stillness! No sound can enter there. No breeze from the upper world can stir the dust upon those massive sepulchres. Even in day-time that shadowy vista, with its groined arches and the black tombs of Wellington and Nelson and the ponderous funeral-car of the Iron Duke, is seen with a shudder. How strangely, how fearfully the mind would be impressed, of him who should wander there to-night! What sublime reflections would be his, standing beside the ashes of the great admiral, and thinking of that fiery, dauntless spirit—so simple, resolute, and true—who made the earth and the sea alike resound with the splendid tumult of his deeds. Somewhere beneath this pavement is the dust of Sir Philip Sidney—buried here before the destruction of the old cathedral, in the great fire of 1666—and here, too, is the nameless grave of the mighty Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. Shakespeare was only twenty-two years old when Sidney fell, at the battle of Zutphen, and, being then resident in London, he might readily have seen, and doubtless did see, the splendid funeral procession with which the body of that heroic gentleman—radiant and immortal example of perfect chivalry—was borne to the tomb. Hither came Henry of Hereford—returning from exile and deposing the handsome, visionary, useless Richard—to mourn over the relics of his father, dead of sorrow for his son's absence and his country's shame. Here, at the venerable age of ninety-one, the glorious brain of Wren found rest at last, beneath the stupendous temple that himself had reared. The watcher in the crypt tonight would see, perchance, or fancy that he saw, those figures from the storied past. Beneath this roof—the soul and the perfect symbol of sublimity!—are ranged more than fourscore monuments to heroic martial persons who have died for England, by land or sea. Here, too, are gathered in everlasting repose the honoured relics of men who were famous in the arts of peace. Reynolds and Opie, Lawrence and West, Landseer, Turner, Cruikshank, and many more, sleep under the sculptured pavement where now the pilgrim walks. For fifteen centuries a Christian church has stood upon this spot, and through it has poured, with organ strains and glancing lights, an endless procession of prelates and statesmen, of poets and warriors and kings. Surely this is hallowed and haunted ground! Surely to him the spirits of the mighty dead would be very near, who—alone, in the darkness—should stand to-night 'within those sacred walls, and hear, beneath that awful dome, the mellow thunder of the bells of God.