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MORE ABOUT KILKHAVEN.
Our dining-room was one story below the level at which we had entered the
parsonage; for, as I have said, the house was built into the face of the
cliff, just where it sunk nearly to the level of the shores of the bay.
While at dinner, on the evening of our arrival, I kept looking from the
window, of course, and I saw before me, first a little bit of garden,
mostly in turf, then a low stone wall; beyond, over the top of the wall,
the blue water of the bay; then beyond the water, all alive with light and
motion, the rocks and sand-hills of the opposite side of the little bay,
not a quarter of a mile across. I could likewise see where the shore went
sweeping out and away to the north, with rock after rock standing far into
the water, as if gazing over the awful wild, where there was nothing to
break the deathly waste between Cornwall and Newfoundland. But for the
moment I did not regard the huge power lying outside so much as the merry
blue bay between me and those rocks and sand-hills. If I moved my head a
little to the right, I saw, over the top of the low wall already mentioned,
and apparently quite close to it the slender yellow masts of a schooner,
her mainsail hanging loose from the gaff, whose peak was lowered. We must,
I thought, be on the very harbour-quay. When I went out for my walk with
Wynnie, I had turned from the bay, and gone to the brow of the cliffs
overhanging the open sea on our own side of it.
When I came down to breakfast in the same room next morning, I stared. The
blue had changed to yellow. The life of the water was gone. Nothing met my
eyes but a wide expanse of dead sand. You could walk straight across
the bay to the hills opposite. From the look of the rocks, from the
perpendicular cliffs on the coast, I had almost, without thinking,
concluded that we were on the shore of a deep-water bay. It was high-water,
or nearly so, then; and now, when I looked westward, it was over a long
reach of sands, on the far border of which the white fringe of the waves
was visible, as if there was their hitherto, and further towards us they
could not come. Beyond the fringe lay the low hill of the Atlantic. To add
to my confusion, when I looked to the right, that is, up the bay towards
the land, there was no schooner there. I went out at the window, which
opened from the room upon the little lawn, to look, and then saw in a
moment how it was.
"Do you know, my dear," I said to my wife, "we are just at the mouth of
that canal we saw as we came along? There are gates and a lock just outside
there. The schooner that was under this window last night must have gone in
with the tide. She is lying in the basin above now."
"O, yes, papa," Charlie and Harry broke in together. "We saw it go up
this morning. We've been out ever so long. It was so funny," Charlie
went on--everything was funny with Charlie--"to see it rise up like a
Jack-in-the-box, and then slip into the quiet water through the other
gates!"
And when I thought about the waves tumbling and breaking away out there,
and the wide yellow sands between, it was wonderful--which was what Charlie
meant by funny--to see the little vessel lying so many feet above it all,
in a still plenty of repose, gathering strength, one might fancy to rush
out again, when its time was come, into the turmoil beyond, and dash its
way through the breasts of the billows.
After breakfast we had prayers, as usual, and after a visit to Connie, whom
I found tired, but wonderfully well, I went out for a walk by myself, to
explore the neighbourhood, find the church, and, in a word, do something to
shake myself into my new garments. The day was glorious. I wandered along
a green path, in the opposite direction from our walk the evening before,
with a fir-wood on my right hand, and a belt of feathery tamarisks on my
left, behind which lay gardens sloping steeply to a lower road, where stood
a few pretty cottages. Turning a corner, I came suddenly in sight of the
church, on the green down above me--a sheltered yet commanding situation;
for, while the hill rose above it, protecting it from the east, it looked
down the bay, and the Atlantic lay open before it. All the earth seemed to
lie behind it, and all its gaze to be fixed on the symbol of the infinite.
It stood as the church ought to stand, leading men up the mount of vision,
to the verge of the eternal, to send them back with their hearts full of
the strength that springs from hope, by which alone the true work of the
world can be done. And when I saw it I rejoiced to think that once more
I was favoured with a church that had a history. Of course it is a happy
thing to see new churches built wherever there is need of such; but to the
full idea of the building it is necessary that it should be one in which
the hopes and fears, the cares and consolations, the loves and desires of
our forefathers should have been roofed; where the hearts of those through
whom our country has become that which it is--from whom not merely the
life-blood of our bodies, but the life-blood of our spirits, has come down
to us, whose existence and whose efforts have made it possible for us to
be that which we are--have before us worshipped that Spirit from whose
fountain the whole torrent of being flows, who ever pours fresh streams
into the wearying waters of humanity, so ready to settle down into a
stagnant repose. Therefore I would far rather, when I may, worship in an
old church, whose very stones are a history of how men strove to realise
the infinite, compelling even the powers of nature into the task--as I
soon found on the very doorway of this church, where the ripples of the
outspread ocean, and grotesque imaginations of the monsters of its deeps,
fixed, as it might seem, for ever in stone, gave a distorted reflex, from
the little mirror of the artist's mind, of that mighty water, so awful, so
significant to the human eye, which yet lies in the hollow of the Father's
palm, like the handful that the weary traveller lifts from the brook by the
way. It is in virtue of the truth that went forth in such and such like
attempts that we are able to hold our portion of the infinite reality which
God only knows. They have founded our Church for us, and such a church as
this will stand for the symbol of it; for here we too can worship the
God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob--the God of Sidney, of Hooker, of
Herbert. This church of Kilkhaven, old and worn, rose before me a history
in stone--so beaten and swept about by the "wild west wind,"
"For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms,"
and so streamed upon, and washed, and dissolved, by the waters lifted from
the sea and borne against it on the upper tide of the wind, that you could
almost fancy it one of those churches that have been buried for ages
beneath the encroaching waters, lifted again, by some mighty revulsion of
nature's heart, into the air of the sweet heavens, there to stand marked
for ever with the tide-flows of the nether world--scooped, and hollowed,
and worn like aeonian rocks that have slowly, but for ever, responded to
the swirl and eddy of the wearing waters. So, from the most troublous of
times, will the Church of our land arise, in virtue of what truth she
holds, and in spite, if she rises at all, of the worldliness of those who,
instead of seeking her service, have sought and gained the dignities which,
if it be good that she have it in her power to bestow them, need the
corrective of a sharply wholesome persecution which of late times she has
not known. But God knows, and the fire will come in its course--first in
the form of just indignation, it may be, against her professed servants,
and then in the form of the furnace seven times heated, in which the true
builders shall yet walk unhurt save as to their mortal part.
I looked about for some cottage where the sexton might be supposed to live,
and spied a slated roof, nearly on a level with the road, at a little
distance in front of me. I could at least inquire there. Before I reached
it, however, an elderly woman came out and approached me. She was dressed
in a white cap and a dark-coloured gown. On her face lay a certain repose
which attracted me. She looked as if she had suffered but had consented to
it, and therefore could smile. Her smile lay near the surface. A kind word
was enough to draw it up from the well where it lay shimmering: you could
always see the smile there, whether it was born or not. But even when she
smiled, in the very glimmering of that moonbeam, you could see the deep,
still, perhaps dark, waters under. O! if one could but understand what
goes on in the souls that have no words, perhaps no inclination, to set it
forth! What had she endured? How had she learned to have that smile always
near? What had consoled her, and yet left her her grief--turned it,
perhaps, into hope? Should I ever know?
She drew near me, as if she would have passed me, as she would have done,
had I not spoken. I think she came towards me to give me the opportunity of
speaking if I wished, but she would not address me.
"Good morning," I said. "Can you tell me where to find the sexton?"
"Well, sir," she answered, with a gleam of the smile brightening underneath
her old skin, as it were, "I be all the sexton you be likely to find this
mornin', sir. My husband, he be gone out to see one o' Squire Tregarva's
hounds as was took ill last night. So if you want to see the old church,
sir, you'll have to be content with an old woman to show you, sir."
"I shall be quite content, I assure you," I answered. "Will you go and get
the key?"
"I have the key in my pocket, sir; for I thought that would be what you'd
be after, sir. And by the time you come to my age, sir, you'll learn to
think of your old bones, sir. I beg your pardon for making so free. For
mayhap, says I to myself, he be the gentleman as be come to take Mr.
Shepherd's duty for him. Be ye now, sir?"
All this was said in a slow sweet subdued tone, nearly of one pitch. You
would have felt that she claimed the privilege of age with a kind of
mournful gaiety, but was careful, and anxious even, not to presume upon it,
and, therefore, gentle as a young girl.
"Yes," I answered. "My name is Walton I have come to take the place of my
friend Mr. Shepherd; and, of course, I want to see the church."
"Well, she be a bee-utiful old church. Some things, I think, sir, grows
more beautiful the older they grows. But it ain't us, sir."
"I'm not so sure of that," I said. "What do you mean?"
"Well, sir, there's my little grandson in the cottage there: he'll never be
so beautiful again. Them children du be the loves. But we all grows uglier
as we grows older. Churches don't seem to, sir."
"I'm not so sure about all that," I said again.
"They did say, sir, that I was a pretty girl once. I'm not much to look at
now."
And she smiled with such a gracious amusement, that I felt at once that if
there was any vanity left in this memory of her past loveliness, it was
sweet as the memory of their old fragrance left in the withered leaves of
the roses.
"But it du not matter, du it, sir? Beauty is only skin-deep."
"I don't believe that," I answered. "Beauty is as deep as the heart at
least."
"Well to be sure, my old husband du say I be as handsome in his eyes as
ever I be. But I beg your pardon, sir, for talkin' about myself. I believe
it was the old church--she set us on to it."
"The old church didn't lead you into any harm then," I answered. "The
beauty that is in the heart will shine out of the face again some day--be
sure of that. And after all, there is just the same kind of beauty in a
good old face that there is in an old church. You can't say the church is
so trim and neat as it was the day that the first blast of the organ filled
it as with, a living soul. The carving is not quite so sharp, the timbers
are not quite so clean. There is a good deal of mould and worm-eating and
cobwebs about the old place. Yet both you and I think it more beautiful now
than it was then. Well, I believe it is, as nearly as possible, the same
with an old face. It has got stained, and weather-beaten, and worn; but if
the organ of truth has been playing on inside the temple of the Lord, which
St. Paul says our bodies are, there is in the old face, though both form
and complexion are gone, just the beauty of the music inside. The wrinkles
and the brownness can't spoil it. A light shines through it all--that of
the indwelling spirit. I wish we all grew old like the old churches."
She did not reply, but I thought I saw in her face that she understood my
mysticism. We had been walking very slowly, had passed through the quaint
lych-gate, and now the old woman had got the key in the lock of the door,
whose archway was figured and fashioned as I have described above, with a
dozen mouldings or more, most of them "carved so curiously."
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