The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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What followed is, as I write this, scarcely credible to myself;
but however incredible, it is true. Young Lidderdale, acting no
doubt at the instigation of "Father" Ogilvie (as my son actually
called him to my face, not realizing the blasphemy of according to
a mortal clergyman the title that belongs to God alone), entered
into a conspiracy with another Romanizing clergyman, the Reverend
Oliver Dorward, Vicar of Green Lanes, Hants, to abduct my son from
his own father's house, with what ultimate intention I dare not
think. Incredible as it must sound to modern ears, they were so far
successful that for a whole week I was in ignorance of his
whereabouts, while detectives were hunting for him up and down
England. The abduction was carried out by young Lidderdale, with
the assistance of a youth called Hacking, so coolly and skilfully
as to indicate that the abettors behind the scenes are USED TO SUCH
ABDUCTIONS. This, my lord, points to a very grave state of affairs
in our midst. If the son of a Protestant clergyman like myself can
be spirited away from a populous but nevertheless comparatively
small town like Slowbridge, what must be going on in great cities
like London? Moreover, everything is done to make it attractive for
the unhappy youth who is thus lured away from his father's hearth.
My own son is even now still impenitent, and I have the greatest
fears for his moral and religious future, so rapid has been the
corruption set up by evil companionship.

These, my lord, are the facts set out as shortly as possible and
written on the eve of my departure in circumstances that militate
against elegance of expression. I am, to tell the truth, still
staggered by this affair, and if I make public my sorrow and my
shame I do so in the hope that the Society of which your lordship
is President, may see its way to take some kind of action that will
make a repetition of such an outrage upon family life for ever
impossible.

Believe me to be,

Your lordship's obedient servant,

Eustace Pomeroy.

The publication of this letter stirred England. _The Times_ in a leading
article demanded a full inquiry into the alleged circumstances. _The
English Churchman_ said that nothing like it had happened since the days
of Bloody Mary. Questions were asked in the House of Commons, and
finally when it became known that Lord Danvers would ask a question in
the House of Lords, Mr. Ogilvie took Mark to see Lord Hull who wished to
be in possession of the facts before he rose to correct some
misapprehensions of Lord Danvers. Mark also had to interview two
Bishops, an Archdeacon, and a Rural Dean. He did not realize that for a
few weeks he was a central figure in what was called THE CHURCH CRISIS.
He was indignant at Mr. Pomeroy's exaggeration and perversions of fact,
and he was so evidently speaking the truth that everybody from Lord Hull
to a reporter of _The Sun_ was impressed by his account of the affair,
so that in the end the Pomeroy Abduction was decided to be less
revolutionary than the Gunpowder Plot.

Mr. Lidderdale, however, believed that his nephew had deliberately tried
to ruin him out of malice, and when two parents seized the opportunity
of such a scandal to remove their sons from Haverton House without
paying the terminal fees, Mr. Lidderdale told Mark that he should recoup
himself for the loss out of the money left by his mother.

"How much did she leave?" his nephew asked.

"Don't ask impertinent questions."

"But it's my money, isn't it?"

"It will be your money in another six years, if you behave yourself.
Meanwhile half of it will be devoted to paying your premium at the
office of my friend Mr. Hitchcock."

"But I don't want to be a solicitor. I want to be a priest," said Mark.

Uncle Henry produced a number of cogent reasons that would make his
nephew's ambition unattainable.

"Very well, if I can't be a priest, I don't want the money, and you can
keep it yourself," said Mark. "But I'm not going to be a solicitor."

"And what are you going to be, may I inquire?" asked Uncle Henry.

"In the end I probably _shall_ be a priest," Mark prophesied. "But I
haven't quite decided yet how. I warn you that I shall run away."

"Run away," his uncle echoed in amazement. "Good heavens, boy, haven't
you had enough of running away over this deplorable Pomeroy affair?
Where are you going to run to?"

"I couldn't tell you, could I, even if I knew?" Mark asked as tactfully
as he was able. "But as a matter of fact, I don't know. I only know that
I won't go into Mr. Hitchcock's office. If you try to force me, I shall
write to _The Times_ about it."

Such a threat would have sounded absurd in the mouth of a schoolboy
before the Pomeroy business; but now Mr. Lidderdale took it seriously
and began to wonder if Haverton House would survive any more of such
publicity. When a few days later Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had consulted
about his future, wrote to propose that Mark should live with him and
work under his superintendence with the idea of winning a scholarship at
Oxford, Mr. Lidderdale was inclined to treat his suggestion as a
solution of the problem, and he replied encouragingly:

Haverton House,

Slowbridge.

Jan. 15.

Dear Sir,

Am I to understand from your letter that you are offering to make
yourself responsible for my nephew's future, for I must warn you
that I could not accept your suggestion unless such were the case?
I do not approve of what I assume will be the trend of your
education, and I should have to disclaim any further responsibility
in the matter of my nephew's future. I may inform you that I hold
in trust for him until he comes of age the sum of L522 8s. 7d.
which was left by his mother. The annual interest upon this I have
used until now as a slight contribution to the expense to which I
have been put on his account; but I have not thought it right to
use any of the capital sum. This I am proposing to transfer to you.
His mother did not execute any legal document and I have nothing
more binding than a moral obligation. If you undertake the
responsibility of looking after him until such time as he is able
to earn his own living, I consider that you are entitled to use
this money in any way you think right. I hope that the boy will
reward your confidence more amply than he has rewarded mine. I need
not allude to the Pomeroy business to you, for notwithstanding your
public denials I cannot but consider that you were as deeply
implicated in that disgraceful affair as he was. I note what you
say about the admiration you had for my brother. I wish I could
honestly say that I shared that admiration. But my brother and I
were not on good terms, for which state of affairs he was entirely
responsible. I am more ready to surrender to you all my authority
over Mark because I am only too well aware how during the last year
you have consistently undermined that authority and encouraged my
nephew's rebellious spirit. I have had a great experience of boys
during thirty-five years of schoolmastering, and I can assure you
that I have never had to deal with a boy so utterly insensible to
kindness as my nephew. His conduct toward his aunt I can only
characterize as callous. Of his conduct towards me I prefer to say
no more. I came forward at a moment when he was likely to be sunk
in the most abject poverty, and my reward has been ingratitude. I
pray that his dark and stubborn temperament may not turn to vice
and folly as he grows older, but I have little hope of its not
doing so. I confess that to me his future seems dismally black. You
may have acquired some kind of influence over his emotions, if he
has any emotions, but I am not inclined to suppose that it will
endure.

On hearing from you that you persist in your offer to assume
complete responsibility for my nephew, I will hand him over to your
care at once. I cannot pretend that I shall be sorry to see the
last of him, for I am not a hypocrite. I may add that his clothes
are in rather a sorry state. I had intended to equip him upon his
entering the office of my old friend Mr. Hitchcock and with that
intention I have been letting him wear out what he has. This, I may
say, he has done most effectually.

I am, Sir,

Yours faithfully,

Henry Lidderdale.

To which Mr. Ogilvie replied:

The Vicarage,

Meade Cantorum,

Bucks.

Jan. 16.

Dear Mr. Lidderdale,

I accept full responsibility for Mark and for Mark's money. Send
both of them along whenever you like. I'm not going to embark on
another controversy about the "rights" of boys. I've exhausted
every argument on this subject since Mark involved me in his
drastic measures of a month ago. But please let me assure you that
I will do my best for him and that I am convinced he will do his
best for me.

Yours truly,

Stephen Ogilvie.

CHAPTER XIII

WYCH-ON-THE-WOLD

Mark rarely visited his uncle and aunt after he went to live at Meade
Cantorum; and the break was made complete soon afterward when the living
of Wych-on-the-Wold was accepted by Mr. Ogilvie, so complete indeed that
he never saw his relations again. Uncle Henry died five years later;
Aunt Helen went to live at St. Leonard's, where she took up palmistry
and became indispensable to the success of charitable bazaars in East
Sussex.

Wych, a large village on a spur of the Cotswold hills, was actually in
Oxfordshire, although by so bare a margin that all the windows looked
down into Gloucestershire, except those in the Rectory; they looked out
across a flat country of elms and willow-bordered streams to a flashing
spire in Northamptonshire reputed to be fifty miles away. It was a high
windy place, seeming higher and windier on account of the numbers of
pigeons that were always circling round the church tower. There was
hardly a house in Wych that did not have its pigeon-cote, from the great
round columbary in the Rectory garden to the few holes in a gable-end of
some steep-roofed cottage. Wych was architecturally as perfect as most
Cotswold villages, and if it lacked the variety of Wychford in the vale
below, that was because the exposed position had kept its successive
builders too intent on solidity to indulge their fancy. The result was
an austere uniformity of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape
whose beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an old
wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to the transient
observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the builders to be sparing
with their windows; the result of such solicitude for the comfort of the
inmates was a succession of blank spaces of freestone that delighted
the eye with an effect of strength and leisure, of cleanliness and
tranquillity.

The Rectory, dating from the reign of Charles II, did not arrogate to
itself the right to retire behind trees from the long line of the single
village street; but being taller than the other houses it brought the
street to a dignified conclusion, and it was not unworthy of the noble
church which stood apart from the village, a landmark for miles, upon
the brow of the rolling wold. There was little traffic on the road that
climbed up from Wychford in the valley of the swift Greenrush five miles
away, and there was less traffic on the road beyond, which for eight
miles sent branch after branch to remote farms and hamlets until itself
became no more than a sheep track and faded out upon a hilly pasturage.
Yet even this unfrequented road only bisected the village at the end of
its wide street, where in the morning when the children were at school
and the labourers at work in the fields the silence was cloistral, where
one could stand listening to the larks high overhead, and where the
lightest footstep aroused curiosity, so that one turned the head to peep
and peer for the cause of so strange a sound.

Mr. Ogilvie's parish had a large superficial area; but his parishioners
were not many outside the village, and in that country of wide pastures
the whole of his cure did not include half-a-dozen farms. There was no
doctor and no squire, unless Will Starling of Rushbrooke Grange could be
counted as the squire.

Halfway to Wychford and close to the boundary of the two parishes an
infirm signpost managed with the aid of a stunted hawthorn to keep
itself partially upright and direct the wayfarer to Wych Maries. Without
the signpost nobody would have suspected that the grassgrown track thus
indicated led anywhere except over the top of the wold.

"You must go and explore Wych Maries," the Rector had said to Mark soon
after they arrived. "You'll find it rather attractive. There's a disused
chapel dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. My
predecessor took me there when we drove round the parish on my first
visit; but I haven't yet had time to go again. And you ought to have a
look at the gardens of Rushbrooke Grange. The present squire is away. In
the South Seas, I believe. But the housekeeper, Mrs. Honeybone, will
show you round."

It was in response to this advice that Mark and Esther set out on a
golden May evening to explore Wych Maries. Esther had continued to be
friendly with Mark after the Pomeroy affair; and when he came to live at
Meade Cantorum she had expressed her pleasure at the prospect of having
him for a brother.

"But you'll keep off religion, won't you?" she had demanded.

Mark promised that he would, wondering why she should suppose that he
was incapable of perceiving who was and who was not interested in it.

"I suppose you've guessed my fear?" she had continued. "Haven't you?
Haven't you guessed that I'm frightened to death of becoming religious?"

The reassuring contradiction that one naturally gives to anybody who
voices a dread of being overtaken by some misfortune might perhaps have
sounded inappropriate, and Mark had held his tongue.

"My father was very religious. My mother is more or less religious.
Stephen is religious. Miriam is religious. Oh, Mark, and I sometimes
feel that I too must fall on my knees and surrender. But I won't.
Because it spoils life. I shall be beaten in the end of course, and I'll
probably get religious mania when I am beaten. But until then--" She did
not finish her sentence; only her blue eyes glittered at the challenge
of life.

That was the last time religion was mentioned between Mark and Esther,
and since both of them enjoyed the country they became friends. On this
May evening they stood by the signpost and looked across the shimmering
grass to where the sun hung in his web of golden haze above the edge of
the wold.

"If we take the road to Wych Maries," said Mark, "we shall be walking
right into the sun."

Esther did not reply, but Mark understood that she assented to his
truism, and they walked on as silent as the long shadows that followed
them. A quarter of a mile from the high road the path reached the edge
of the wold and dipped over into a wood which was sparse just below the
brow, but which grew denser down the slope with many dark evergreens
interspersed, and in the valley below became a jungle. After the bare
upland country this volume of May verdure seemed indescribably rich and
the valley beyond, where the Greenrush flowed through kingcups toward
the sun, indescribably alluring. Esther and Mark forgot that they were
exploring Wych Maries and thinking only of reaching that wide valley
they ran down through the wood, rejoicing in the airy green of the
ash-trees above them and shouting as they ran. But presently cypresses
and sombre yews rose on either side of the path, and the road to Wych
Maries was soft and silent, and the serene sun was lost, and their
whispering footsteps forbade them to shout any more. At the bottom of
the hill the trees increased in number and variety; the sun shone
through pale oak-leaves and the warm green of sycamores. Nevertheless a
sadness haunted the wood, where the red campions made only a mist of
colour with no reality of life and flowers behind.

"This wood's awfully jolly, isn't it?" said Mark, hoping to gain from
Esther's agreement the dispersal of his gloom.

"I don't care for it much," she replied. "There doesn't seem to be any
life in it."

"I heard a cuckoo just now," said Mark.

"Yes, out of tune already."

"Mm, rather out of tune. Mind those nettles," he warned her.

"I thought Stephen said he drove here."

"Perhaps we've come the wrong way. I believe the road forked by the ash
wood above. Anyway if we go toward the sun we shall come out in the
valley, and we can walk back along the banks of the river to Wychford."

"We can always go back through the wood," said Esther.

"Yes, if you don't mind going back the way you came."

"Come on," she snapped. She was not going to be laughed at by Mark, and
she dared him to deny that he was not as much aware as herself of an
eeriness in the atmosphere.

"Only because it seems dark in here after that dazzling sunlight on the
wold. Hark! I hear the sound of water."

They struggled through the undergrowth toward the sound; soon from a
steep wooded bank they were gazing down into a millpool, the surface of
which reflected with a gloomy deepening of their hue the colour but not
the form of the trees above. Water was flowing through a rotten sluice
gate down from the level of the stream upon a slimy water-wheel that
must have been out of action for many years.

"The dark tarn of Auber in the misty mid region of Weir!" Mark
exclaimed. "Don't you love _Ulalume_? I think it's about my favourite
poem."

"Never heard of it," Esther replied indifferently. He might have taken
advantage of this confession to give her a lecture on poetry, if the
millpool and the melancholy wood had not been so affecting as to make
the least attempt at literary exposition impertinent.

"And there's the chapel," Mark exclaimed, pointing to a ruined edifice
of stone, the walls of which were stained with the damp of years rising
from the pool. "But how shall we reach it? We must have come the wrong
way."

"Let's go back! Let's go back!" Esther exclaimed, surrendering to the
command of an intuition that overcame her pride. "This place is
unlucky."

Mark looking at her wild eyes, wilder in the dark that came so early in
this overshadowed place, was half inclined to turn round at her behest;
but at that moment he perceived a possible path through the nettles and
briers at the farther end of the pool and unwilling to go back to the
Rectory without having visited the ruined chapel of Wych Maries he
called on her to follow him. This she did fearfully at first; but
gradually regaining her composure she emerged on the other side as cool
and scornful as the Esther with whom he was familiar.

"What frightened you?" he asked, when they were standing on a grassgrown
road that wound through a rank pasturage browsed on by a solitary black
cow and turned the corner by a clump of cedars toward a large building,
the presence of which was felt rather than seen beyond the trees.

"I was bored by the brambles," Esther offered for explanation.

"This must be the driving road," Mark proclaimed. "I say, this chapel is
rather ripping, isn't it?"

But Esther had wandered away across the rank meadow, where her
meditative form made the solitary black cow look lonelier than ever.
Mark turned aside to examine the chapel. He had been warned by the
Rector to look at the images of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary
Magdalene that had survived the ruin of the holy place of which they
were tutelary and to which they had given their name. The history of the
chapel was difficult to trace. It was so small as to suggest that it was
a chantry; but there was no historical justification for linking its
fortunes with the Starlings who owned Rushbrooke Grange, and there was
no record of any lost hamlet here. That it was called Wych Maries might
show a connexion either with Wychford or with Wych-on-the-Wold; it lay
about midway between the two, and in days gone by there had been
controversy on this point between the two parishes. The question had
been settled by a squire of Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth
century, since when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by
some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record
neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk
worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of
bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that
covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its
floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of
the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward as they had gazed for six
hundred years. The curiosity of the few antiquarians who visited the
place and speculated upon its past had kept the images clear of the ivy
that covered the rest of the fabric. Mark did not put this to the credit
of the antiquarians; but now perceiving for the first time these two
austere shapes of divine women under conditions of atmosphere that
enhanced their austerity and unearthliness he ascribed their freedom
from decay to the interposition of God. To Mark's imagination, fixed
upon the images while Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the
chapel, there was granted another of those moments of vision which
marked like milestones his spiritual progress. He became suddenly
assured that he would neither marry nor beget children. He was
astonished to find himself in the grip of this thought, for his mind had
never until this evening occupied itself with marriage or children, nor
even with love. Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite
purpose in the scheme of the world. He could not, he said to himself, be
considered credulous if he sought for the explanation of his state of
mind in the images of the two Maries. He looked at them resolved to
illuminate with reason's eye the fluttering shadows of dusk that gave to
the stone an illusion of life's bloom.

"Did their lips really move?" he asked aloud, and from the field beyond
the black cow lowed a melancholy negative. Whether the stone had spoken
or not, Mark accepted the revelation of his future as a Divine favour,
and thenceforth he regarded the ruined chapel of Wych Maries as the
place where the vow he made on that Whit-sunday was accepted by God.

"Aren't you ever coming?" the voice of Esther called across the field,
and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on the grassgrown drive that led
round the cedar grove to Rushbrooke Grange.

"It's too late now to go inside," he objected.

They were standing before the house.

"It's not too late at all," she contradicted eagerly. "Down here it
seems later than it really is."

Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of the average
Cotswold manor. Being a one-storied building it occupied a large
superficial area, and its tumbling irregular roofs of freestone, the
outlines of which were blurred by the encroaching mist of vegetation
that overhung them, gave the effect of water, as if the atmosphere of
this dank valley had wrought upon the substance of the building and as
if the architects themselves had been confused by the rivalry of the
trees by which it was surrounded. The owners of Rushbrooke Grange had
never occupied a prominent position in the county, and their estates had
grown smaller with each succeeding generation. There was no conspicuous
author of their decay, no outstanding gamester or libertine from whose
ownership the family's ruin could be dated. There was indeed nothing of
interest in their annals except an attack upon the Grange by a party of
armed burglars in the disorderly times at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, when the squire's wife and two little girls were
murdered while the squire and his sons were drinking deep in the Stag
Inn at Wychford four miles away. Mark did not feel much inclined to
blunt his impression of the chapel by perambulating Rushbrooke Grange
under the guidance of Mrs. Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther
perversely insisted upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her
excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit. By now it was a
pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy with moths' wings, heavy with
the scent of apple blossom.

"Well, you must explain who we are," said Mark while the echoes of the
bell died away on the silence within the house and they waited for the
footsteps that should answer their summons. The answer came from a
window above the porch where Mrs. Honeybone's face, wreathed in
wistaria, looked down and demanded in accents that were harsh with alarm
who was there.

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