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The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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"I am the Rector's sister, Mrs. Honeybone," Esther explained.

"I don't care who you are," said Mrs. Honeybone. "You have no business
to go ringing the bell at this time of the evening. It frightened me to
death."

"The Rector asked me to call on you," she pressed.

Mark had already been surprised by Esther's using her brother as an
excuse to visit the house and he was still more surprised by hearing her
speak so politely, so ingratiatingly, it seemed, to this grim woman
embowered in wistaria.

"We lost our way," Esther explained, "and that's why we're so late. The
Rector told me about the water-lily pool, and I should so much like to
see it."

Mrs. Honeybone debated with herself for a moment, until at last with a
grunt of disapproval she came downstairs and opened the front door. The
lily pool, now a lily pool only in name, for it was covered with an
integument of duckweed which in twilight took on the texture of velvet,
was an attractive place set in an enclosure of grass between high grey
walls.

"That's all there is to see," said Mrs. Honeybone.

"Mr. Starling is abroad?" Esther asked.

The housekeeper nodded.

"And when is he coming back?" she went on.

"That's for him to say," said the housekeeper disagreeably. "He might
come back to-night for all I know."

Almost before the sentence was out of her mouth the hall bell jangled,
and a distant voice shouted:

"Nanny, Nanny, hurry up and open the door!"

Mrs. Honeybone could not have looked more startled if the voice had been
that of a ghost. Mark began to talk of going until Esther cut him short.

"I don't think Mr. Starling will mind our being here so much as that,"
she said.

Mrs. Honeybone had already hurried off to greet her master; and when she
was gone Mark looked at Esther, saw that her face was strangely flushed,
and in an instant of divination apprehended either that she had already
met the squire of Rushbrooke Grange or that she expected to meet him
here to-night; so that, when presently a tall man of about thirty-five
with brick-dust cheeks came into the close, he was not taken aback when
Esther greeted him by name with the assurance of old friendship. Nor was
he astonished that even in the wan light those brick-dust cheeks should
deepen to terra-cotta, those hard blue eyes glitter with recognition,
and the small thin-lipped mouth lose for a moment its immobility and
gape, yes, gape, in the amazement of meeting somebody whom he never
could have expected to meet at such an hour in such a place.

"You," he exclaimed. "You here!"

By the way he quickly looked behind him as if to intercept a prying
glance Mark knew that, whatever the relationship between Esther and the
squire had been in the past, it had been a relationship in which
secrecy had played a part. In that moment between him and Will Starling
there was enmity.

"You couldn't have expected him to make a great fuss about a boy," said
Esther brutally on their way back to the Rectory.

"I suppose you think that's the reason why I don't like him," said Mark.
"I don't want him to take any notice of me, but I think it's very odd
that you shouldn't have said a word about knowing him even to his
housekeeper."

"It was a whim of mine," she murmured. "Besides, I don't know him very
well. We met at Eastbourne once when I was staying there with Mother."

"Well, why didn't he say 'How do you do, Miss Ogilvie?' instead of
breathing out 'you' like that?"

Esther turned furiously upon Mark.

"What has it got to do with you?"

"Nothing whatever to do with me," he said deliberately. "But if you
think you're going to make a fool of me, you're not. Are you going to
tell your brother you knew him?"

Esther would not answer, and separated by several yards they walked
sullenly back to the Rectory.




CHAPTER XIV

ST. MARK'S DAY


Mark tried next day to make up his difference with Esther; but she
repulsed his advances, and the friendship that had blossomed after the
Pomeroy affair faded and died. There was no apparent dislike on either
side, nothing more than a coolness as of people too well used to each
other's company. In a way this was an advantage for Mark, who was having
to apply himself earnestly to the amount of study necessary to win a
scholarship at Oxford. Companionship with Esther would have meant
considerable disturbance of his work, for she was a woman who depended
on the inspiration of the moment for her pastimes and pleasures, who was
impatient of any postponement and always avowedly contemptuous of Mark's
serious side. His classical education at Haverton House had made little
of the material bequeathed to him by his grandfather's tuition at
Nancepean. None of his masters had been enough of a scholar or enough of
a gentleman (and to teach Latin and Greek well one must be one or the
other) to educate his taste. The result was an assortment of grammatical
facts to which he was incapable of giving life. If the Rector of
Wych-on-the-Wold was not a great scholar, he was at least able to repair
the neglect of, more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to
Mark's education by the meanness of Haverton House; moreover, after Mark
had been reading with him six months he did find a really first-class
scholar in Mr. Ford, the Vicar of Little Fairfield. Mark worked
steadily, and existence in Oxfordshire went by without any great
adventures of mind, body, or spirit. Life at the Rectory had a kind of
graceful austerity like the well-proportioned Rectory itself. If Mark
had bothered to analyze the cause of this graceful austerity, he might
have found it in the personality of the Rector's elder sister Miriam.
Even at Meade Cantorum, when he was younger, Mark had been fully
conscious of her qualities; but here they found a background against
which they could display themselves more perfectly. When they moved from
Buckinghamshire and the new rector was seeing how much Miriam
appreciated the new surroundings, he sold out some stock and presented
her with enough ready money to express herself in the outward beauty of
the Rectory's refurbishing. He was luckily not called upon to spend a
great deal on the church, both his predecessors having maintained the
fabric with care, and the fabric itself being sound enough and
magnificent enough to want no more than that. Miriam, though shaking one
of those capable and well-tended fingers at her beloved brother's
extravagance, accepted the gift with an almost childish determination to
give full value of beauty in return, so that there should not be a
servant's bedroom nor a cupboard nor a corridor that did not display the
evidence of her appreciation in loving care. The garden was handed over
to Mrs. Ogilvie, who as soon as May warmed its high enclosures bloomed
there like one of her own favourite peonies, rosy of face and fragrant,
ample of girth, golden-hearted.

Outside the Rectory Mark spent most of his time with Richard Ford, the
son of the Vicar of Little Fairfield, with whom he went to work in the
autumn after his arrival in Oxfordshire. Here again Mark was lucky, for
Richard, who was a year or two older than himself and a student at
Cooper's Hill whence he would emerge as a civil engineer bound for
India, was one of those entirely admirable young men who succeed in
being saintly without any rapture or righteousness.

Mark said one day:

"Rector, you know, Richard Ford really is a saint; only for goodness'
sake don't tell him I said so, because he'd be furious."

The Rector stopped humming a joyful _Miserere_ to give Mark an assurance
of his discretion. But Mark having said so much in praise of Richard
could say no more, and indeed he would have found it hard to express in
words what he felt about his friend.

Mark accompanied Richard on his visits to Wychford Rectory where in
this fortunate corner of England existed a third perfect family. Richard
was deeply in love with Margaret Grey, the second daughter, and if Mark
had ever been intended to fall in love he would certainly have fallen in
love with Pauline, the youngest daughter, who was fourteen.

"I could look at her for ever," he confided in Richard. "Walking down
the road from Wych-on-the-Wold this morning I saw two blue butterflies
on a wild rose, and they were like Pauline's eyes and the rose was like
her cheek."

"She's a decent kid," Richard agreed fervently.

Mark had had such a limited experience of the world that the amenities
of the society in which he found himself incorporated did not strike his
imagination as remarkable. It was in truth one of those eclectic,
somewhat exquisite, even slightly rarefied coteries which are produced
partly by chance, partly by interests shared in common, but most of all,
it would seem, by the very genius of the place. The genius of Cotswolds
imparts to those who come beneath his influence the art of existing
appropriately in the houses that were built at his inspiration. They do
not boast of their privilege like the people of Sussex. They are not
living up to a landscape so much as to an architecture, and their voices
lowered harmoniously with the sigh of the wind through willows and
aspens have not to compete with the sea-gales or the sea.

Mark accepted the manners of the society in which good fortune had set
him as the natural expression of an inward orderliness, a traditional
respect for beauty like the ritual of Christian worship. That the three
daughters of the Rector of Wychford should be critical of those who
failed to conform to their inherited refinement of life did not strike
him as priggish, because it never struck him for a moment that any other
standard than theirs existed. He felt the same about people who objected
to Catholic ceremonies; their dislike of them did not present itself to
him as arising out of a different religious experience from his own; but
it appeared as a propensity toward unmannerly behaviour, as a kind of
wanton disregard of decency and good taste. He was indeed still at the
age when externals possess not so much an undue importance, but when
they affect a boy as a mould through which the plastic experience of his
youth is passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate
form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was the revulsion from
the arid ugliness of Haverton House and the ambition to make up for
those years of beauty withheld, both of which urged him on to take the
utmost advantage of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of
those years to the fine etching of the present. Miriam at home, the
Greys at Wychford, and in some ways most of all Richard Ford at
Fairfield gave him in a few months the poise he would have received more
gradually from a public school education.

So Mark read Greek with the Vicar of Little Fairfield and Latin with the
Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold, who, amiable and holy man, had to work
nearly twice as hard as his pupil to maintain his reserve of
instruction. Mark took long walks with Richard Ford when Richard was
home in his vacations, and long walks by himself when Richard was at
Cooper's Hill. He often went to Wychford Rectory, where he learnt to
enjoy Schumann and Beethoven and Bach and Brahms.

"You're like three Saint Cecilias," he told them. "Monica is by Luini
and Margaret is by Perugino and Pauline. . . ."

"Oh, who am I by?" Pauline exclaimed, clapping her hands.

"I give it up. You're just Saint Cecilia herself at fourteen."

"Isn't Mark foolish?" Pauline laughed.

"It's my birthday to-morrow," said Mark, "so I'm allowed to be foolish."

"It's my birthday in a week," said Pauline. "And as I'm two years
younger than you I can be two years more foolish."

Mark looked at her, and he was filled with wonder at the sanctity of her
maidenhood. Thenceforth meditating upon the Annunciation he should
always clothe Pauline in a robe of white samite and set her in his
mind's eye for that other maid of Jewry, even as painters found holy
maids in Florence or Perugia for their bright mysteries.

While Mark was walking back to Wych and when on the brow of the first
rise of the road he stood looking down at Wychford in the valley below,
a chill lisping wind from the east made him shiver and he thought of the
lines in Keats' _Eve of St. Mark_:

_The chilly sunset faintly told_
_Of unmatured green vallies cold,_
_Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,_
_Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,_
_Of primroses by shelter'd rills,_
_And daisies on the aguish hills._

The sky in the west was an unmatured green valley tonight, where Venus
bloomed like a solitary primrose; and on the dark hills of Heaven the
stars were like daisies. He turned his back on the little town and set
off up the hill again, while the wind slipped through the hedge beside
him in and out of the blackthorn boughs, lisping, whispering, snuffling,
sniffing, like a small inquisitive animal. He thought of Monica,
Margaret, and Pauline playing in their warm, candle-lit room behind him,
and he thought of Miriam reading in her tall-back chair before dinner,
for Evensong would be over by now. Yes, Evensong would be over, he
remembered penitently, and he ought to have gone this evening, which was
the vigil of St. Mark and of his birthday. At this moment he caught
sight of the Wych Maries signpost black against that cold green sky. He
gave a momentary start, because seen thus the signpost had a human look;
and when his heart beat normally it was roused again, this time by the
sight of a human form indeed, the form of Esther, the wind blowing her
skirts before her, hurrying along the road to which the signpost so
crookedly pointed. Mark who had been climbing higher and higher now felt
the power of that wind full on his cheeks. It was as if it had found
what it wanted, for it no longer whispered and lisped among the boughs
of the blackthorn, but blew fiercely over the wide pastures, driving
Esther before it, cutting through Mark like a sword. By the time he had
reached the signpost she had disappeared in the wood.

Mark asked himself why she was going to Rushbrooke Grange.

"To Rushbrooke Grange," he said aloud. "Why should I think she is going
to Rushbrooke Grange?"

Though even in this desolate place he would not say it aloud, the answer
came back from this very afternoon when somebody had mentioned casually
that the Squire was come home again. Mark half turned to follow Esther,
but in the moment of turning he set his face resolutely in the direction
of home. If Esther were really on her way to meet Will Starling, he
would do more harm than good by appearing to pry.

Esther was the flaw in Mark's crystal clear world. When a year ago they
had quarrelled over his avowed dislike of Will Starling, she had gone
back to her solitary walks and he conscious, painfully conscious, that
she regarded him as a young prig, had with that foolish pride of youth
resolved to be so far as she was concerned what she supposed him to be.
His admiration for the Greys and the Fords had driven her into jeering
at them; throughout the year Mark and she had been scarcely polite to
each other even in public. The Rector and Miriam probably excused Mark's
rudeness whenever he let himself give way to it, because their sister
did not spare either of them, and they were made aware with exasperating
insistence of the dullness of the country and of the dreariness of
everybody who lived in the neighbourhood. Yet, Mark could never achieve
that indifference to her attitude either toward himself or toward other
people that he wished to achieve. It was odd that this evening he should
have beheld her in that relation to the wind, because in his thoughts
about her she always appeared to him like the wind, restlessly sighing
and fluttering round a comfortable house. However steady the
candle-light, however bright the fire, however absorbing the book,
however secure one may feel by the fireside, the wind is always there;
and throughout these tranquil months Esther had always been most
unmistakably there.

In the morning Mark went to Mass and made his Communion. It was a
strangely calm morning; through the unstained windows of the clerestory
the sun sloped quivering ladders of golden light. He looked round with
half a hope that Esther was in the church; but she was absent, and
throughout the service that brief vision of her dark transit across the
cold green sky of yester eve kept recurring to his imagination, so that
for all the rich peace of this interior he was troubled in spirit, and
the intention to make this Mass upon his seventeenth birthday another
spiritual experience was frustrated. In fact, he was worshipping
mechanically, and it was only when Mass was over and he was kneeling to
make an act of gratitude for his Communion that he began to apprehend
how he was asking fresh favours from God without having moved a step
forward to deserve them.

"I think I'm too pleased with myself," he decided, "I think I'm
suffering from spiritual pride. I think. . . ."

He paused, wondering if it was blasphemous to have an intuition that God
was about to play some horrible trick on him. Mark discussed with the
Rector the theological aspects of this intuition.

"The only thing I feel," said Mr. Ogilvie, "is that perhaps you are
leading too sheltered a life here and that the explanation of your
intuition is your soul's perception of this. Indeed, once or twice
lately I have been on the point of warning you that you must not get
into the habit of supposing you will always find the onset of the world
so gentle as here."

"But naturally I don't expect to," said Mark. "I was quite long enough
at Haverton House to appreciate what it means to be here."

"Yes," the Rector went on, "but even at Haverton House it was a passive
ugliness, just as here it is a passive beauty. After our Lord had fasted
forty days in the desert, accumulating reserves of spiritual energy,
just as we in our poor human fashion try to accumulate in Lent reserves
of spiritual energy that will enable us to celebrate Easter worthily, He
was assailed by the Tempter more fiercely than ever during His life on
earth. The history of all the early Egyptian monks, the history indeed
of any life lived without losing sight of the way of spiritual
perfection displays the same phenomena. In the action and reaction of
experience, in the rise and fall of the tides, in the very breathing of
the human lungs, you may perceive analogies of the divine rhythm. No, I
fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing more than one of those
movements which warn us that the sleeper will soon wake."

Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector dissatisfied. He
wanted something more than analogies taken from the experience of
spiritual giants, Titans of holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh
seemed as remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might appear
to a captain of the local volunteers. What he had gone to ask the Rector
was whether it was blasphemous to suppose that God was going to play a
horrible trick on him. He had not wanted a theological discussion, an
academic question and reply. Anything could be answered like that,
probably himself in another twenty years, when he had preached some
hundreds of sermons, would talk like that. Moreover, when he was alone
Mark understood that he had not really wanted to talk about his own
troubles to the Rector at all, but that his real preoccupation had been
and still was Esther. He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her
brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will Starling, or
if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther had not come in till
nine o'clock last night because she had been to Wych Maries? Mark,
remembering those wild eyes and that windblown hair when she stood for a
moment framed in the doorway of the Rector's library, could not believe
that none of her family had guessed that something more than the whim to
wander over the hills had taken her out on such a night. Did Mrs.
Ogilvie, promenading so placidly along her garden borders, ever pause in
perplexity at her daughter's behaviour? Calling them all to mind, their
attitudes, the expressions of their faces, the words upon their lips,
Mark was sure that none of them had any idea what Esther was doing. He
debated now the notion of warning Miriam in veiled language about her
sister; but such an idea would strike Miriam as monstrous, as a mad and
horrible nightmare. Mark shivered at the mere fancy of the chill that
would come over her and of the disdain in her eyes. Besides, what right
had he on the little he knew to involve Esther with her family?
Superficially he might count himself her younger brother; but if he
presumed too far, with what a deadly retort might she not annihilate his
claim. Most certainly he was not entitled to intervene unless he
intervened bravely and directly. Mark shook his head at the prospect of
doing that. He could not imagine anybody's tackling Esther directly on
such a subject. Seventeen to-day! He looked out of the window and felt
that he was bearing upon his shoulders the whole of that green world
outspread before him.

The serene morning ripened to a splendid noontide, and Mark who had
intended to celebrate his birthday by enjoying every moment of it had
allowed the best of the hours to slip away in a stupor of indecision.
More and more the vision of Esther last night haunted him, and he felt
that he could not go and see the Greys as he had intended. He could not
bear the contemplation of the three girls with the weight of Esther on
his mind. He decided to walk over to Little Fairfield and persuade
Richard to make a journey of exploration up the Greenrush in a canoe. He
would ask Richard his opinion of Will Starling. What a foolish notion!
He knew perfectly well Richard's opinion of the Squire, and to lure him
into a restatement of it would be the merest self-indulgence.

"Well, I must go somewhere to-day," Mark shouted at himself. He secured
a packet of sandwiches from the Rectory cook and set out to walk away
his worries.

"Why shouldn't I go down to Wych Maries? I needn't meet that chap. And
if I see him I needn't speak to him. He's always been only too jolly
glad to be offensive to me."

Mark turned aside from the high road by the crooked signpost and took
the same path down under the ash-trees as he had taken with Esther for
the first time nearly a year ago. Spring was much more like Spring in
these wooded hollows; the noise of bees in the blossom of the elms was
murmurous as limes in June. Mark congratulated himself on the spot in
which he had chosen to celebrate this fine birthday, a day robbed from
time like the day of a dream. He ate his lunch by the old mill dam,
feeding the roach with crumbs until an elderly pike came up from the
deeps and frightened the smaller fish away. He searched for a
bullfinch's nest; but he did not find one, though he saw several of the
birds singing in the snowberry bushes; round and ruddy as October apples
they looked. At last he went to the ruined chapel, where after
speculating idly for a little while upon its former state he fell as he
usually did when he visited Wych Maries into a contemplation of the two
images of the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. While he sat on a
hummock of grass before the old West doorway he received an impression
that since he last visited these forms of stone they had ceased to be
mere relics of ancient worship unaccountably preserved from ruin, but
that they had somehow regained their importance. It was not that he
discerned in them any miraculous quality of living, still less of
winking or sweating as images are reputed to wink and sweat for the
faithful. No, it was not that, he decided, although by regarding them
thus entranced as he was he could easily have brought himself to the
point of believing in a supernatural manifestation. He was too well
aware of this tendency to surrender to it; so, rousing himself from the
rapt contemplation of them and forsaking the hummock of grass, he
climbed up into the branches of a yew-tree that stood beside the chapel,
that there and from that elevation, viewing the images and yet unviewed
by them directly, he could be immune from the magic of fancy and
discover why they should give him this impression of having regained
their utility, yes, that was the word, utility, not importance. They
were revitalized not from within, but from without; and even as his mind
leapt at this explanation he perceived in the sunlight, beyond the
shadowy yew-tree in which he was perched, Esther sitting upon that
hummock of grass where but a moment ago he had himself been sitting.

For a moment, as if to contradict a reasonable explanation of the
strange impression the images had made upon him, Mark supposed that she
was come there for a tryst. This vanished almost at once in the
conviction that Esther's soul waited there either in question or appeal.
He restrained an impulse to declare his presence, for although he felt
that he was intruding upon a privacy of the soul, he feared to destroy
the fruits of that privacy by breaking in. He knew that Esther's pride
would be so deeply outraged at having been discovered in a moment of
weakness thus upon her knees, for she had by now fallen upon her knees
in prayer, that it might easily happen she would never in all her life
pray more. There was no escape for Mark without disturbing her, and he
sat breathless in the yew-tree, thinking that soon she must perceive his
glittering eye in the depths of the dark foliage as in passing a
hedgerow one may perceive the eye of a nested bird. From his position he
could see the images, and out of the spiritual agony of Esther kneeling
there, the force of which was communicated to himself, he watched them
close, scarcely able to believe that they would not stoop from their
pedestals and console the suppliant woman with benediction of those
stone hands now clasped aspiringly to God, themselves for centuries
suppliant like the woman at their feet. Mark could think of nothing
better to do than to turn his face from Esther's face and to say for her
many _Paternosters_ and _Aves_. At first he thought that he was praying
in a silence of nature; but presently the awkwardness of his position
began to affect his concentration, and he found that he was saying the
words mechanically, listening the while to the voices of birds. He
compelled his attention to the prayers; but the birds were too loud. The
_Paternosters_ and the _Aves_ were absorbed in their singing and
chirping and twittering, so that Mark gave up to them and wished for a
rosary to help his feeble attention. Yet could he have used a rosary
without falling out of the yew-tree? He took his hands from the bough
for a moment and nearly overbalanced. _Make not your rosary of yew
berries_, he found himself saying. Who wrote that? _Make not your rosary
of yew berries._ Why, of course, it was Keats. It was the first line of
the _Ode to Melancholy_. Esther was still kneeling out there in the
sunlight. And how did the poem continue? _Make not your rosary of yew
berries._ What was the second line? It was ridiculous to sit astride a
bough and say _Paternosters_ and _Aves_. He could not sit there much
longer. And then just as he was on the point of letting go he saw that
Esther had risen from her knees and that Will Starling was standing in
the doorway of the chapel looking at her, not speaking but waiting for
her to speak, while he wound a strand of ivy round his fingers and
unwound it again, and wound it round again until it broke and he was
saying:

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