She had thought herself neat and suitable when she looked in the glass, and had found it enough, because all her instincts were neat and plain. It was a cruel irony of fate that had forced her into a morbid, passionate groove. In those days she had never as much as heard of obsessions of the mind, and would not have believed they could touch her, if she had. She had asked nothing of life but that it should be clean and straight, and still found it hard to believe in the shadowed, twisted thing which it had proved.
Her parents had died before Simon had made her a home, so she had gone out to service and had been married from her “place.” She found him waiting when she went downstairs, in clothes as neat and suitable as her own, and he had given her a bunch of lilies of the valley, and a little Prayer Book with a brown back. They had always been matter-of-fact as lovers, and they were very matter-of-fact now, but Sarah, from this far-off distance, knew that, after all, they had not missed the thrill. Even in the small-windowed, silent house that had a maiden lady for tenant there was a touch of the exquisite thing—the same delicate rapture that was spreading its diaphanous wings over the coloured sea and land. …
They walked to church by the path across the fields, and the cattle raised their heads to look at Simon’s suitable clothes, and the inch of escaped ribbon frisking on Sarah’s suitable bonnet. They went arm-in-arm through the still churchyard, where their forefathers, lying together, saw nothing strange in this new conjunction of old names; and arm-in-arm up the empty aisle towards the cave of the chancel that had the flower of its rose window set in it like a jewelled eye. Their boots sounded terribly loud on the uncarpeted tiles, and they trod on tiptoe when they crossed the stones of the vaults, because the names looking up seemed somehow to turn into the uplifted faces of the prostrate dead. And presently the stone of the chancel-steps had stopped them as with a bar, bidding them think, in that last moment, whether the feet of their purpose had been rightly set.
They felt very small as they waited among the climbing pillars and under the spring of the groined roof, smaller and smaller as the unmarked minutes passed and nobody came. A shaft of light from the clerestory touched them like the point of a sacrificial knife, showing their faces humble and patient and a little too anxious to be glad. A bird flashed in through the open chancel-door, sat for a moment on the altar-rail and sang, and then caught sight of the sunlit country and flashed out again. It had not even seen the waiting couple who were so very quiet and so terribly small. And then, just as they were at their smallest, the Pageant of Eliza had swept in.
There were many to tell them afterwards of the sensation in the village when Eliza in gorgeous apparel had come driving with trampling horses to the old lychgate. At the sound of the horses’ hoofs and the first flash of the veil the houses had emptied themselves as a teapot empties itself when you tilt the spout. Veils were the prerogative of the “quality” in those days, and that in itself was sufficient to make a stir. In a moment there were groups on the green, children running up the street and folk pressing into the churchyard, and in a moment more the veiled yet flaunting figure had passed into the church, an over-rigged ship up the straight estuary of the aisle.
Behind Simon and Sarah the place was suddenly full of noise, whispering and shuffling and treading of heavy feet, and the ringing of nailed boots on the smooth tiles. Presently all that had been inside the church had gone out as if swept by a broom, and all that had been outside had come in with a blatant rush, filling it with curious faces and crowded bodies and suppressed laughter and muttered speech. Into the quiet hour that had been meant for Simon and Sarah alone, Eliza came full tilt with a tumult of sightseers in her train. Not for her was the peace between the springing pillars which rent before her like a curtain rent by hands. She trod with bold, self-satisfied strides over the dead faces which to her were only names. She created a vulgar raree-show out of the simple blessing of a tranquil God.
Only outside the sea and the mountains kept their mystery till the knot was tied. The sacred hour of Simon and Sarah was withdrawn silently into higher courts.
All that was human in Sarah, however, remained at the mercy of the broken hour below. Now and then she caught a glimpse of Eliza’s face through the veil, or a gleam of her shining
