Page:The Heart of England.djvu/197

 Here and there a sword stood out quite clear, or the head of a woman or a youth, a coat of armour, an aureole that some head had lost, a curve of vesture, or a mere whisper of colour, red like old blood, or a few words, such as "olim magnificus putcherrimus"—"periit"—"resurget"; things that survived there much as events in human memories, and as incidents and expressions may actually survive our death, and painfully strive for integration in a dim world of fragments that shall be strangely arrayed again.

The clerk stood looking out of a little open window that revealed a piece of green meadow and yellow maple that might have belonged to the ancient glass.

One by one the men came in, two old labourers past work, a neighbouring farmer, his cowman and carter, a gamekeeper, and the women and children in twos and threes, and lastly the squire—perhaps twenty-five altogether. In hymn and psalm and prayer all voices save those of the rector and one sweet-voiced child were so faint that the church was undisturbed. The old men were still, the young restless, the women and children interested in one another; but they were fainter than the figures on the wall, being so like thousands of others, all but a red and fair-haired man of fifty who might have been a Bacchus hastily metamorphosed for some jolly purpose.

With the sermon the silence became immense, as if it must flower suddenly or crumble away in a roar. The preacher spoke slowly as one who scorned time, and in the intervals could be heard the masticating of horses in the meadow outside. He spoke of the