As the heavy door closed behind them the girl felt she had passed into a different world, a world smelling of some sort of chilly-fleshed fungous growths that had taken centuries to mature.
Rook took her by the hand and led her up the narrow aisle, past the brass lectern, under the Norman archway, to where the tombs of the Ashovers of old days lay in their pallid immobility. Standing behind her, while her knees touched the sleeping Crusader, he took her in his arms and kissed her cold cheek. Letting her head sink back and turning her face sideways she met his lips, while her slender body yielded itself to him.
She felt strangely and profoundly happy in his embrace. It was a different kind of happiness altogether from what she felt when Lexie kissed her on the day she had fled from her home. She had had Rook on her mind then, so that she could not lie back content upon the dark flood; but it was Rook himself whose desire was that flood now, and her whole nature was free to respond.
A queer remembrance came into her mind as she yielded to his caresses, the remembrance of a salt marsh by the Dorset coast, where the greenish-white light of a protracted sunset hung like livid phosphorus in the black pools, stained with pale blood. She remembered how a solitary heron with wide-stretched wings and trailing legs had descended into the water; and how she had felt that it was those livid pools in the black earth, rather than the darkened sky overhead, that offered an escape to her soul.
Here in the church with the man she loved she felt as if she were hidden safe away from all responsibility, from all pursuit. She felt as long as she could keep his desire concentrated upon her, that Time itself stood still; and a lovely, deep, enchanted Eternity substituted itself for the little poisonous rankling minutes that throbbed like evil ulcers.
Rook’s mind also had its own obscure journeys to make. He was aware — as she never for a moment seemed to be — of the presence of his dead people. He was aware of an angry menace rising from all that human dust under his feet, threatening him if he did not open the gates of the future to their race, cursing him if he barred and locked those gates in the selfish enjoyment of uncreative, unproductive emotion.
As he caressed her there in that dark church on that curious day he felt as though he were inflicting a definite wound upon the accumulated yearning, the gathered tension, stretching out into the future, of six long human centuries.
So many fathers begetting so many children; so many children begetting so many fathers; and all to end in his striking them back into the annihilating dark, with a mocking “Down, wantons, down!”
It was as if all the life energy of all that proud human tribe had been concentrated in one invisible gesture of intense creation, only to be derided, jeered at, spurned, by his flippant indifference.
Indifference? It was defiance; since he had chosen their very resting place to flaunt his sterile malice. Into this very shrine of their vitality, of their hope, of their unconquerable life urge he had come to parade his disillusionment, his alliance with emptiness, with nothingness, with the eternal No of the abyss!
He had come to fool them. How did the sentinel Crusader know that this girl he had brought with him was inhibited and disallowed; a mocking mirage to their hope? He had come to fool them. So at least that smirking infidel of a great-grandfather Benjamin seemed to guess as he leered at them over the plump cupids.
For it was against the very monument of the crafty Deist that the two were leaning now; and, as they clung together there, Rook felt he was taking a kind of revenge on fate itself.
He was certainly revenging himself upon the life lust of his own race. He was denying that race any future at all. He was saying to the vast dim company of future Ashovers, “Ye shall not live!”
It was a feeling of this kind, deep, cold, malicious, that made every caress he gave this girl a kind of flouting of the gods. Each kiss was a malignant sacrilege directed against the helpless invisible company of the Future.
He had decided to cut the living navel cord between these two. Let the one be totally forgotten! Let the other never be born!
Something of the viciousness of these thoughts must have passed into the very touch of his hands; but if it did, the girl neither regarded it nor was affected by it.
Rook was startled — as if it were something upon which he had not calculated — when he became aware of the spiritual exaltation of his companion.
The girl’s white features, as he caught a glimpse of them in that spectral light, wore an expression of childlike beatitude. He knew there had been a mysterious attraction of some kind between himself and this woebegone little creature; but when he saw that illuminated look on her face, endowing her with an utterly unexpected beauty, he was conscious of a sharp secret pang, as if his nature had suddenly touched some “fourth dimension” whose superiority to his own level of existence shocked and troubled him.
Many months after this he remembered what he felt at that moment, when that white face swirled up to him as if on the crest of a dark wave, looking at him and through him and past him in an ecstasy of which he himself touched barely the fringe.
It was certainly in league with the nerves of women, the peculiar atmosphere of that December day.
Whether it was in league with the remorseless umbilical cord of those insistent generations was a different matter. Rook Ashover had only commenced his fatal struggle with that dark mandate!
The two companions found themselves back again at the door at last; the man troubled, anxious, perturbed, his mind abnormally alert to every shape and sound of the external world; the girl drugged, dazed, numbed, but unfathomably happy.
“It’s like death to make love to you,” he muttered when they were out of the church.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I felt like that, too.”
She lied with an entranced luxuriousness, careless of what he said or what she answered.
“I shall wait for William now without minding a bit,” she added. “You go off quickly, Rook. No! No! No good-byes! I’ll go back and light all the candles! You look when you get to the bridge and see if the windows aren’t lit up! When you hear him ringing the bell you may think of me saying my prayers by those tombs! There! Go off quick— No! No! I won’t say any good-bye!”
Rook did turn round when he reached the bridge; and sure enough, the windows were lighted up as he had never seen them lighted up before. It was a sort of heathen Candlemas; a twilight celebration of the tutelary Powers of that riverside, as they reassumed, with the fall of darkness, their ancestral domination.
The smell of the water washing against the mossy arches, the smell of the black mud in the banked-up ditches, the smell of miles and miles of damp grass sinking down, blade by misty blade, under the weight of the night, flowed like a palpable exhalation around the yellowish gleam of those Gothic windows.
He leaned against the parapet and listened intently. The air about him seemed supernaturally hushed; all the great gulfs of the night listening there, even as he was listening.
And then in a moment, with a suddenness that made Rook gasp, for he had heard no footstep upon the road, the great cracked reverberating bell rang out from the church tower.
Toom! Toom! Toom!
The very cattle and sheep must have stirred uneasily in their sheds and bartons. It was as if that heathen illumination had actually summoned forth out of the air the tangible presence of something that had been gathering upon Ashover since the dawn of the day.
Toom! Toom! Toom!
It was as if the gigantic feet of Cybele herself, Magna Mater, Bona Dea,were striding bronze-sandalled over the dark bedrock of Frome-side.