Entering the sacred shrine she stood still,--awed by its exquisite
beauty and impressive simplicity. The deep silence, the glamour of
the soft vari-coloured light that flowed through the lancet windows
on either side,--the open purity of the nave, without any
disfiguring pews or fixed seats to mar its clear space,--(for the
chairs which were used at service were all packed away in a remote
corner out of sight)--the fair, slender columns, springing up into
flowering capitals, like the stems of palms breaking into leaf-
coronals,--the dignified plainness of the altar, with that strange
white sarcophagus set in front of it,--all these taken together,
composed a picture of sweet sanctity and calm unlike anything she
had ever seen before. Her emotional nature responded to the
beautiful in all things, and this small perfectly designed House of
Prayer, with its unknown saintly occupant at rest within its walls,
touched her almost to tears. Stepping on tip-toe up to the altar-
rails, she instinctively dropped on her knees, while she read all
that could be seen of the worn inscription on the sarcophagus from
that side-'In Resurrectione--Sanctorum--Resurget.' The atmosphere
around her seemed surcharged with mystical suggestions,--a vague
poetic sense of the super-human and divine moved her to a faint
touch of fear, and made her heart beat more quickly than its wont.
"It is lovely--lovely!" she murmured under her breath, as she rose
from her kneeling attitude--"The whole church is a perfect gem of
architecture! I have never seen anything more beautiful in its way,-
-not even the Chapel of the Thorn at Pisa. And according to Mrs.
Spruce's account, the man I met this morning--the quizzical parson
with the grey-brown curly-locks, did it all at his own expense--he
must really be quite clever,--such an unusual thing for a country
clergyman!"
She took another observant survey of the whole building, and then
went out again into the churchyard. There she paused, her dog beside
her, shading her eyes from the sun as she looked wistfully from
right to left across the sadly suggestive little hillocks of mossy
turf besprinkled with daisies, in search of an object which was as a
landmark of disaster in her life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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