The Llantrisant church has that primitive division between nave and
chancel which only very foolish people decline to recognise as
equivalent to the Oriental iconostasis and as the origin of the Western
rood-screen. A solid wall divided the church into two portions; in the
centre was a narrow opening with a rounded arch, through which those who
sat towards the middle of the church could see the small, red-carpeted
altar and the three roughly shaped lancet windows above it.
The "reading pew" was on the outer side of this wall of partition, and
here the rector did his service, the choir being grouped in seats about
him. On the inner side were the pews of certain privileged houses of
the town and district.
On the Sunday morning the people were all in their accustomed places,
not without a certain exultation in their eyes, not without a certain
expectation of they knew not what. The bells stopped ringing, the
rector, in his old-fashioned, ample surplice, entered the reading-desk,
and gave out the hymn: "My God, and is Thy Table spread."
And, as the singing began, all the people who were in the pews within
the wall came out of them and streamed through the archway into the
nave. They took what places they could find up and down the church, and
the rest of the congregation looked at them in amazement.
Nobody knew what had happened. Those whose seats were next to the aisle
tried to peer into the chancel, to see what had happened or what was
going on there. But somehow the light flamed so brightly from the
windows above the altar, those being the only windows in the chancel,
one small lancet in the south wall excepted, that no one could see
anything at all.
"It was as if a veil of gold adorned with jewels was hanging there," one
man said; and indeed there are a few odds and scraps of old painted
glass left in the eastern lancets.
But there were few in the church who did not hear now and again voices
speaking beyond the veil.
CHAPTER VI
OLWEN'S DREAM
The well-to-do and dignified personages who left their pews in the
chancel of Llantrisant Church and came hurrying into the nave could give
no explanation of what they had done. They felt, they said, that they
had to go, and to go quickly; they were driven out, as it were, by a
secret, irresistible command. But all who were present in the church
that morning were amazed, though all exulted in their hearts; for they,
like the sailors who saw the rose of fire on the waters, were filled
with a joy that was literally ineffable, since they could not utter it
or interpret it to themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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