A voice may have an immense influence over a sensitive nature. This bell
of the Cathedral of Granada has one of the most marvellous voices in the
world, deep with a depth of old and vanished ages, heavy with the burden
of all the long-dead years, and this evening it seemed suddenly to
strike away a veil from Catherine's husband. She was leaning her arms on
the painted railing and searching the toy city with her happy eyes.
Mark, standing behind her, was solicitously winding a shawl round her to
protect her from the chill that falls from the Sierra Nevada with the
dropping downward of the sun. As the bell tolled, Catherine felt that
Mark's hands slipped from her shoulders. She glanced round and up at
him. He was standing rigid. His eyes were widely opened. His lips were
parted. All the gaiety that usually danced in his face had disappeared.
He looked like an entranced man.
"Mark!" Catherine exclaimed. "Mark! why, how strange you look!"
"Do I?" he said, staring out over the wide plain below.
The voice of the bell died reluctantly on the air, but some huge and
vague echo of its heavy romance seemed to sway, like a wave, across the
little houses to the sunset and faint towards Seville.
"Yes, you look sad and stern. I have never seen your face like
this--till now."
He made no answer.
"Are you sad because we are going so soon?" she asked. "But then why
should we go? We are perfectly happy here. There is nothing to call us
away."
"Kitty, does not that bell give you the lie?" he answered.
"The bell of the Cathedral?" she asked, wondering.
"Yes. Just now when I listened to it, I seemed to hear it whispering of
the mysterious things of life, of the hidden currents in the great
river, of the sorrows, of the terrors, of the crimes."
"Mark!" said Catherine in amazement.
"Nothing to call us away from our idle happiness here!" he continued.
"Do you say--nothing?"
"Why--no. For we are free; we have no ties. You have no profession,
Mark. You have no art even to call you back to England. Dear father--how
he worships the arts!"
"And you, Kitty--you?"
Mark spoke with a curious pressure of excitement.
"He has taught me to love them too."
"How much, Kitty? As he loves them, more than anything else on earth?"
She had never heard him speak at all like this. She answered:
"Ah no. For my mother----"
She paused.
"My mother has made me understand that there is something greater than
any art, more important, more beautiful."
"What can that be?"
"Oh, Mark--religion!"
He leaned over the railing at her side, and the white and red roses that
embraced the pillar shook against his thick dark hair in the infant
breeze of evening.
"But there are many religions," he said. "A man's art may be his
religion."
A troubled look came into her eyes and made them like her mother's.
"Oh no, Mark."
"Yes, Kitty," he said, with growing earnestness, putting aside his
reserve for the first time with her. "Indeed it may."
"You mean when he uses it to do good?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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