by George Moore
His last words were that Percy must not overtax his strength, and upon that came the word: bloodless, which Hugh remembered on his way back to the inn, it seeming to him that the doctor had spoken of a transfusion of blood. But they had talked so much on so many subjects, and as every one was illustrated by anecdotes, Hugh could not remember whether the doctor had said that Percy would benefit by a transfusion of blood. He would have liked to give his blood to Percy, and it might well have been that the wish was father to the thought, and that the doctor had said no more than that some other patient had been so benefited. He knew that the doctor had not asked for a transfusion of blood, but liked to think he had, and walked to and fro under the limes possessed by all the exaltations of sacrifice before he recovered his composure.
V
I like these plains breaking into rocky crests, Hugh said, and from the top of a high ditch he stood enamoured of a land showing like velvet under a bright sky. But don’t come up, Percy, he cried, and jumping he joined Percy in the sunken road, which they followed mile after mile, seeing nothing but the road in front of them, till Percy cried at last: Look, Hugh, we have come upon the sea, or is it a cloud? Which do you think it is?
Of their long travel this lag end of it seemed the most tedious. Hugh was anxious. They were still many miles from St. David’s and had walked more than five miles. If we could only see a cart, he said. But there was barely a house in sight, and at the end of another mile they began to speak of making a shift to pass the night under the lee of a haystack when a cart came by, and on questioning the driver as to the way to St. David’s, he told them he was going thither. Some money was proffered, and after driving for an hour he said: Another two miles and we shall be at the inn. You see you clump of trees? Which, Hugh asked, for there are two? The two are but a quarter of a mile apart, sir, and under the trees on the left you’ll find your inn. It will be pleasant to meet the friendliness of trees again, said Percy, for we have seen none this long while; and they fell to wondering what sort of inn they were going to till the gravel sweep, from which the boundary wall had been removed, proclaimed it to be a country house of former times converted to the needs of the traveller.
Tea and buttered toast were welcome after their long walk, and after tea, despite their walk, the temptation of the famous ruins drew them out of the inn, and they descended the steep road to where it branched, and the ruinous road to the right seeming to them more likely than the new road going by the Baptist Chapel to bring them into view of the ruins they were in search of, they shuffled through much loose rubble, coming into sight at last of a great gateway flanked by round towers and broken parapets standing over against a wild landscape. A wonderful residence the Bishop’s Palace must have been, Percy said, when raiders sallied from the crests and every wood was the haunt of wolves and bears, and the Bishop’s archers defended the gateway against all comers, Danish, Irish, or local. A trickle of the Alan flowed through the valley, and still speaking of the portcullis, of which they had discovered traces, and the loopholes through which the archers shot arrows at the besiegers, Hugh and Percy continued the descent, their eyes fixed on a Cathedral built largely of a violet stone peculiar to the locality, the violet tinge visible even in the great burly tower added by Bishop Gower in the fourteenth century. Before him there were other Bishops, Hugh said, but the Cathedral we are looking upon now is his work. Very much botched some fifty or sixty years ago, answered Percy; but I like the perched pinnacles of the burly tower, elegant as storks. But we are wasting our sight on the Cathedral, he cried, pointing to a ruined parapet of open arches richly carven, with a rose window — As beautiful as the evening, he added.
And dropping into silence, Hugh sought for words whereby to express the beauty of the many mullions radiating from an inner circle, but Percy’s words: As beautiful as the evening, seemed to have said everything. Yet Percy is not overcome by the beauty for its own sake, Hugh said to himself; he thinks of it all and feels it all as material for his drawing — so intensely is he an artist, he added, ashamed of having indulged in a reproof even in involuntary thought. To make amends he agreed with Percy that the Cathedral was nearly all modern, and a moment after, overcome by the thought that religion had always flourished in the valley of the Alan in Pagan as in Christian times, he walked rapt in a sense of God’s presence in Nature, till they reached where the roads branched and Percy said: We are still very far from the inn; no, about a quarter of a mile, he added. And helping his friend up the steep acclivity, he reproached himself for having allowed Percy to come so far after a long walk, begging of him to lean his weight upon his arm.
But I shall tire you — No, you cannot tire me, Percy.
At last the Grove Inn was reached and they were glad to retire to their beds, though it was but to toss feverishly from side to side in their rooms, each wondering if his fellow slept or waked, sleep not coming to either before morning. At ten o’clock Hugh had not the courage to awaken Percy, but laid by his door a jug of hot water and covered it with a towel, and it was twelve o’clock before they were again in the street, busy in talk about arches, Hugh, having read a few facts from a book picked out of the shelves of the bookcase in their sitting-room, telling that the Cathedral was Romanesque, built in the thirteenth century or a century later, before the pointed arch had come so far north, and that the bones of many Bishop Princes lay beneath the carven effigies. But more interesting than these, to Hugh at least, was the tomb of the great Saint of the sixth century, who was murdered by a robber on an island of the coast; and they pondered on the circumstance of the murder: a lonely island, a robber, and a great Saint, till Percy began to tell that his sleep was troubled last night by a dream of a robber who lived with his mistress happily in a cave until the prayers of a priest lured the woman across the sea to the island where the Saint had set up a hermitage. You don’t mean, Percy, that the Saint lived with the robber’s mistress! No, I didn’t dream that she was the Saint’s mistress, but his helpmate, and that they sat listening in the afternoons to the Songs of birds till they learnt their language. It was from a bird that came over that they heard the robber was crossing in his coracle. Those dawn dreams shake one’s nerves, said Hugh; and strange to say I, who rarely dream, dreamed last night. We were very tired and for a long time we must have lain dozing; dreams, it is said, come just before waking. I wish I could remember my dream — something about a hermitage; for me it was one, though it was filled with eighteenth-century furniture. You were dreaming of Wotton Hall, said Percy. I suppose I was, or something like it, Hugh answered; and descending the loose roadway, full of purple slate, he stopped to compare the stone under their feet with the slate in which some ancient architecture had sheathed the Cathedral. And pointing to the buttresses and to the round windows on either side of the doorway overlooking the Alan, he said that nobody would contend that the round windows in the Cathedral were designed by the same workman who had carved the beautiful rose window in the ruins. For these are like — and finding at last a word to his liking, he said: These windows have no more beauty than the cartwheels lumbering at this moment down the laneway; the cartwheels are appropriate to the business they are designed for, but these round windows merely offend our eyes. At least, that is how they strike me. But you are saying nothing, Percy. I was just thinking, Hugh, that something had to be done, for the Cathedral was shaken almost to a ruin in the twelfth century by an earthquake; Gower rebuilt it too close to the river and a subsidence began, when we don’t know; but it seems clear from what you read out of the book that some rebuilding had to be undertaken in the ‘sixties, else the Cathedral would have become a ruin. Of course it is arguable that a ruinous Cathedral is better than a patched Cathedral. I grant you that it was badly patched, but it must have been always ugly.
Hugh expostulated, saying that Percy should not pass judgment before he had seen the inside; whereupon they passed inside, and standing in a clumsy sort of nave Hugh asked Percy if he did not think it worthy of admiration —
Somewhat squat, but fine for Wales in the fourteenth century. We must consider the time, Hugh added. I dare say that worse things have been built since, Percy answered, but it did not look in the fourteenth century as it does to-day. All these capitals have been recarved. But the book tells us, said Hugh, that only the whitewash was removed. The book may tell what it pleases, Percy replied. Those capitals were recarved, and in its seventeenth-century whitewash the Cathedral would have looked better. Come to the ruins, Hugh, there is nothing to see here. But Hugh said he would like to find the Saint’s tomb, and it seemed to Percy that they would never get out of the ugly Cathedral. But they were out of it half an hour later, admiring the great original buttresses built to support the eastern wall of the Cathedral, circled buttresses, six feet of stone and mortar, not less, falling into ruins in places. Percy praised the flowering grasses that had found roothold in the decaying masonry, and began to sketch the windows of St. Mary’s Chapel, a lovely ruin, whilst Hugh went in search of the builder, who, for a fee, showed him over the Chapel, telling him that little remained of the College, which was destroyed by order when religion was reformed in the seventeenth century. The builder tells me, Hugh said, returning to Percy, that the cloister passed under these windows. But what a beautiful drawing you are doing. You have made the mullions seem even more beautiful than they are. I don’t call this drawing, Percy replied, passing his sketch to the builder; and then giving his mind to the disposition of the cloister, he fell to discovering what had once (probably in thirteen hundred and seventy) been a low wall, pillared and arched, supporting the under croft, with a lean-to roof above it to carry off the rain, the cloister sweeping round to the right to join the Cathedral. Anon they listened to the builder telling that with the assistance of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and his wife Blanche, Bishop Houghton had founded the College, the Bishop himself endowing it for the maintenance of a master and seven priest-fellows, who were bound to live in strict obedience to the regulations laid down by him, to say the Hours and the Requiem Masses and obey without argument the Preceptor or Treasurer of the Cathedral, and — But I see the Dean coming our way, stopping, said the builder, to rate that idle fellow, Jones, for being away at his dinner a full hour and a half. And Hugh and Percy pitied the hunchback, who might lose his job for half an hour of truancy.
All the same, without discipline the world would come to pieces like a rotten sponge, and that the Dean should not perceive their notice of him, Hugh and Percy fell to asking questions, of the builder, nor had they to ask many before the Dean was among them. Whereupon Hugh began to talk, Percy thought ramblingly, of the harm to art the Reformation had worked — Destroying images, sculpture, he said, stopping for lack of words, allowing the Dean to interpose a pertinent remark that the path to truth was always littered with material damage. Had not the Homan Church destroyed much beautiful architecture and sculpture? A tall spare man was the Dean, a long clerical foreshore, as dreary he seemed to Percy, whom he surprised by his answer to Hugh’s next contention that the Cathedral, the College, and the Palace were built in Catholic times and should therefore belong to the Catholic Church. But there is no Catholic Church in Wales, he answered. Wales accepted the Reformation and therefore, so it seems to me, the Cathedral and the ruins of the College and Palace should pass over to us. Your principles, Mr. Dean, are admirable, said Percy, with the view of helping Hugh out of a controversy in which he seemed to be worsted, but the Reformed Church is not true to its principles. Ireland did not change her religion, yet — The Irish Church was disendowed by a Protestant Minister, a fact that speaks well for the good faith of Protestantism. Many years after, Hugh interjected, and the smooth sluggish voice of the Dean answered with a serviceable quotation: The mills of God, etc., and alluding to the disendowment of the Welsh Church, the Dean lamented that the terms offered to the Welsh were not so good as those that the Irish had gotten. The disendowment has left us, he said, with not enough funds to keep the Cathedral in repair. The Cathedral did not seem to us to need repair. Not need repair! the Dean replied, raising his voice slightly. A great building needs constant attendance, and I hope since our Cathedral has been to you both a source of interest and curiosity that you will not leave without helping us to support what you partly admire. Our theology, I gather, is not the same, but appreciation of the past out of which we have come should not prevent you from assisting us. You will find a box — I am sure that my friend and I will be glad to contribute, said Percy; we were waiting for your permission to wander about the ruins of the Bishop’s Palace to draw the mullioned doorways. Could you tell us, Mr.
Dean, Hugh began — A cheque for five pounds, Percy whispered, and the Dean moved away, instructing the builder that liberty for a full inspection of the ruins was granted.
I am not sure that it was altogether right for us to contribute to the support of a Protestant place of worship, Hugh growled in Percy’s ear. You must not think, Hugh, that I am indifferent to the questions of conscience that arise up in our Catholic minds, but I should like to hear how it was that the Bishop’s Palace was allowed to fall into ruins. In another hundred years these ruins will be but rubble heaps. And in response to Hugh’s question the builder told them that the Bishop’s Palace was built about the year thirteen hundred and forty, and that it served not only as a Bishop’s Palace but also as a hostel for the pilgrims who visited the Saint’s shrine. They passed over a pretty stone bridge and round some garths breathing a pleasant odour of sweetbriar and flowering grasses, which they would have enjoyed longer had their enjoyment not been interrupted by the beauty of the doorway. Percy’s sketch-book was out of his pocket in an instant, but the builder had a tale to tell, one worth listening to. The sketch-book was returned to the pocket, and Percy learnt from him that the cause of the ruin was Bishop Barlow’s daughters. But how could the Bishop’s daughters cause the ruin? asked Percy. He had five, said the builder — Five or seven, interjected Hugh, but unabashed the builder replied that Bishop Barlow, in fifteen hundred and thirty-six, unroofed the Palace for the sake of the lead, which was sold, and procured five dowries for his daughters, every one of whom married a Bishop. Five Bishops for sons-in-law! cried Percy. I am beginning to hear the quintet, bass, baritone, tenor, and falsetto, the low notes, of course, being given to the falsetto and the high notes to the bass. Five daughters who married five Bishops! What do you say to a little march, the March of the Sons-in-Law? Five sets of gaiters, five shovel hats! Hugh replied. What a comment the Bishop and his family are upon the Reformation, the subject of a joke and at the same time of a melancholy mood. But let us be serious. All this vast ruin is built about a quadrangle, a hundred and seventy feet long I think the builder said it was, and he is right in saying that Bishop Gower avoided the monotony of the square with projectures, keeping the same height throughout and giving due prominence to the Banqueting Hall and the Bishop’s Private Apartments. The Bishop seems to have known the value of stress and reticence. And the builder told us, didn’t he, that the parapet consists of a series of arches, the shafts resting on corbels, and every one different, with a pleasure walk between roofs and parapets. I can see the happy monks in my thoughts sunning themselves when the weather was fine. But before you begin to sketch the doorway, Percy, let us pass through it into the Banqueting Hall, for I would like to see the rose window from the inside.
