A Cathedral Courtship Part 4

Aunt Celia says we shall have no worthy architecture until every building is made an exquisitely sincere representation of its deepest purpose--a symbol, as it were, of its indwelling meaning. I should think it would be very difficult to design a lunatic asylum on that basis, but I didn't dare say so, as the idea seemed to present no incongruities to Mr. Copley. Their conversation is absolutely sublimated when they get to talking of architecture. I have just copied two quotations from Emerson, and am studying them every night for fifteen minutes before I go to sleep. I'm going to quote them some time offhand, just after matins, when we are wandering about the cathedral grounds. The first is this: 'The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportion and perspective of vegetable beauty.' Then when he has recovered from the shock of this, here is my second: 'Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce.'

Memoranda: _Lincoln choir is an example of Early English or First Pointed, which can generally be told from something else by bold projecting b.u.t.tresses and dog-tooth moulding round the abacusses._ (The plural is my own, and it does not look right.) _Lincoln Castle was the scene of many prolonged sieges, and was once taken by Oliver Cromwell._

_He_

York, _June 26_, The Black Swan.

Kitty Schuyler is the concentrated essence of feminine witchery.

Intuition strong, logic weak, and the two qualities so balanced as to produce an indefinable charm; will-power large, but docility equal, if a man is clever enough to know how to manage her; knowledge of facts absolutely _nil_, but she is exquisitely intelligent in spite of it. She has a way of evading, escaping, eluding, and then gives you an intoxicating hint of sudden and complete surrender. She is divinely innocent, but roguishness saves her from insipidity. Her looks? She looks as you would imagine a person might look who possessed these graces; and she is worth looking at, though every time I do it I have a rush of love to the head. When you find a girl who combines all the qualities you have imagined in the ideal, and who has added a dozen or two on her own account, merely to distract you past all hope, why stand up and try to resist her charm? Down on your knees like a man, say I!

I'm getting to adore Aunt Celia. I didn't care for her at first, but she is so deliciously blind. Anything more exquisitely unserviceable as a chaperon I can't imagine. Absorbed in antiquity, she ignores the babble of contemporaneous lovers. That any man could look at Kitty when he could look at a cathedral pa.s.ses her comprehension. I do not presume too greatly on her absent-mindedness, however, lest she should turn unexpectedly and rend me. I always remember that inscription on the backs of the little mechanical French toys: 'Quoiqu'elle soit tres solidement montee, il faut ne pas brutaliser la machine.'

And so my courtship progresses under Aunt Celia's very nose. I say 'progresses'; but it is impossible to speak with any certainty of courting, for the essence of that gentle craft is hope, rooted in labour and trained by love.

[Ill.u.s.tration: She ignores the babble of contemporaneous lovers]

I set out to propose to her during service this afternoon by writing my feelings on the flyleaf of the hymn-book, or something like that; but I knew that Aunt Celia would never forgive such blasphemy, and I thought that Kitty herself might consider it wicked. Besides, if she should chance to accept me, there was nothing I could do in a cathedral to relieve my feelings. No; if she ever accepts me, I wish it to be in a large, vacant spot of the universe, peopled by two only, and those two so indistinguishably blended, as it were, that they would appear as one to the casual observer. So I practised repression, though the wall of my reserve is worn to the thinness of thread-paper, and I tried to keep my mind on the droning minor canon, and not to look at her, 'for that way madness lies.'

_She_

York, _June 28_, High Petergate Street.

My taste is so bad! I just begin to realize it, and I am feeling my 'growing pains,' like Gwendolen in 'Daniel Deronda.' I admired the stained gla.s.s in the Lincoln Cathedral the other day, especially the Nuremberg window. I thought Mr. Copley looked pained, but he said nothing. When I went to my room, I consulted a book and found that all the gla.s.s in that cathedral is very modern and very bad, and the Nuremberg window is the worst of all. Aunt Celia says she hopes that it will be a warning to me to read before I speak; but Mr. Copley says no, that the world would lose more in one way than it would gain in the other. I tried my quotations this morning, and stuck fast in the middle of the first.

Mr. Copley thinks I have been feeing the vergers too liberally, so I wrote a song about it called 'The Ballad of the Vergers and the Foolish Virgin,' which I sang to my guitar. Mr. Copley thinks it is cleverer than anything he ever did with his pencil. Of course, he says that only to be agreeable; but really, whenever he talks to me in that way, I can almost hear myself purring with pleasure.

We go to two services a day in the minster, and sometimes I sit quite alone in the nave drinking in the music as it floats out from behind the choir-screen. The Litany and the Commandments are so beautiful heard in this way, and I never listen to the fresh, young voices chanting 'Write all these Thy laws in our hearts, we beseech Thee,' without wanting pa.s.sionately to be good. I love, too, the joyful burst of music in the _Te Deum_: 'Thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.' I like that word 'all'; it takes in foolish me, as well as wise Aunt Celia.

And yet, with all its pomp and magnificence, the service does not help me quite so much nor stir up the deep places, in me so quickly as dear old Dr. Kyle's simpler prayers and talks in the village meeting-house where I went as a child. Mr. Copley has seen it often, and made a little picture of it for me, with its white steeple and the elm-tree branches hanging over it. If I ever have a husband I should wish him to have memories like my own. It would be very romantic to marry an Italian marquis or a Hungarian count, but must it not be a comfort to two people to look back on the same past?

We all went to an evening service last night. It was an 'occasion,' and a famous organist played the Minster organ.

I wonder why choir-boys are so often playful and fidgety and uncanonical in behaviour? Does the choirmaster advertise 'Naughty boys preferred,' or do musical voices commonly exist in unregenerate bodies?

With all the opportunities they must have outside of the cathedral to exchange those objects of beauty and utility usually found in boys'

pockets, there is seldom a service where they do not barter penknives, old coins, or tops, generally during the Old Testament reading. A dozen little black-surpliced 'probationers' sit together in a seat just beneath the choir-boys, and one of them spent his time this evening in trying to pull a loose tooth from its socket. The task not only engaged all his own powers, but made him the centre of attraction for the whole probationary row.

Coming home, Aunt Celia walked ahead with Mrs. Benedict, who keeps turning up at the most unexpected moments. She's going to build a Gothicky memorial chapel somewhere, and is making studies for it. I don't like her in the least, but four is certainly a more comfortable number than three. I scarcely ever have a moment alone with Mr. Copley, for, go where I will and do what I please, as Aunt Celia has the most perfect confidence in my indiscretion, she is always _en evidence_.

Just as we were turning into the quiet little street where we are lodging, I said:

'Oh dear, I wish that I really knew something about architecture!'

'If you don't know anything about it, you are certainly responsible for a good deal of it,' said Mr. Copley.

'I? How do you mean?' I asked quite innocently, because I couldn't see how he could twist such a remark as that into anything like sentiment.

'I have never built so many castles in my life as since I've known you, Miss Schuyler,' he said.

'Oh,' I answered as lightly as I could, 'air-castles don't count.'

'The building of air-castles is an innocent amus.e.m.e.nt enough, I suppose,' he said; 'but I'm committing the folly of living in mine. I--'

Then I was frightened. When, all at once, you find you have something precious that you only dimly suspected was to be yours, you almost wish it hadn't come so soon. But just at that moment Mrs. Benedict called to us, and came tramping back from the gate, and hooked her supercilious, patronizing arm in Mr. Copley's, and asked him into the sitting-room to talk over the 'lady-chapel' in her new memorial church. Then Aunt Celia told me they would excuse me, as I had had a wearisome day; and there was nothing for me to do but to go to bed, like a snubbed child, and wonder if I should ever know the end of that sentence. And I listened at the head of the stairs, shivering, but all that I could hear was that Mrs. Benedict asked Mr. Copley to be her own architect. Her architect, indeed! That woman ought not to be at large--so rich and good-looking and unconscientious!

_He_

York, _July 5_.

I had just established myself comfortably near to Miss Van Tyck's hotel, and found a landlady after my own heart in Mrs. Pickles, No. 6, Micklegate, when Miss Van Tyck, aided and abetted, I fear, by the romantic Miss Schuyler, elected to change her quarters, and I, of course, had to change too. Mine is at present a laborious (but not unpleasant) life. The causes of Miss Schuyler's removal, as I have been given to understand by the lady herself, were some particularly pleasing window-boxes in a lodging in High Petergate Street; boxes overflowing with pink geraniums and white field-daisies. No one (she explains) could have looked at this house without desiring to live in it; and when she discovered, during a somewhat exhaustive study of the premises, that the maid's name was Susan Strangeways, and that she was promised in marriage to a brewer's apprentice called Sowerb.u.t.t, she went back to her conventional hotel and persuaded her aunt to remove without delay. If Miss Schuyler were offered a room at the Punchbowl Inn in the Gillygate and a suite at the Grand Royal Hotel in Broad Street, she would choose the former unhesitatingly; just as she refused refreshment at the best caterer's this afternoon and dragged Mrs. Benedict and me into 'The Little Snug,' where an alluring sign over the door announced 'A Homely Cup of Tea for Twopence.' But she would outgrow all that; or, if she didn't, I have common-sense enough for two; or if I hadn't, I shouldn't care a hang.

Is it not a curious dispensation of Providence that, just when Aunt Celia is confined to her room with a cold, Mrs. Benedict should join our party and spend her days in our company? She drove to the Merchants'

Hall and the Cavalry Barracks with us, she walked on the city walls with us, she even dared the 'homely' tea at 'The Little Snug'; and at that moment I determined I wouldn't build her memorial church for her, even at a most princely profit.

On crossing Lendal Bridge we saw the river Ouse running placidly through the town, and a lot of little green boats moored at a landing-stage.

'How delightful it would be to row for an hour!' exclaimed Miss Schuyler.

'Oh, do you think so, in those tippy boats on a strange river?'

remonstrated Mrs. Benedict.

The moment I suspected she was afraid of the water, I lured her to the landing-stage and engaged a boat.

'It's a pity that that large flat one has a leak, otherwise it would have held three nicely; but I dare say we can be comfortable in one of the little ones,' I said doubtfully.

'Shan't we be too heavy for it?' Mrs. Benedict inquired timidly.

'Oh, I don't think so. We'll get in and try it. If we find it sinks under our weight we won't risk it,' I replied, spurred on by such twinkles in Miss Schuyler's eyes as blinded me to everything else.

'I really don't think your aunt would like you to venture, Miss Schuyler,' said the marplot.

'Oh, as to that, she knows I am accustomed to boating,' replied Miss Schuyler.

'And Miss Schuyler is such an excellent swimmer,' I added.