Though his curate was away, the incumbent of Orrinleigh, my kind Cyril Nasmith, had thrown aside his everlasting scrolls and folios, and spent the whole morning out-of-doors with me. We had been over the castle park and gallery, and even into the dairy, and thence up the path by a trout-stream to the site of a Saxon city; and Nasmith had been enthusiastically educating me all the way. I knew that there was little enough for him to do meanwhile. His village sheep were very tame and white; and his other sheep, at the manor, all wild and black: theology seemed to fall rather flat between them. So, by the dispensation of Providence, in his work-day leisure he had relapsed into the one intellectual passion of his life, archÆology: a wise, worshipping sort of man, and the prince of Anglican antiquaries. As for me, he loved me better than ever when he found what genuine interest I took in his quiet hidden corner of ——shire, whither I came from London to pass a memorable night and day with him, after a sixteen years' separation; for his boyhood had been spent in my own Maryland, his mother's family being Americans. It was a little sober, pastoral place, this Orrinleigh, with its straw-browed cottages bosomed in roses, sitting all in a row upon the overshaded lane, and, from the height where we stood, looking like so many sepia-tinted mushrooms in the broad green world. Just beyond us, in the near neighborhood of Orrinleigh House, the gray sham-Grecian porch of his ritualistic Tudor church skulked in the faint May sun. "What do you call that?" I said. "It is the one ugly thing hereabouts." He smiled. "Of course it is ugly, structurally," he answered in an apologetic tone; "Saint Ruth's was built in King James the First's time; I do not pride myself on that. But you should see the ruin, Holden! a darling bit of Early Decorated. Walk over there now with me. We have the time to give; and it is only a couple of miles away." And off he started at his brisk bachelor pace, fixing his shovel-hat well on his forehead, for we were in the teeth of the inland breeze. "This enormity," I remarked, casting a sportive thumb over my shoulder, "has an odd name: Saint Ruth's." He corrected me in his most amiable fashion. "The title is not unique; and it has every precedent, pre-Christian as it is. Have you never heard, good sceptic, of Saint Joachim? nay, of Saint Michael, another person who might have proved an alibi if he ever came up for Roman canonization? Besides, the name has ancient local sanction. This Saint Ruth's-on-the-Hill continues the dedication of the other to which we are going: Lovers' Saint Ruth's." "Lovers' Saint Ruth's?" I exclaimed, keen at the scent. "Come now, Nasmith, there's some legend back of that; you know there is. Let us have it." And that is how I heard the story.

He told it not without reluctance, as if it were a precious thing he could not easily part with, even to an old friend. All along the road, as we went between the pleasant farm-lands, stepping over golden pools of primroses between the wheel-tracks, little silences broke into his talk. Nasmith's heart is truly in the past; and humbly happy indeed it keeps him. We had been through the gallery before breakfast, and he reminded me of it, by way of prelude. "Do you remember how pleased you were with the great Vandyck on the east wall?" The grouped portrait of a blonde man, a blonde woman, and a child unlike either; how beautiful it was! the two unforgettable melancholy faces contrasting oddly with the ruddy dark-eyed boy in a yellow doublet, playing with his dog before them on the floor.

"Well, you saw there the Lord Richard, and his wife, the Lady Eleanor. He was the third Earl's only son, born in the year 1606. The house of Orrinleigh was founded by his grand-uncle, on murder and fraud. Richard, almost the only Langham with a conscience, had it in too great a degree, and grew up, one knows not why, with a diseased sense of impending retribution; and, therefore, when misfortune for a while overwhelmed him and his, it found him not unprepared. His mother was a Neville; he had great prospects and possessions. Lady Eleanor was a sweet lass of honorable blood, a good squire's daughter, and the youngest of a family of eight. She belonged over there in Frambleworth, where you see the twin spires. From boyhood and girlhood these two clung to each other. I wonder if one ever sees such fast love now-a-days: so simple, so deep, so long-suffering, all made of rapture and grief! They were betrothed early, with a kiss given under the shadow of the king yew in the old church-yard; they both cherished the place to the end, and there lies their dust. You see, the original Saint Ruth's was a monastic chapel; and it was stripped, and left to fall to pieces, by the greed of the rascally Reformers, (excuse me; that's what I must call them!" muttered my filial High Churchman), "and it was nearly as much of a ruin in Lord Richard's youth as it is to-day. For a whole generation, Orrinleigh had no Christian services at all, and dropped into less than paganism; for which nobody seemed to care, until the architectural hodge-podge on the hill was raised by the old Earl, and the people were gradually gathered in to learn all about a new code of moral beauty from the nakedest, dullest, and vulgarest object in the three kingdoms. As I was saying, the two young people made their tryst by the priory wall, secretly, as it had to be; for the Earl would not hear of penniless Eleanor Thurlocke for his heir's bride; and the squire, a staunch Elizabethan Protestant, favored young Kit Brimblecombe, or his cousin Austin, for her suitor, and held aloof from the Lord Richard, whom he suspected of having reclaimed his ancestors' faith and become a Papist, while at Oxford. That, as it happened, was true enough; and, moreover, the girl herself had followed her lover back into the old religion: so that there were disadvantage and danger of all kinds, in those days, behind them and before. The little church meant much to them both, the pathetic ghost of what had been so famous and fair. There they used to meet, when luck served, for what great comfort they could still reap out of their narrowing lives, shedding tears on each other's breasts over that outlook which seemed so cruelly hopeless. But a terrible tragedy broke up and changed their youth, and it was at Lovers' Saint Ruth's that it happened.

"Eleanor was barely past eighteen, and Richard not one-and-twenty. It was spring twilight, when he rode down alone to the valley, galloping, because, for once, he was a little late to meet his maid. She also had started on foot, across the dewy field-path from Frambleworth, having for company part of the way an old market-woman and her goodman, who would not have betrayed the object of her journey for worlds. They left her at the lonely cross-roads, whence she gayly took her way west, with Orrinleigh Church, as it was still called, almost in sight. The next morning their bodies were found, not fifty rods away; and it is clear to me, that, hearing Eleanor's first stifled call, they had turned back to her rescue, and so perished at the hands of the wicked. With whom the guilt lay, none ever knew; the blame was laid upon the gypsies, I think unjustly, and three of them were hanged on these very downs. It was a wild time; and desperate men, singly, or in bands, mad for food and plunder, and reeling drunk from cellar to cellar, were over this peaceful county. The squire's ewe lamb, whom, in his senses, a devil might have spared with a blessing on her sweet looks, was foully waylaid, and worse than murdered. In the face of agony and humiliation, her spirit fainted away. Hours later, when all was still, and the dazzling moon was up over the sycamores, Eleanor Thurlocke awoke, and, with her last spasmodical strength, dragged herself to the end of the lane, and on to the hollow stone step of the church, to die. It was past midnight. Who should be within those crumbling walls, even then, but her own Richard, kneeling in his satin dress, with a lighted hand-lamp by his side, his brow raised to Heaven? He had missed her; and he knew not what to think for disappointment and anxious love; and, sleep being far from him, there had he waited until now before the fallen altar-stone where they had so often prayed together. As dejectedly he swung back the outer door, he saw his dear, her thick gold locks unbound, her vesture in disorder, her hands chilled and bleeding from the stony travel and the briers. Without a question, for he was ever a ready courageous lad, he put out the lantern, and cast it under a bush; and, gathering Eleanor into his strong arms, first making the sign of the cross upon her brow, he climbed the hill slowly, steadily, and bore her straight into Orrinleigh House, and into his dead mother's chamber. He made no sound; but he left her long enough to get restoratives, and then hurried back, and laid her tenderly in the high-canopied bed there, radiant in the moonshine; and, keeping his own heart smothered, so that it could utter no least cry, placed the door ajar, and began to pace, soft as a tiger, to and fro, to and fro, to and fro, outside. When the white of dawn appeared, he crept in and crouched low beside the pillows. She opened her eyes, and, with his haggard cheek close to hers, stammered to him, piteously, as best she could, her knowledge of what had befallen. He did not speak nor move for a long while, partly because he feared so for her jarred mind. But he knew the house would be stirring with the day, and events lay in his hands. It was a strange, inconsistent thing, but entirely in harmony with the Lord Richard's fatalistic character, that neither then, nor ever after, would he proclaim the true fact. To save her from certain slander, to wall her in with reparation on every side, was his one passionate impulse. He knew that having carried her by night to Orrinleigh, he must bear the burden of his own deed. He made his resolve to explain nothing, for her sake, and to act as became the overmastering affection he had for her. He breathed quickly and firmly in her ear: 'Nell!' She smiled faintly at him. 'Nell, darling, this must be our bridal-morn.' A low groan, such as made him shiver like the air around a fire, was her only answer; such a heart-rending groan of pure unreasoning horror as his ears had never heard. But he could not flinch now; the morn was breaking, fresh and undelayed, over his altered world. With the still force which was in him, and which, from his boyhood, could compel every one he knew, the Lord Richard said: 'Yes.' 'Yes!' she echoed, after a while, as if in a weary dream, and fell unconscious again. Then he rose, and called old Stephen Bowles, the servant whom he could best trust, and despatched him, on his own horse, ere the sun was up, for a priest eleven miles away. And there, in his dead mother's chamber, with one only witness, and in such wretchedness, the two were hastily wed, Eleanor lying quietly, since they dared not raise her, and the hope of Orrinleigh kneeling with his curly bronze head buried in her white little hands. When the others had gone, for he had set himself much to do, he sought his father. Sealing his lips thenceforward against the mystery which had hurried his action, he spoke out, and told him he had married Eleanor Thurlocke, and that he hoped he might be forgiven if he had seemed undutiful; and before the old Earl, who was dressing, could show his rage, quietly walked away, and rode over to Frambleworth, and made almost the same speech, in Eleanor's behalf, to the squire. Such wrath, and curiosity, and excitement, and upbraiding were never in this neighborhood before; for the two young people lived in the eyes of many who wished them well, and who looked for a great wedding, with masques, and dancing, and holiday arches, and public largesses of drink and money, such as had not been in mid-England for a generation. Wonderful as it seemed, the turmoil soon passed; and the two, never stirring from the very heart of the disturbance and opposition, somehow lived on, and were not parted, and slowly established a peace with their angry kindred. Malice itself could not hold out long against the Lord Richard's winning ways; and ever, as he grew older, he became sadder and gentler, and more to be honored by all men. But the Lady Eleanor lost the merry laughter she once had, and shrank, in great mistrust, even from her own family, so that it was plain at times that her reason was shaken. None on earth, meanwhile, save the lovers themselves, held the clew to their blighted lives. He never left her; he never travelled, nor went to court, as became his station, but sat patiently awaiting, at home, the crowning distress which he now knew must come upon them. Gossip broke out again, ere long, as much as it dared, in the village taverns; and there was a lifting of willing eyebrows among the gentry dwelling near, when, in the autumn, the incarnate disaster, the child in the Vandyck picture, was born. They rang the joy-bells from the church-tower, and the tenantry came under the eaves and cheered until faithful old Stephen threatened them with his blunderbuss, and drove them away. The Earl was sitting at his cards, with his bad foot on a stool before him, when the Lord Richard came in, with a silken parcel in his arms, followed only by a couple of his sniffing hounds. 'Well, what hast thou there, Dick?' cried the big blustering man, not unkindly. 'Father,' said the young stricken Lord Richard, in his impassioned fidelity, holding the parcel forth, 'I have my son.' And thereupon such a mortal paleness came upon him, and his knees shook so under him, for the deceit, that he scarce could stand. Seeing him quake, the old Earl, a rough jolly creature in his better moods, laughed long and loud.

"And so it seemed to the only ones who sat tongue-tied amid the great rejoicing, as if the divine wrath had indeed spent itself upon their house; the doom of the iniquity of the forefathers, as the Lord Richard would say to himself. What fresh and mistaken thinking there was to do, the miserable lad, being sane, did for both, believing that a curse was upon them, and that they must endure it, and accept the torture of that alien child's presence for some purpose hidden from human eyes. Their pact and horrible habit of silence weighed upon their hearts; and had not one constrained the other, she was very fain at times to confess, and go, if needs be, into disgrace for the lie. They would wander sometimes on the terrace, hand-in-hand, without speech, looking like brother and sister under a common ban. It seems impossible to understand this deliberate choice of a wrong attitude towards life, except in the light of that mysticism,

'With shuddering, meek, submitted thought,'

which ruled the Lord Richard's nature. Meanwhile the infant changed to a noisy, bounding rogue with black eyes, whom his young mother hated. They called him Ralph, a name not borne before by any of the Langham race. From his cradle, the poor waif clung to the Lord Richard, as to his only friend; and that saintly soul, as one might take sweetly a bitter penance, reared him in right ways, and encouraged or chided him at need, and won from him an awe and gratitude affecting to see. But the Lady Eleanor would never have him so much as touch her gown, which the maids about the manor laid to her troubled wits, and felt sorry for, without more ado. The old Earl, who liked the boy's health and pluck, had the portrait painted for the gallery; and even there you will notice that Ralph is far away from her, and at her husband's feet. Years of dereliction, therefore, these were to the Lord Richard, having no child of his own, and watching his intruding heir gaining daily some virtue and seemly knowledge, and coming, either by nature or by his careful breeding, fully to deserve those things to which he had no right before God and the king. And the boy grew, and was worthy to be loved, so brave he was, and so truth-speaking, and so tractable, despite his fits of temper. When he had passed his tenth birthday, he was sent to Meldom School; and his first absence lifted, as it were, the black load from his mother's spirit; and the beginning of her recovery, after all that she had endured, was from that day. There came soon to her and the Lord Richard an unexpected happiness; for the year 1636 saw the birth of their own little Vivian. You may believe that his father, perplexed by the fresh aspect of the problem before him, tried to solve it by prayer and patience; the good heart, chastened ever with much sorrow, and melted away with thinking, thinking. His wife, free of his morbid scruples, cried out at last irresistibly for the vindication of her little one. But the Lord Richard was visited by a prophetic dream, and was wrung with misgivings, less like a man's than a woman's, in searching to divine his duty. For he foresaw, of a surety, in his sleep, what a poor vicious thing his son was to be. All the estates, being entailed, were to pass to the acknowledged eldest, passing, therefore, by unjust consent, in this case, to an interloper, to the detriment of the true inheritor; and to maintain Ralph's right would be a legal crime. On the other hand, the great power and responsibility of which he promised to make such fair use,—what if these should become, in the hands of that other to whom they would be intrusted, engines for havoc in the world, since then to disown Ralph were a moral crime? Lord Richard wrestled hard with his demon of doubt, to no avail. In good time, alas, as it was ordained, when Vivian was a bonny babe in his third summer, the unforeseen deliverance came. Ralph Langham was thrown from his pony at Long Meldom Cross, and brought home for dead. He never spoke a word, but passed to eternity with his fingers clasped tight on the Lord Richard's compassionate hand, and a great tear rolling down his round brown cheek. His short career had been like a cheerful cloud swimming in the sun, and itself casting damp and darkness on the hills below. The strangest thing of all was the ungoverned joy which came, at the news, upon the Lady Eleanor, a joy dreadful, at that time, to those about; but when it faded away, all the evil else linked with it seemed to fade too, and very shortly she was wholly restored, and became her own comely, gracious self again, even as she was when first the beardless Lord Richard had told her his love. So that the liberty of those hunted young spirits was established in the grave of him whom heraldry yet names as their first-born. They laid him yonder, in Lovers' Saint Ruth's. Where else but there? as if in unuttered thanksgiving that mercy had reached them at last upon its fatal threshold. There is the tower, Holden, and the broken top mullion (is it not graceful?) of the great west window."

We swung into the prettiest open space imaginable, close to a glassy lake, and found the fourteenth-century church, with its yews and leaning stones, before us. I went silently in at Nasmith's heels. The flooring was the perfect plush of English grass; the roof of the nave was living boughs. For a single huge ash-tree had rooted itself there generations ago, and grown much larger round than our four arms could span, and lifted its spread of leaves nearer heaven than the level of the walls. Ivy hung on the chancel arch, and many bright-colored wildflowers, whose seeds had lodged in the crevices and in the blank windows, filled the whole enclosure, bay after bay, with a riot of color and fragrance. Soft green daylight everywhere caressed the eye. The chancel roof, of exquisitely groined limestone, was still unfallen, though it had a rift or two; and on either side, where the monks' stalls must have stood a dozen deep, there were crumbling tombs, with effigies in alabaster. I went directly up one step to a plain small brass over against the piscina, and pushed the weeds aside. Nasmith knew I should not be able to decipher the inscription, on which the rain of three hundred summers had been sifted in. Leaning his head against one of the piers, a good distance down, he looked over at me, and began to recite, in an agreeable monotone: "'Here lieth Ralph, thirteen years old, heir while he lived to Orrinleigh and Gaynes; whom do thou, O Lord! receive among the innocent.

For Time still tries
The truth from lies,
And God makes open what the world doth blind.

A. D. 1639.' Do you recognize the verse? Robert Greene's. The choice of it was so significant it must have been the Lord Richard's doing. You will notice that the epitaph is sensitively worded; it is pure fact, and nothing else; and it has, too, an affectionate sound which has always been a sort of satisfaction to me." "How immensely dramatic the upshot might have been if he had lived!" I said. "The poor little fellow, infelix natu, felicior morte." I was astonished to find a slight mist over my eyes. "Tell me of these others next him, Nasmith: a knight and his lady side by side, recumbent, and therefore pre-Reformation." Nasmith's slow, radiant, indulgent smile was upon me, as he moved forward from the light to where I stood. "No," he said. "Look at the armor and the fashion of the dress, not at the attitude, which is unusual, of course, for the Caroline period. Those are the blessed twain of whom I have been telling you. See!" He pointed to the discolored raised Latin text which ran around the wide slabs beneath. I traced it out. "Pray for the souls of Richard Esme Vivian Langham, Viscount Gaynes, and of Eleanor his adored wife, neither of them ripe in years, who together, in this venerable sanctuary, suffered calamity, and sought repose in Christ." There were no dates. I waited for Nasmith to go on. He did so, in that tone of grave personal interest which he reserves for these "old, unhappy, far-off things."

"They had to lead very private lives, on account of their proscribed creed; a constraint which to them was not unwelcome. Their good works, however, were known over the whole countryside, which is loyal to their memory. She was the first to die, in 1640, contracting a fever, and fading gradually away. There were two young children to remember her and take pattern after her, (would that they had done so!) Vivian and Joan. When the civil wars began, the old Earl was feeble and near his end; and the Lord Richard, whose principles and natural sympathies were all for King Charles, joined the unanimous Catholic gentry, and sought with eagerness the only use that seemed left to him. His bright beloved presence graced the camp but a little while, for in his thirty-seventh year he was killed at the second battle of Newbury, while carrying the royal standard. They brought him back to the old chapel where he wished to be buried, and where none of his house have been buried since. Both these figures were made under his own eye, when his wife's dust was laid below. Are they not nobly and delicately wrought, and full of rest? His hand holds hers; he had always said they should lie so, as his namesake king and Anne of Bohemia, long ago, lay in the Abbey at Westminster. The ruin has taken its traditional distinctive name of Lovers' Saint Ruth's from them. All my parish maids steal in on Hallowe'en to kiss these joined hands, and wish themselves good fortune, and hundreds of ——shire sweethearts have plighted their troth here, under the stars. It has always been a place of pilgrimage, though its full history is not even guessed at. Saint Ruth's-on-the-Hill, my friend, can never buy or borrow such a charm as this."

As he paused, we heard the plaintive interruptive note of a pair of wood-doves in the ash. He looked at me again. "I forgot to say that they were content to die, my martyr hero and heroine of Orrinleigh, for they had won four years, at the end, of absolute unbroken bliss. They used to come down here every evening for a talk, or a hymn to Our Lady, arm in arm, and happy as children all the way. Their day of storms was brief, and it had a lovely sunset." "Ah, Nasmith," I exclaimed, like a sentimental girl, "I am glad of that. How did you know?" He drew his foot idly through the soft sward as he spoke. "I had the whole story in the Lord Richard's own hand. He wrote it out during the last night he spent at the manor, with his spurs and sword lying by him ready for the morrow: the whole tender, tragic story, with his curious mental struggles laid bare. He thought the truth due to his father, and to his dead stainless Eleanor, to clear her memory from erring rumor which had early got abroad. The manuscript was put away under a seal; and as soon as his son's will was opened, the Earl knew where to find it; I have seen it all scorched and stained with the old man's tears. No eye, from his to mine, has read it since. You see, the next and fourth Earl, Vivian, grew up a graceless cynic reprobate in London, never visited his estates, and cared nothing for his lineage. His sister was little better. I ought to spare her and her second husband any vituperations, since they did me the courtesy of becoming my great-great-great-great-grandparents! Did I never tell you? The Langhams, bad enough in the beginning, have been a worse crew than before, since the Lord Richard's time. Almost 'every inch that is not fool is rogue,' as Dryden says of his giant. Francis, the ninth of the line, lately dead, and his Countess, being my very distant relatives, and impressed with my virtues, which were then being wasted on the desert air, offered me the benefice. The first thing I did, after setting Saint Ruth's in order, was to look about for materials for a history of the parish from a period before the Conquest. During the summer, they put a world of papers, grants, charters, registries, and so on, into my way, which had been heaped in some old chests in the tool-house. One of these papers was that letter, a pearl in sea-kelp. I took it promptly over to Orrinleigh. The Earl was in his hunting-coat, swearing, over his glasses, at some excellent Liberal news in his morning journal. 'Read this,' I said; 'it is one of your ancestral romances, and ought to be reverently preserved.' He laid it by. A few days afterwards, while I was gathering fruit and vines for a Harvest Sunday, he pulled it from his pocket, and threw it at me over the garden wall, remarking that as my reverend appetite was for musty parchments, he did not know but what I had best have this one, especially as his wife and niece, having glanced at it, would not give it house-room! So I had the keepership of that mournful secret of the Lord Richard's wonderful love and patience, which came near altering the local annals I was to write. It was like the unburied dead; it tormented me. Not one of those vulgarians to whom it really belonged was fit to touch it, much less understand it; and I did not wish to add it to any collection, mine or another's. I hesitated a good bit, and then I stole off, on a chilly Martinmas eve, and piously burned it here in Lovers' Saint Ruth's, on this tomb, and scattered the ashes into the grass." A gust of wind came into the choir, and the clock half a mile away struck one. At the sound, we reached for our hats, which we had instinctively laid aside, and crossed the little transept to the door, Nasmith first, I following, as we had entered. Once more, as we left the porch, dark with ivy and weather-stains, we heard the wood-doves, over our heads in the nave, utter a slow musical moan, one to the other. "Their souls," I whispered suddenly. "Peace to all such, after pain," said poetic Cyril. "Amen," I answered. We both smiled. How we two were enjoying our renewed society, back in a bygone England!

Hardly had we gained the road, when a carriage rolled by, with a single figure on horseback clattering alongside. A black-bonneted girl in mourning, handsome, if furtive, under her parasol, and both her companions, the younger of whom sat beside her, saluted Nasmith in what I thought to be a cold, perfunctory manner. I guessed something, for his honest cheek flushed. "I fear these are the great folk of Orrinleigh," I remarked. "The men have selfish, stupid faces, more's the pity." "Yes," he replied; "you have seen some of the Lord Richard's degenerate descendants. I once meant to give his manuscript to Audrey—to the young lady in the carriage. I hoped she might value it. But, as I said, I destroyed it instead. You are the only person to whom I ever repeated the tale, and almost in the original words. Go put it in a book, if you like, Holden; make what you can of it; develop and proportion it; I trust your handling." I thanked him. "No. Your chivalrous Cavalier is too complex a subject for me," was my frank reply; "I feel safer with a history than with a mystery." I was a hardened republican novelist even then, and his senior, and not blind to the "human document," neither of the seventeenth century, nor of the nineteenth. "Nasmith," I began cunningly, "you were in love with the Honorable Audrey, and she refused you. How fortunate for you! Yours was the neatest and most spiritual revenge I ever heard of: to keep from her what might have helped transform her woman's nature, stifled in an ill atmosphere,—the knowledge that she was of the blood of the saints,

'Tho' fallen on evil days,
On evil days tho' fallen, and evil tongues.'"

He gave my hand a half-humorous pressure, his head turning neither to right nor to left, dear old Nasmith! He must be past forty now, and they tell me, moreover, that he is a Benedictine monk at Downside: he will care nothing what I say of him. And thus we climbed the balmy downs, back to our lunch at the vicarage, without another word.