It was Gertie’s birthday at the Rectory, and there was a sound of merry-making in the air, but what form it would take was held a secret from all of us who were not required to take an active part in its celebration. Only I saw great signs of preparation in progress both at the Rectory and the Manor House. Peggy’s aid was called in to help in the cutting and sewing of many mysterious garments. Music, too, I saw was to be held in requisition, for there was a sound of constant rehearsals in the Rectory and Manor House drawing-rooms.But what puzzled me most was the refurbishing of an enormous array of old lanterns—not adapted to illumination or calculated to add lustre to the festivities of the day. No; lanterns these of a past and antiquated type, resembling in some degree the lanterns of horn which, as illuminators, have long ago passed out of fashion, and are only to be found occasionally in some stable or cowshed that has lapsed far behind the progress of the age.

Never did I imagine that female tongues—girlish tongues more especially—could keep a secret so rigidly. Not a word was let slip by Marion or the Rectory party in explanation of their proceedings, so all I could do was to possess my soul in patience, thankful that my own presence was not a necessary part in the due performance of these mysteries.

I have told you, I think, something of the position of the Manor House. But of its greatest, and perhaps unique attraction, I have said nothing. In olden times a monastery of large dimensions had held possession of the ground that lay between the Manor House and the Rectory. Of this the Refectory was the only perfect fragment, a magnificent vaulted building just visible from the Manor House windows where it lay in the valley beneath. Built of some fine grey stone that had taken to itself all the colouring of which lichens are capable, it was tinted now with soft-toned yellows in every possible gradation, and, in the sunlight of an autumn evening, literally glowed in the warmth of the reflected rays. Only a barn now, and the labourers who went in and out of it, to store and stack the produce of the glebe, never bethought themselves of the glory from which it had fallen.

The river that brought us the Rectory trout lower down in its course had been arrested on its way by the monks, and formed a lake, with a tree-clad island in the midst, from which they supplied themselves with Lenten fare. On the ground that rose between the lake and the Manor, scattered fragments of ruins—here an unsupported arch, hard by a standing column or fragment of wall—with sarcophagi, at intervals, that had been removed from their niches and desecrated of their contents, all testified to the power and wide extent of the original community. These ruins lay within the precincts of the Manor House. But just outside the boundary, on the summit of an adjoining hill, there rose into the thin air the wondrous shape of a tiny chapel, beside the perfection of which even the Refectory itself looked coarse and material. Coloured by a growth of lichen of the same soft tones, and with all its delicate tracery untouched by the lapse of some five hundred years, it seemed the product of some fairy hand. But the hand must have known its business well, for, in spite of the delicate workmanship, every needless point and pinnacle had been rigidly cut down, that the gales which fell full upon it from the broad Atlantic might find no grip or holding ground. Even the buttresses and gargoyles had been allowed no useless ornamentation or finish; all the adornment had wisely been lavished on the interior. It had been fashioned in one single nave, and the fans which sprang from the columns on either side gave a lightness and delicacy to the roof that minuter decoration would have only impaired, while a tiny tower, uprising at the end that over-looked the sea and pierced by a narrow winding stair, supplied just what was needed to break the monotony of the exterior outline.

It was to this wondrous place, I found, that the birthday festivities were directed.As evening approached, all who were to take part in the ceremonial assembled at the Refectory. In what took place within, no outsider was allowed to participate. But at eight o’clock, and just as the moon was rising, a long procession of robed and cowled monks issued from the building, and holding, each of them, a lantern in his hand, entered on the slow and winding ascent that led to the chapel on the hill. And as they wended their way round and round the grass-clad cone, their voices came to us in slow and solemn hymns for the sailors on the sea. The course of time had been reversed, and once again, as in the days when the chapel was built, we saw re-enacted before us the ritual for which it was intended. It was difficult even for ourselves, who knew well and intimately every one of those cowled monks, to believe that we were not living five centuries before our time, and assisting once again in a ceremonial that, in the early days of the monastery, must have taken place again and again when storm and tempest were raging. Only to-night there was no storm and tempest. The necessities of modern comfort and convention had so far interfered with the celebration, that it was re-enacted at a time when the chief requirements for its enactment were obtrusively wanting. And when the summit of the hill had been reached, we watched and waited till the final development came.

On a sudden from the tower that crowned the chapel a light flashed out and burned steadily from a brazier on its summit. Any sailors who were voyaging along that calm and moonlit sea must have been startled by a light that warned them they were approaching a rough and inhospitable coast, of which, in a brightness that was clear as the day, no ship could by any possibility have been ignorant, unless the look-out had been hopelessly and disgracefully incapable.

The light burned on for an hour, then vanished.

And the festivities of Gertie’s birthday were ended.

* * * * *

I was beginning to descend the hill among the more belated of the revellers, when a gentle hand was laid on my shoulder, and I turned and saw Marion.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Harold,” she said, “but in all the crowd and confusion you were undiscoverable. Birthday festivities for Gertie, and birthday festivities for you and me, dear—the birthday of our love.”

And then we dropped purposely behind the crowd, who were sweeping in all directions down the hill.

“Let us go back to the chapel, Harold,” she whispered. “We may never see the view on such a night again. Even the tropics couldn’t supply a scene to smile more sweetly on our love.”

“No, that they couldn’t, dearest. What is it the poet says?—

‘Come away! the heavens above
Just have light enough for love.’

Well, the heavens have been kinder still to you and me, Marion, and lighted us a lamp by which I can read every glance in your eye, and every smile on your lips. And are you really happy, dear, I wonder? I can never hear you say it too often.”

“Yes, Harold, happy as I never expected or deserved to be.” And then she would say no more—only drew closer to my side—for she was new and strange to the expression of her love. “By the way,” she added, “don’t you wonder how they got up the turret-stairs to light the lamp? I’ve tried them again and again and could never manage more than half of them, even in the daylight. Many of them are gone altogether, and all of them are crumbling and dangerous.”

“Ah! that was part of the secret, dear, they kept so well, though I thought that you at any rate had been entrusted with it. The girls, you see, wanted a man to manage that for them, and so they condescended to trust me with the business. There have been carpenters at work in the tower for days, but always in the late evening and when no one was about. And they’ve made quite a decent flight of wooden steps. Suppose we try them. The view from the top will be finer even than this; and, better still, we shall be alone together for once in the day.”

We did well to climb the turret, for the panorama all around us was clear as on the clearest day.

The chapel hill, on which we stood, rose from the centre of a valley which was itself encompassed by a ring of distant hills, except on the side towards the sea, on which two or three small steamers were passing, like flies across a silver shield.

All the deep places of the valley were shrouded in a moonlit mist. Only here and there a tree-top, or some ruined fragment of the monastery beneath, rose high enough to pierce the silver cloud. In the distance the hills shone bright and clear, their smooth and regular outline broken at intervals by rounded tumuli, fit emblems of the Mighty Mother who had taken her children back again to her bosom for their last sleep.

On the velvet sward below us lay the form of another chapel, designed, or so it might have seemed, in ebony or jet. So black and well-defined was the shadow that it seemed more real and substantial than the fabric on which we stood. Each point and parapet of the building was reproduced in clearest silhouette, even to the outline of the hideous gargoyles, of which our own two figures where we leaned upon the parapet might have been modern imitations in a less outlandish form.

At our feet stood the brazier, its weird and slender form reprinted on the platform of the tower, wherein a few live coals, remnant of the spent beacon-fire, still showed a dull and lurid glare. In the moonlight they shone like coloured fruits piled in a basket of ribbed and frosted silver.

“It might be the tripod of the Delphic shrine,” I said, “ready prepared for some solemn incantation. Suppose we try its efficacy, Marion, by swearing fealty to our love.” And then, with only the solemn hills around us and the silence of the moonlit night, my love and I crossed hands above the glowing embers and prayed that the flame of our love might burn undimmed till the change which men call death should renew it in another and more perfect form.

“Love’s pious flame for ever burneth;
From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth,”

quoted Marion, “which is true enough, though Southey was no poet; else he’d have put such a pretty idea in more poetic form.”

“I wonder how you came to love me, Marion,” I said, “especially as I am sure that Eric was my rival. And you know I’m nothing to him in looks or prospects or anything.”

“What, fishing for compliments already, are you? Though perhaps it’s true. He’s a dear old fellow and I love him almost as much as I do you. Only, you see, in another way. And perhaps for a husband one wants something to lean upon—something more manly, it may be, and less picturesque. You aren’t offended, are you, by the implied compliment? And there was the wreck, and that settled it. You didn’t give me a chance. Why, I never look at Bruno,”—this was the name of the dog, for the captain had given him to her—“without thinking how you risked your life to please my idle fancy. Though indeed it was no fancy, for I should always have been dreaming of him if that poor dog had died. And yet, perhaps—perhaps—I cannot tell. Sometimes I think I might have ended by marrying Eric, if you had stayed away.”

A footstep sounded on the platform behind us, and there, confronting us as we turned to go, stood Riverdale himself. He had heard, I felt sure, Marion’s concluding words.