I broke off abruptly, for the car was gliding over a bridge, and underneath was a silvery, glinting ribbon, that might, in fairy-land, pa.s.s for a river.

"Shall I stop the car and let you dabble the toe of your shoe in the water?" my guide asked.

I looked at him in bewilderment.

"I shan't be able to believe it's just water--unless you do," I explained. He had seen the look I let fall upon the shining breast of the stream.

"And I'll send Collins away."

"Of course! It's sacrilegious to let any wooden-faced human look upon--all this!"

The car obediently let us out, then steamed softly away, up the road and out of sight.

Mr. Tait held out his hand to me and helped me down the steep little river bank. I dabbled the toe of my shoe in the water, and as he finally drew me away, with the suggestion of further delights, I caught sight of a tiny fish, lying whitely upward in a tangle of weeds.

"How _could_ he die?" I asked mournfully, as we walked away and climbed back to the level of the park. "It seems so unappreciative."

The man beside me laughed.

"_Things_--even the most beautiful things on earth--don't keep people--or fish alive," he said. "They can't even make people want to stay alive--if this is all they have, and after all, the river is just a thing--and the park is a thing--and the house is a thing!"

We had walked on rapidly, and at that moment the house itself became apparent. I clutched his arm.

"A thing!" I denied, looking at it in a dazed fashion. "Why, it's the House of a Hundred Dreams! It's all the dreams of April mornings--and Christmas nights--and----"

"And what?" he asked gravely. But my eyes were still intoxicated.

"Why, it's Religion--and Art--and _Love_--and Comfort!"

He looked at it wonderingly, as if he expected to see statues representing these chapters in the book of Life.

What he saw was a tangle of gravel walks, gray as the desert, drawing away from gra.s.sy places and coming up sharply against the house.

_Such_ a house! A church--a tomb--a fluttering-curtained living-hall--all stretched out in one long chain of battlemented stone. Where the church began and the living-hall ended no one could say, for there were trees everywhere.

"The lower part of the abbey is in good condition, it seems," my conductor remarked, as we approached.

"Good condition!" I echoed. "Why, those doorways are as realistic as--Sunday morning! I feel that I ought to have on a silk dress--and hold the corners of my prayer-book with a handkerchief--to keep from soiling my white gloves."

"If you listen perhaps you can hear the choir-boys," he said, after a pause, and without smiling.

"But there might be a sermon, too!" I objected.

High above the doors was a great open s.p.a.ce of a missing window; then, over this, smaller s.p.a.ces for smaller windows; and--in a niched pinnacle--the Virgin.

"How can she--a woman in love--endure all this beauty?" I asked, my voice hushed with awe.

"She's endured it for many centuries, it seems," he answered.

But we came closer then.

"Why, she hasn't even seen it--not once!" I cried, for I saw then that she was not looking up, but down--at the burden in her arms.

Instinctively Maitland Tait bared his head as we crossed the threshold.

"Shall we try to find a way through here into the gardens?" he asked.

CHAPTER XVII

HOUSE OF A HUNDRED DREAMS

The shadows inside the roofless old abbey were warm and friendly. The sunlight gleamed against the tombs with a cheer which always falls over very old grief spots.

"This quietude--this sense of all rightness--makes you feel that nothing really matters, doesn't it?" I asked, looking around with a sort of awed delight as we paused to read one or two inscriptions--voluminous in length and medieval in spelling.

The man at my side was less awed.

"Shall we go on to the gardens, then?" he asked. "You'll not think so little of temporal pleasures there, perhaps."

I looked up at him.

"But why?"

"Well, because these gardens are usually filled with suggestions of living joys--for one thing. There are millions of forget-me-nots, which always give a cheering aspect to the landscape--and there are frequently the flowers mentioned in Shakespeare's plays."

With a sigh of regret we left the sanctuary. Then, turning a corner of the old stone wall we came full upon a side of the house which was receiving shamelessly the biggest sun-kiss I had ever seen. But then, it was the biggest house I had ever seen. It was the gladdest sun--and it was the warmest blending. Between house and sun--as if they were the love children of this union--lay thousands of brilliant flowers.

When I could get my breath I made a quick suggestion that we go closer.

"I want to know which is rosemary--and which is rue!" I told him. But he stopped a moment and detained me.

We halted beside a fallen stone, at a point slightly separated from the walls of the house--a sort of half-way ground, where the shadow of the Greek cross on an isolated pinnacle seemed still to claim the ground for religion, against the encroachments of the work-a-day world. Maitland Tait's sudden smile was a mixture of amus.e.m.e.nt and tenderness.

"I've recently heard a story about this spot--this identical stone--which will interest you," he said. "A monk comes here at night--one of those old fellows buried in there."

I smiled.

"It's quite true!" he insisted. "People have seen him."

"I know it," I avowed seriously. "I was not smiling out of unbelief, but out of sheer joy at beholding with mine own eyes the 'Norman stone!'

"'He mutters his prayers on the midnight air, And his ma.s.s of the days that are gone.'"

Maitland Tait looked at me in surprise.

"Do you know all the legends of the place?" he asked.