He was indeed almost in the position of the man
in the tale, who, by a sudden electric shock, lost the vision of the
things about him in the London streets, and gazed instead upon the sea
and shore of an island in the Antipodes; for Darnell only clung with an
effort to the interests and the atmosphere which, till lately, had
seemed all the world to him; and the grey house and the wood and the
river, symbols of the other sphere, intruded as it were into the
landscape of the London suburb. But he went on, with more restraint, telling his stories of far-off
ancestors, how one of them, the most remote of all, was called a saint,
and was supposed to possess certain mysterious secrets often alluded to
in the papers as the 'Hidden Songs of Iolo Sant.' And then with an
abrupt transition he recalled memories of his father and of the strange,
shiftless life in dingy lodgings in the backwaters of London, of the dim
stucco streets that were his first recollections, of forgotten squares
in North London, and of the figure of his father, a grave bearded man
who seemed always in a dream, as if he too sought for the vision of a
land beyond the strong walls, a land where there were deep orchards and
many shining hills, and fountains and water-pools gleaming under the
leaves of the wood. 'I believe my father earned his living,' he went on, 'such a living as
he did earn, at the Record Office and the British Museum. He used to
hunt up things for lawyers and country parsons who wanted old deeds
inspected. He never made much, and we were always moving from one
lodging to another--always to out-of-the-way places where everything
seemed to have run to seed. We never knew our neighbours--we moved too
often for that--but my father had about half a dozen friends, elderly
men like himself, who used to come to see us pretty often; and then, if
there was any money, the lodging-house servant would go out for beer,
and they would sit and smoke far into the night. 'I never knew much about these friends of his, but they all had the same
look, the look of longing for something hidden. They talked of mysteries
that I never understood, very little of their own lives, and when they
did speak of ordinary affairs one could tell that they thought such
matters as money and the want of it were unimportant trifles. When I
grew up and went into the City, and met other young fellows and heard
their way of talking, I wondered whether my father and his friends were
not a little queer in their heads; but I know better now.' So night after night Darnell talked to his wife, seeming to wander
aimlessly from the dingy lodging-houses, where he had spent his boyhood
in the company of his father and the other seekers, to the old house
hidden in that far western valley, and the old race that had so long
looked at the setting of the sun over the mountain. But in truth there
was one end in all that he spoke, and Mary felt that beneath his words,
however indifferent they might seem, there was hidden a purpose, that
they were to embark on a great and marvellous adventure. So day by day the world became more magical; day by day the work of
separation was being performed, the gross accidents were being refined
away. Darnell neglected no instruments that might be useful in the work;
and now he neither lounged at home on Sunday mornings, nor did he
accompany his wife to the Gothic blasphemy which pretended to be a
church. They had discovered a little church of another fashion in a back
street, and Darnell, who had found in one of the old notebooks the maxim
_Incredibilia sola Credenda_, soon perceived how high and glorious a
thing was that service at which he assisted. Our stupid ancestors taught
us that we could become wise by studying books on 'science,' by meddling
with test-tubes, geological specimens, microscopic preparations, and the
like; but they who have cast off these follies know that they must read
not 'science' books, but mass-books, and that the soul is made wise by
the contemplation of mystic ceremonies and elaborate and curious rites. In such things Darnell found a wonderful mystery language, which spoke
at once more secretly and more directly than the formal creeds; and he
saw that, in a sense, the whole world is but a great ceremony or
sacrament, which teaches under visible forms a hidden and transcendent
doctrine. It was thus that he found in the ritual of the church a
perfect image of the world; an image purged, exalted, and illuminate, a
holy house built up of shining and translucent stones, in which the
burning torches were more significant than the wheeling stars, and the
fuming incense was a more certain token than the rising of the mist. His
soul went forth with the albed procession in its white and solemn order,
the mystic dance that signifies rapture and a joy above all joys, and
when he beheld Love slain and rise again victorious he knew that he
witnessed, in a figure, the consummation of all things, the Bridal of
all Bridals, the mystery that is beyond all mysteries, accomplished from
the foundation of the world. So day by day the house of his life became
more magical. And at the same time he began to guess that if in the New Life there are
new and unheard-of joys, there are also new and unheard-of dangers. In
his manuscript books which professed to deliver the outer sense of those
mysterious 'Hidden Songs of Iolo Sant' there was a little chapter that
bore the heading: _Fons Sacer non in communem Vsum convertendus est_,
and by diligence, with much use of the grammar and dictionary, Darnell
was able to construe the by no means complex Latin of his ancestor. The
special book which contained the chapter in question was one of the most
singular in the collection, since it bore the title _Terra de Iolo_, and
on the surface, with an ingenious concealment of its real symbolism, it
affected to give an account of the orchards, fields, woods, roads,
tenements, and waterways in the possession of Darnell's ancestors. Here,
then, he read of the Holy Well, hidden in the Wistman's Wood--_Sylva
Sapientum_--'a fountain of abundant water, which no heats of summer can
ever dry, which no flood can ever defile, which is as a water of life,
to them that thirst for life, a stream of cleansing to them that would
be pure, and a medicine of such healing virtue that by it, through the
might of God and the intercession of His saints, the most grievous
wounds are made whole.' But the water of this well was to be kept
sacred perpetually, it was not to be used for any common purpose, nor to
satisfy any bodily thirst; but ever to be esteemed as holy, 'even as the
water which the priest hath hallowed.' And in the margin a comment in a
later hand taught Darnell something of the meaning of these
prohibitions. He was warned not to use the Well of Life as a mere luxury
of mortal life, as a new sensation, as a means of making the insipid cup
of everyday existence more palatable.