The women
stopped their talk for a moment, and one of them brought him a glass of
milk and an apple from some cold inner chamber; and then, suddenly, from
a room above there rang out a shrill and terrible shriek, and then, in a
young girl's voice, a more terrible song. It was not like anything the
child had ever heard, but as the man recalled it to his memory, he knew
to what song it might be compared--to a certain chant indeed that
summons the angels and archangels to assist in the great Sacrifice. But
as this song chants of the heavenly army, so did that seem to summon all
the hierarchy of evil, the hosts of Lilith and Samael; and the words
that rang out with such awful modulations--_neumata inferorum_--were in
some unknown tongue that few men have ever heard on earth. The women glared at one another with horror in their eyes, and he saw
one or two of the oldest of them clumsily making an old sign upon their
breasts. Then they began to speak again, and he remembered fragments of
their talk. 'She has been up there,' said one, pointing vaguely over her shoulder. 'She'd never know the way,' answered another. 'They be all gone that
went there.' 'There be nought there in these days.' 'How can you tell that, Gwenllian? 'Tis not for us to say that.' 'My great-grandmother did know some that had been there,' said a very
old woman. 'She told me how they was taken afterwards.' And then his uncle appeared at the door, and they went their way as they
had come. Edward Darnell never heard any more of it, nor whether the
girl died or recovered from her strange attack; but the scene had
haunted his mind in boyhood, and now the recollection of it came to him
with a certain note of warning, as a symbol of dangers that might be in
the way. *       *       *       *       *

It would be impossible to carry on the history of Edward Darnell and of
Mary his wife to a greater length, since from this point their legend is
full of impossible events, and seems to put on the semblance of the
stories of the Graal. It is certain, indeed, that in this world they
changed their lives, like King Arthur, but this is a work which no
chronicler has cared to describe with any amplitude of detail. Darnell,
it is true, made a little book, partly consisting of queer verse which
might have been written by an inspired infant, and partly made up of
'notes and exclamations' in an odd dog-Latin which he had picked up
from the 'Iolo MSS. ', but it is to be feared that this work, even if
published in its entirety, would cast but little light on a perplexing
story. He called this piece of literature 'In Exitu Israel,' and wrote
on the title page the motto, doubtless of his own composition, '_Nunc
certe scio quod omnia legenda; omnes historiæ, omnes fabulæ, omnis
Scriptura sint de ME narrata_.' It is only too evident that his Latin
was not learnt at the feet of Cicero; but in this dialect he relates the
great history of the 'New Life' as it was manifested to him. The 'poems'
are even stranger. One, headed (with an odd reminiscence of
old-fashioned books) 'Lines written on looking down from a Height in
London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the Sun' begins thus:--

    One day when I was all alone
    I found a wondrous little stone,
    It lay forgotten on the road
    Far from the ways of man's abode. When on this stone mine eyes I cast
    I saw my Treasure found at last. I pressed it hard against my face,
    I covered it with my embrace,
    I hid it in a secret place. And every day I went to see
    This stone that was my ecstasy;
    And worshipped it with flowers rare,
    And secret words and sayings fair. O stone, so rare and red and wise
    O fragment of far Paradise,
    O Star, whose light is life! O Sea,
    Whose ocean is infinity! Thou art a fire that ever burns,
    And all the world to wonder turns;
    And all the dust of the dull day
    By thee is changed and purged away,
    So that, where'er I look, I see
    A world of a Great Majesty. The sullen river rolls all gold,
    The desert park's a faery wold,
    When on the trees the wind is borne
    I hear the sound of Arthur's horn
    I see no town of grim grey ways,
    But a great city all ablaze
    With burning torches, to light up
    The pinnacles that shrine the Cup. Ever the magic wine is poured,
    Ever the Feast shines on the board,
    Ever the song is borne on high
    That chants the holy Magistry--
      Etc. etc. etc. From such documents as these it is clearly impossible to gather any very
definite information. But on the last page Darnell has written--

'So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary,
useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an
ancient wood, where a clear well rose into grey film and vapour beneath
a misty, glimmering heat. And a form came towards me from the hidden
places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well.' The White People


PROLOGUE

'Sorcery and sanctity,' said Ambrose, 'these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.' Cotgrave listened, interested. He had been brought by a friend to this
mouldering house in a northern suburb, through an old garden to the room
where Ambrose the recluse dozed and dreamed over his books. 'Yes,' he went on, 'magic is justified of her children. There are many,
I think, who eat dry crusts and drink water, with a joy infinitely
sharper than anything within the experience of the "practical" epicure.' 'You are speaking of the saints?' 'Yes, and of the sinners, too. I think you are falling into the very
general error of confining the spiritual world to the supremely good;
but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The
merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be
a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we
muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner
sense of things, and, consequently, our wickedness and our goodness are
alike second-rate, unimportant.' 'And you think the great sinner, then, will be an ascetic, as well as
the great saint?' 'Great people of all kinds forsake the imperfect copies and go to the
perfect originals. I have no doubt but that many of the very highest
among the saints have never done a "good action" (using the words in
their ordinary sense). And, on the other hand, there have been those who
have sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done
an "ill deed."' He went out of the room for a moment, and Cotgrave, in high delight,
turned to his friend and thanked him for the introduction. 'He's grand,' he said. 'I never saw that kind of lunatic before.' Ambrose returned with more whisky and helped the two men in a liberal
manner.