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