“I’m awfully sorry,” he answered, “but I really do not know exactly what you are talking about. Who is she? Do you mean Rosamund Severne?”

“Of course I mean Rosamund Severne,” she cried angrily, “and he would not even leave her name. How do you suppose I should have liked that? What are you staring at? Do you really mean that you don’t know that Rosamund and Michael Herne are in love with each other?”

“I don’t seem to know much,” he said, “but if that’s true of course I see what you mean.”

“I must go to see her,” said Olive, “and yet I hardly know even how to do that.”

She crossed the now deserted garden towards the house; and as she did so, something made her stand and gaze for a moment at the monument that stood on the lawn; the broken image standing on the dragon. And as she looked at it strange and new things came into her soul and her eyes. In the clear exalted intensity of her happiness and unhappiness, she seemed to be seeing it for the first time.

Then she looked about her, as if almost scared of the stillness, the abrupt and utter stillness that had succeeded to all the hubbub of that horrible afternoon. The great lawn, enclosed on three sides by the front and two wings of the Abbey buildings, had been not an hour ago tossing with angry crowds and now it was as empty as the Courts of a city of the dead. Evening was wheeling towards darkness and the round moon rose and brightened steadily until the faint shadows of the new wan light began to change on the gargoyles and Gothic ornaments as they lost the last shadow of the sun. And as the face of all that ancient building flickered and changed under the changing light, it seemed to come more fully into the foreground of her mind and take on a meaning she had never understood before; though she should have been the first, she might have fancied, to understand it from the beginning. That pointed and tapering tracery, of which she had talked lightly to Monkey long ago, the dark glass of the windows, dense with colours that could only be discovered from within– suddenly told her something; a paradox. Inside there was light and outside there was only lead. But who was really inside? . . . Those three walls with all their hooded windows, seemed to be watching; seemed to have watched from the beginning of all their follies and to be still watching–and waiting.

Suddenly and silently, as with a sort of soft shock, she came upon Rosamund herself standing in the great gateway. She did not need to look at that perfect mask of tragedy; she avoided looking at it; but she caught her friend by the arm and said incoherently: “Oh I do not know what to say to you . . . and I have so much to say.”

There was no answer and she broke forth again, “It’s a shame that it should happen to you, who have never been anything but good to all the world. It’s a shame that anybody should tell such tales.”

Then Rosamund Severne said in a dreadful dead voice; “He always tells the truth.”

“I think you are the noblest woman in the world,” said Olive.

“Only the most unlucky,” said the other. “It is nobody’s fault. It’s as if there were a curse on this place.”

And in that instant of time Olive received a revelation like a blinding light; and understood her own trembling in the shadow of those watching walls.

“Rosamund, there is a curse on the place,” she said. “There’s a curse because there is a blessing. But it’s nothing to do with anything we have ever talked about. It has nothing to do with anything that man said. It’s not a curse on your name or anybody else’s name, whatever your name is or whether it’s old or new. The curse is in the name of this house.”

“The name of this house,” repeated the other in a dull voice.

“You’ve seen it at the top of your note-paper a thousand times and taken it for granted; and you have never seen that that is the falsehood. It doesn’t matter whether your father’s position is false or not: it doesn’t matter whether it’s old or new. This place doesn’t belong to the old families any more than the new families. It belongs to God.”

Rosamund seemed to stiffen suddenly like a literal statue and yet one could swear the statue had ears to hear.

Olive burst out again with her broken soliloquy; “Why have all our toppling fancies about kings and knights come with a crash; why is all our Round Table ruined? Because we never began at the beginning. Because we never went back to the Thing itself. The Thing that produced everything else; the love of the Thing where it really lives. On this spot long ago two hundred men lived and loved It.”

She stopped and seemed to realise that her words were tumbling out in a tail foremost fashion; and that she was herself, hardly setting a good example of beginning at the beginning. She made a desperate effort at clarity.

“Don’t you see–the modern people may be right to be modern; there may be people who ask for nothing better than banks and brokers; there may be people who think Milldyke a nice place. Your father and his friends may have been right in their way; I’m sure they weren’t so wrong as they looked when he was abusing them . . . it was hateful, and anyhow he had no business to spring it on you like that, without telling you beforehand.”

The statue spoke again; it seemed as if it never spoke except to utter one sort of stony defence.

“He did tell me beforehand. And I think that was more terrible.”

“Let me say what I am trying to say,” said 0live pathetically. “I feel as if it didn’t belong to me, and I must give it away. There may be people to whom it’s senseless to talk about a flower of chivalry; it sounds like a blossom of butchery. But if we want the flower of chivalry, we must go right away back to the root of chivalry. We must go back if we find it in a thorny place people call theology. We must think differently about death and free will and loneliness and the last appeal. It’s just the same with the popular things we can turn into fashionable things; folk-dances and pageants and calling everything a Guild. Our fathers did these things by the thousand; quite common people; not cranks. We are always asking how they did it. What we’ve got to ask is why they did it. . . . Rosamund, this is why they did it. Something lived here. Something they loved. Some of them loved it so much. . . . Oh don’t you and I know what is the only test? They wanted to be alone with it.”

The statue moved ever so faintly as if turning away; and Olive clutched the arm again in a sort of remorse.

“You must think me mad to be talking so when you suffer; but it’s as if I were bursting with news–with something bigger than all the universe of sorrow. Rosamund, there really is joy. Not rejoicing but joy; not rejoicing at this or that; but the thing itself, we only see reflected in mirrors– which sometimes break. And it lived here. That’s why they didn’t want anything else; not even what we want; not even the best we know. . . . And that’s what’s gone–the good itself. Now we have only evils to hate, and thank God we hate them.”

She pointed suddenly at the monument in the middle of which the wrinkles and convolutions were traced elaborately by the silver-point of the moon-light, like the phosphorescence that outlines some goggling sea-monster.

“We have only the dragon left. A hundred times I’ve looked at that dragon and hated it and never understood it. Upright and high above that horror stood St. Michael or St. Margaret, subduing and conquering it; but it is the conqueror that has vanished. We have no notion of what it would be really like; we haven’t tried to imagine what image really stood there. We danced round it and thought of everything else except that. There burned in this court a great bonfire of visionary passion which in the spirit could be seen for miles and men lived in the warmth of it; the positive passion and possession, the thing worth having in itself. But now the very best of them are negative; attacking the absence of it in the world. They fight for truth where it isn’t. They fight for honour where it isn’t. They are a thousand times right; but it ends in truth and honour fighting each other, as poor Jack and Michael fought. We haven’t any sense or any place where these virtues are happy, where these virtues are simply themselves. I love Jack and Jack loves justice; but he loves justice where it isn’t. There ought to be a way of loving it where it is.”