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He said to himself, “It must be near midnight now,” and the impression came upon him that the actual identity of Christ— like a vast, shadowy, tortured ghost hovering over the moonlit town—was summoning him to make some final inward decision. It would have been impossible for him to put into words what this decision was that he felt he was being inevitably, irretrievably led to make. But it was a decision which, if he made it before midnight, that is to say, before the first minute struck of the day when Christ died, he would never be able to retract.

MARK'S COURT

Mr. Geard woke up before dawn on Easter morning. The outer levels of his consciousness were at once assailed by two annoyances proceeding from opposite directions.

The first of these annoyances was connected with Mr. Barter. The teasing memory of Mr. Barter's face, the rankling impression of the man's materialism, the extravagant salary he had been compelled to offer him, the unpleasantness—as if he had touched some sticky and poisonous plant,—left in his mind by the fellow's hatred of Philip; all this became something that descended on him like a leaden weight the moment he opened his eyes.

The second vexation that rose up in his mind assumed the shape of a letter, with a peer's coronet on it, which he had received by yesterday's afternoon post. This letter was from the Marquis of P. asking him whether he couldn't manage to “run over”—the great nobleman expressed himself very casually— and “have a bite with me incog.” at Mark Moor Court, this very Easter Sunday.

Mark Moor Court was a small but very ancient farmhouse, which this owner of half the Mendips kept as a private pleasure-house of escape; allowing few of his own family and absolutely none of the conventional county people to cross its historic threshold.

Save for the crypt beneath Saint Mary's ruined chapel in Glas-tonbury and the foundations of the Roman Road between Glaston-bury and Street, there was not a fragment of masonry in all Somersetshire older than this little solitary grey farm standing, like Mariana's moated grange, upon a sort of fortified island in the vast expanse of water-meadows that followed the movement of the Brue, as that river flowed northwest towards the sea-flats of Burnham.

Mark Moor Court could be easily reached from Glastonbury. It was exactly seven miles away, beyond Meare Heath, beyond Westhay Level, and beyond the Burnham and Evercreech branch of the Somerset and Dorset Railway* Save for the river and the railway, the only connection between Glastonbury and Mark Moor was this one winding, grass-grown road, a road that no modern traffic ever disturbed; for although it was just possible for initiates in the rhynes and hatches and weirs of these queer flats to reach by its means a path to Highbridge and thence to Burn-ham, this particular road lost itself completely in the desolate marshes of Mark Moor.

The old farm-house called Mark Court, or Mark Moor Court, was, according to a local tradition unbroken for a thousand years, the site of a terrible final encounter between Mark, King of Corn-wal, and the Magician Merlin. This particular tradition declares that Merlin—long after he had disappeared with the original heathen Grail into the recesses of Chalice Hill or into the sea-inlets of the Isle of Bardsey—returned once, and once only, to meddle with normal human affairs. This was when he visited King Mark at Mark Moor Court and punished him there for all his misdeeds by reducing him, in the wide low chamber that runs beneath the heavy stone roof, to a pinch of thin grey dust. With this dust ... so the legend ran . . . Merlin, standing at one of the narrow windows between two stone buttresses, and sprinkling it upon the air, fed the eastward-flying herons that came—as indeed they still come—hunting for fish in the ditches of Mark Moor, from their nests in the beech-groves at the foot of Brent Knoll.

The grass-grown road, disused for so long between Glastonbury and Mark Moor, must have witnessed many a strange mediaeval pilgrimage; and, in its long history, worse things than that; for it was along the embankments of this road that the Norse Vikings, following the spring floods up the estuaries of the sea, were wont to push the beaks of their pirate ships as they sought for plunder and rape in the fields of the unknown.

The hurried, informal invitation to lunch this Easter Sunday at Mark Moor Court was only one of a series of such invitations that Bloody Johnny had recently received from the Marquis of Pr He owed these remarkable summonses to the fact that in his boy* hood he had been a servant at the great Elizabethan House in hi native Montacute.

At this house Henry Zoyland* tenth Marquis of P.» had ire quently been a guest; and the striking originality—and, it must also be confessed, the curious physical magnetism—of the young servant had made an indelible impression upon the peer's mind. The Marquis had been reminded of this early infatuation by reading in the Western Gazette of Mr. Geard's unexpected fortune; and as he was attached to Glastonbury, and more than attached to his lonely shooting-lodge amid the dykes of Mark Moor, he had become still further interested in his former friend's career, when he heard rumours of his having been elected Mayor.

Mr. Geard now set himself to call upon those deeper levels of his consciousness that would be undisturbed by these various vexations, whether material or immaterial, that were now besieging so viciously his awakened soul.

He turned on his back and stretched out his arm, extending it beneath his sleeping lady's head; while in immediate response to this affectionate movement, the woman, without awakening, nestled down confidingly upon his shoulder. With his free hand he jerked up the bed-clothes till they were tight under both their chins; and from this snug security he watched, in motionless contemplation, the gradual processes of the dawn.

The familiar feeling, unlike all other possible sensations, of his wife's grey head resting on his shoulder was soon further accentuated by the woman's turning towards him still more closely in her sleep so that their bodies came into contact below the sheet that covered them. By giving her shoulder a few little shakes with his left hand Bloody Johnny now changed the rhythm of her breathing to an easy and silent respiration. His power over his own sensations when once he was really aroused was so dominant that although they had slept together for forty years he still was able by saying to himself “this is my woman” to evoke feelings not only of tenderness towards the grey-haired figure he thus held, but even—strange though it may sound—of actual amorousness.

If Mr. Wollop—the ex-Mayor of Glastonbury—was the most childlike of all the dwellers in the town in his simple zest for the visible world, Mr. Geard—the present Mayor—was possessed of a bottomless richness of sensuality that put to shame every frequenter, high and low, who made use of the services of Mother Legge and the attendance of Young Tewsy, in that quarter of the town known as Paradise.

Bloody Johnny's rival, Philip Crow, was undeniaLIv fond of his wife Tilly, a woman at least ten years younger than Mesr.n Geard; but never for one second, for fifteen long vears. had Philip experienced a single erotic thrill from contact with her.

As the light grewT stronger it became obvious to Mr. Geard that this Easter morning was destined to prove cloudy and windv, if not stormy; but this did not prevent him from discovering somehow a scent of primroses upon the air or even from hearing —and it was almost as if his will-power was so great that he called up this long-tailed grey bird from the orchards beyond L:j Brue—the cry of the cuckoo upon the blowing gusts.

When he had made up his mind that the sun, although quite concealed by wildly driven clouds, must have arisen beyond the Tor and beyond Havyatt Gap, Bloody Johnny gently lifted his still unconscious lady from his shoulder and proceeded cautiously and silently to get out of bed. Retiring on tiptoe to his dressing-room which adjoined their bedroom he shut himself in with his cold bath and his shaving materials-Emerging thence in about half an hour he presented to the eye of all observers a figure that might with equal congruity have been described as an undertaker, a head-waiter or a congregational minister. His big white face, which, unlike the countenance of Mr. Weatherwax, looked smaller, if anything, than it really was owing toj the unnatural size of the back of his great head, showed whiter than ever in the greyness of this Easter morning by reason of the diabolic intensity of his dark eyes.

The pupils of Mr. GeaFd's eyes, like those of the author of “Faust,” had the power of dilating until they left only a very narrow margin of white. But this white rim, just because it was so reduced, gleamed with an incredible lustre as he rolled his eyes—for this was a trick of his; and a trick shared by many prince-prelates of the Roman Catholic Church—without moving his head.

He now went downstairs, every stair creaking under his heavy weight, and shuffled, in his soft carpet-slippers, into the kitchen.

No sign of Sally Jones at present! Well! he could find what he wanted on Easter morning without any help from any Sally. He did in fact lay his hand upon an uncut loaf of bread. This he conveyed into the dining-room, where the family had all their meals, and placing it on the table, now covered with a tablecloth such as one sees in the illustrations of Dickens, he opened the mahogany sideboard and lifted out therefrom a decanter of port wine. Finding no wine glass—indeed no glass of any description —upon the sideboard, Bloody Johnny uttered a growling expletive that sounded like a single syllable much more condemned in polite society than the word “damn” and retired into thcj pantry; from which retreat he presently emerged with a large tumbler*

He now stood for a moment in puzzled hesitation. What he muttered under his breath at that second was—“The East . . . the East ... the East!”

Carrying loaf and decanter and tumbler pressed, all together, against his stomach, he now sought the small postern of his suburban villa and drawing a couple of rusty bolts opened it ™ide.

The East welcomed Mr. Geard with a rush of extremely chilly air; but undeterred by this reception, after listening intently to make sure that Cordelia and Crummie were as fast asleep as their mother, he sank down on his knees in the presence of a little square patch of grass, a few privet bushes, and a tiny round bed with three dead hyacinths in it, and in this position began, with a sort of ravenous greed, tearing open the loaf and gobbling great lumps of crumb from the centre of it. These mouthfuls he washed down with repeated gulps of port wine. As he ate and drank, with the cold wind blowing against his white face, his diabolically dark eyes kept roving about that small garden. So queer a figure must he have presented, and with so formidable a stare must he have raked that small enclosure, that a couple of wagtaih who were looking for worms in the grass instead of flying off hopped towards him in hypnotised amazement, while a female chaffinch that had alighted for a second on one of the privet bushes left the bush and joined the two wagtails upon the patch of grass.

The more greedily Mr, Geard ate the flesh of his Master and drank His blood, the nearer and nearer hopped these three birds. \That other smaller dwellers upon this clouded earth, such as worms and snails and slugs and beetles and wood lice and shrew mice joined with these feathered creatures to make up the congregation at this heretical Easter Mass, neither the celebrant himself nor anyone else will ever know.

“Christ is risen! Christ is risen!” muttered Bloody Johnnv. with his mouth full of the inside of his loaf. “Christ our Passover,” he went on, “is sacrificed for us; let us therefore keep the Feast!”

As he uttered these words he tossed off his third tumbler of port wine; and then, emptying the remainder of the decanter upon the gravel outside the threshold where he knelt, he struggled up, heavily and awkwardly, upon his feet and closed the garden door.

He was only just in time; for the voice of Cordelia was heard from the top of the stairs near his own bedroom;—“Is that you, Dad?”

“Come down, Cordy . . . come down, my pet!” cried Mr. Geard in reply. But without waiting for her appearance he hurriedly conveyed the mutilated loaf and the other things into the kitchen and deposited them on the dresser.

He was just emerging from the kitchen when Cordelia came running downstairs. She was in her dressing-gown and was clearly only just awake.

Mr. Geard, his eyes blazing from out of their deep sockets in his white face, hugged her to his heart.

“Christ is risen!” he mumbled rapturously as he kissed her again and again; surrounding her as he did so with an aura of port wine that was like a purple mist

“Dear old Dad! Dear old Dad!” was all she could find breath to say.

“Crummie awake?” he asked as soon as he let her go.

“Not yet,” she replied, smiling into his burning eyes, “Pve come down to get her tray ready; and then I'll wake her and we'll have our cup of tea before she gets up. She wants me to come to the early service at St. John's with her.”

“Early service? Crummie?” murmured Mr. Geard in astonishment.

“She's taken a fancy to the Church, Dad, ever since you came back from Northwold. Oh, dear! I doubt if either of your daughters will ever get married! You and Mother aren't any good at matchmaking, Dad.”

“Well . . . well . . . well,” muttered Mr. Geard with a heavy sigh.

But as Cordy guessed shrewdly enough it was not the virginity of his children that was worrying him. Her surmise was justified by his next word.

“Well . . . well . . ? you'll have the Wine and the Bread . . . you'll have Christ's Blood and His Body. They'll give it to you of course in those silly little biscuits that don't look like bread at all . . . but it'll be the Master's Body ... and that's the chief thing.”

He stopped and sighed heavily again.

“Oh, Cordy, my child, my child!” he groaned, while a film like that which would cover the eyes of a dog that saw its master being executed crossed the irises of his dark eyes, “there aren't many Christians who feel Him beside them and yet He's nearer us now than we are to each other!”

“Yes, Dad dear,” murmured Cordie.

She always felt extremely embarrassed when her father spoke in this way. The peculiar weight and mass of the man's mystical realism confused and disturbed her. Her own vein of “spirituality,” or whatever it was, was invariably associated with aspects of life that were imaginative or at least intellectual.