The free air poured in as it listed, emphasising the naked poverty of the God of that forlorn village.  At the far end of the church, above the big door which was never opened and the threshold of which was green with weeds, a boarded gallery—­reached by a common miller’s ladder —­stretched from wall to wall.  Dire were its creakings on festival days beneath the weight of wooden shoes.  Near the ladder stood the confessional, with warped panels, painted a lemon yellow.  Facing it, beside the little door, stood the font—­a former holy-water stoup resting on a stonework pedestal.  To the right and to the left, halfway down the church, two narrow altars stood against the wall, surrounded by wooden balustrades.  On the left-hand one, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, was a large gilded plaster statue of the Mother of God, wearing a regal gold crown upon her chestnut hair; while on her left arm sat the Divine Child, nude and smiling, whose little hand raised the star-spangled orb of the universe.  The Virgin’s feet were poised on clouds, and beneath them peeped the heads of winged cherubs.  Then the right-hand altar, used for the masses for the dead, was surmounted by a crucifix of painted papier-mache—­a pendant, as it were, to the Virgin’s effigy.  The figure of Christ, as large as a child of ten years old, showed Him in all the horror of His death-throes, with head thrown back, ribs projecting, abdomen hollowed in, and limbs distorted and splashed with blood.  There was a pulpit, too—­a square box reached by a five-step block—­near a clock with running weights, in a walnut case, whose thuds shook the whole church like the beatings of some huge heart concealed, it might be, under the stone flags.  All along the nave the fourteen Stations of the Cross, fourteen coarsely coloured prints in narrow black frames, bespeckled the staring whiteness of the walls with the yellow, blue, and scarlet of scenes from the Passion.

‘Deo Gratias,’ stuttered out Vincent at the end of the Epistle.

The mystery of love, the immolation of the Holy Victim, was about to begin.  The server took the Missal and bore it to the left, or Gospel-side, of the altar, taking care not to touch the pages of the book.  Each time he passed before the tabernacle he made a genuflexion slantwise, which threw him all askew.  Returning to the right-hand side once more, he stood upright with crossed arms during the reading of the Gospel.  The priest, after making the sign of the cross upon the Missal, next crossed himself:  first upon his forehead—­to declare that he would never blush for the divine word; then on his mouth—­to show his unchanging readiness to confess his faith; and finally on his heart—­to mark that it belonged to God alone.

‘Dominus vobiscum,’ said he, turning round and facing the cold white church.

‘Et cum spirits tuo,’ answered Vincent, who once more was on his knees.