He leaned on the churchyard wall, having the graves to the front of eyes bent inward.  They were Protestant graves, not so impressive to him as the wreathed and gilt of those under dedication to Feltre’s Madonna.  But whatever they were, they had ceased to nurse an injury or feel the pain for having inflicted it.  Their wrinkles had gone from them, whether of anger or suffering.  Ambrose Mallard lay as peaceful in consecrated ground:  and Chumley Potts would be unlikely to think that the helping to lay Ambrose in his quiet last home would cost him a roasting until priestly intercession availed.  So Chummy continues a Protestant; dull consciences can!  But this is incomprehensible, that she, nursing her injury, should be perfectly civil.  She is a woman without emotion.  She is a woman full of emotion, one man knows.  She ties him to her, to make him feel the lash of his remorse.  He feels it because of her casting him from her—­and so civilly.  If this were a Catholic church, one might go in and give the stained soul free way to get a cleansing.  As it is, here are the graves; the dead everywhere have their sanctity, even the heathen.

Fleetwood read the name of the family of Meek on several boards at the head of the graves.  Jonathan Meek died at the age of ninety-five.  A female Meek had eighty-nine years in this life.  Ezra Meek gave up the ghost prematurely, with a couplet, at eighty-one.  A healthy spot, Croridge, or there were virtues in the Meek family, he reflected, and had a shudder that he did not trace to its cause, beyond an acknowledgement of a desire for the warm smell of incense.

CHAPTER XLIII

ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE

His customary wrestle with the night drove Lord Fleetwood in the stillness of the hour after matins from his hated empty Esslemont up again to the village of the long-lived people, enjoying the moist earthiness of the air off the ironstone.  He rode fasting, a good preparatory state for the simple pleasures, which are virtually the Great Nourisher’s teats to her young.  The earl was relieved of his dejection by a sudden filling of his nostrils.  Fat Esslemont underneath had no such air.  Except on the mornings of his walk over the Salzkammergut and Black Forest regions, he had never consciously drawn that deep breath of the satisfied rapture, charging the whole breast with thankfulness.  Huntsmen would know it, if the chase were not urgent to pull them at the tail of the running beast.  Once or twice on board his yacht he might have known something like it, but the salt sea-breeze could not be disconnected from his companion Lord Feltre, and a thought of Feltre swung vapour of incense all about him.  Breathing this air of the young sun’s kiss of earth, his invigoration repelled the seductions of the burnt Oriental gums.