Part 28

A voice may have an immense influence over a sensitive nature. This bell of the Cathedral of Granada has one of the most marvellous voices in the world, deep with a depth of old and vanished ages, heavy with the burden of all the long-dead years, and this evening it seemed suddenly to strike away a veil from Catherine's husband. She was leaning her arms on the painted railing and searching the toy city with her happy eyes. Mark, standing behind her, was solicitously winding a shawl round her to protect her from the chill that falls from the Sierra Nevada with the dropping downward of the sun. As the bell tolled, Catherine felt that Mark's hands slipped from her shoulders. She glanced round and up at him. He was standing rigid. His eyes were widely opened. His lips were parted. All the gaiety that usually danced in his face had disappeared. He looked like an entranced man.

"Mark!" Catherine exclaimed. "Mark! why, how strange you look!"

"Do I?" he said, staring out over the wide plain below.

The voice of the bell died reluctantly on the air, but some huge and vague echo of its heavy romance seemed to sway, like a wave, across the little houses to the sunset and faint towards Seville.

"Yes, you look sad and stern. I have never seen your face like this--till now."

He made no answer.

"Are you sad because we are going so soon?" she asked. "But then why should we go? We are perfectly happy here. There is nothing to call us away."

"Kitty, does not that bell give you the lie?" he answered.

"The bell of the Cathedral?" she asked, wondering.

"Yes. Just now when I listened to it, I seemed to hear it whispering of the mysterious things of life, of the hidden currents in the great river, of the sorrows, of the terrors, of the crimes."

"Mark!" said Catherine in amazement.

"Nothing to call us away from our idle happiness here!" he continued. "Do you say--nothing?"

"Why--no. For we are free; we have no ties. You have no profession, Mark. You have no art even to call you back to England. Dear father--how he worships the arts!"

"And you, Kitty--you?"

Mark spoke with a curious pressure of excitement.

"He has taught me to love them too."

"How much, Kitty? As he loves them, more than anything else on earth?"

She had never heard him speak at all like this. She answered:

"Ah no. For my mother----"

She paused.

"My mother has made me understand that there is something greater than any art, more important, more beautiful."

"What can that be?"

"Oh, Mark--religion!"

He leaned over the railing at her side, and the white and red roses that embraced the pillar shook against his thick dark hair in the infant breeze of evening.

"But there are many religions," he said. "A man's art may be his religion."

A troubled look came into her eyes and made them like her mother's.

"Oh no, Mark."

"Yes, Kitty," he said, with growing earnestness, putting aside his reserve for the first time with her. "Indeed it may."