She passed up alone under the screen, which they had
spared, to see what had been done in the chancel; and as she went she
heard a sobbing from the corner near the priest's door; and there,
crouched forward on his face, crying and moaning quietly, was the old
priest who had been rector of the church for nearly twenty years. He had
somehow held on in Edward's time in spite of difficulties; had thanked
God and the Court of Heaven with a full heart for the accession of Mary;
had prayed and deprecated the divine wrath at the return of the
Protestant religion with Elizabeth; but yet had somehow managed to keep
the old faith alight for eight years more, sometimes evading, sometimes
resisting, and sometimes conforming to the march of events, in hopes of
better days. But now the blow had fallen, and the old man, too
ill-instructed to hear the accents of new truth in the shouting of that
noisy crowd and the crash of his images, was on his knees before the
altar where he had daily offered the holy sacrifice through all those
troublous years, faithful to what he believed to be God's truth, now
bewailing and moaning the horrors of that day, and, it is to be feared,
unchristianly calling down the vengeance of God upon his faithless flock.
This shocked and touched Isabel far more than the destruction of the
images; and she went forward timidly and said something; but the old man
turned on her a face of such misery and anger that she had run straight
out of the church, and joined Anthony as he danced on the green.
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