Nor had
it dealt more kindly with the gentry within its walls, sending some to
the scaffold, pillorying others in infamous office, reducing a few to
poverty, and halting its later guests with gout and paralysis. It had
given them in exchange the dubious immortality of a portrait gallery,
from which they stared with stony and equal resignation; it had
preserved their useless armor and accoutrements; it had set up their
marble effigies in churches or laid them in cross-legged attitudes to
trip up the unwary, until in death, as in life, they got between the
congregation and the Truth that was taught there. It had allowed an
Oldenhurst crusader, with a broken nose like a pugilist, on the strength
of his having been twice to the Holy Land, to hide the beautifully
illuminated Word from the lowlier worshipper on the humbler benches; it
had sent an iconoclastic Bishop of the Reformation to a nearer minster
to ostentatiously occupy the place of the consecrated image he had
overthrown. Small wonder that crowding the Oldenhurst retainers
gradually into smaller space, with occasional Sabbath glimpses of the
living rulers of Oldenhurst already in railed-off exaltation, it had
forced them to accept Oldenhurst as a synonym of eternity, and left the
knowledge of a higher Power to what time they should be turned out
to their longer sleep under the tender grass of the beautiful outer
churchyard.
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