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Giving hostages generally the sons of the chiefs was the usual form of ratifying any treaty. Generally also, the Bishop of the district, or its most distinguished ecclesiastic, was called in as witness of the terms, and both parties were solemnly sworn on the relics of Saints the Gospels of the Monasteries or Cathedrals or the croziers of their venerated founders.
My plan if it could be called a plan was first of all to buy a Paris Baedeker and look over the list of churches. This I did, and, back in the hotel room, I consulted that list. It staggered me. There were churches enough there were far too many. Cathedrals and chapels and churches galore Catholic and Protestant. But there was no church calling itself an abbey.
Grave subjects, like the blue of the sea or the shape of a goblet, he approached with the same solidity of earnestness which he brought to bear on sand cathedrals. It was just this that made him a little tiring. But the three together on the sands made a happy and congruous party of absorbed children, till Cheriton the energetic came swinging back over the sand-hills.
Beryl, thrilled by the ermine and the gleaming brooch, did not care a fig about the cathedrals but sat back in a rapture of speculation. There seemed something in the stately head with its crown of white hair, vaguely, tantalizingly familiar; she must have seen pictures of the Queen of Altruria somewhere. She watched each gesture and fitted it to her dream.
Weatheral's need of mild climate. They went abroad after the Christmas Holidays in which she had coughed more than usual and consented to have her breakfast brought up to bed, setting out every evening from Peter's reading-lamp and arriving very shortly at Italian Cathedrals and old Roman seaport towns that smelled of history.
We tried in vain for a photograph of it, and then after a brief glance at the riches of the Church of the Annunziata, where we were followed around the interior by a sacristan who desired us to note that the pillars were "All inlady, all inlady" with different marbles, and, after a chilly moment in San Lorenzo, which the worshippers and the masons were sharing between them in the prayers and repairs always going on in cathedrals, we drove for luncheon to the hotel where we had sojourned in great comfort three years before.
"That is symbolical of many unfinished cathedrals, where the building is carried across from century to century," said Durtal, snapping his stick. "But listen, fancy apart, there is something which may be done, and has not been done, for celestial botany and pious posies.
There is a serious earnestness in its grave simplicity that has a peculiar influence upon the mind; and I have little doubt that this was felt, and understood by those true architects who designed and built the noble cathedrals at Durham and elsewhere.
But no contrast could be greater among the works of human genius than between the compact and rigid solidity into which the iron had there been forged and wedged and rammed, and these waving and graceful curves, swinging downward and up, almost like blossoming festooned vines along the perfumed Italian lanes; this alluring roadway, resting on towers which rise like those of ancient cathedrals; this lace-work of threads, interweaving their separate delicate strengths into the complex solidity of the whole.
Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.
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