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Updated: May 2, 2025
There's just no escaping them. There they are at matins and evensong." "How shocking! What, gossip afterwards?" "Ask Rollo whether Mungo and Tartar don't stand at the lych-gate, and if he finds it easy to put an end to the game at play." "Oh! and he said they never missed a Sunday service, or the school. Do they distract him?"
The last light of sunset lay in the west; and a sullen wrack of cloud was mounting into the windless sky when Lawford entered the country graveyard again by its dark weather-worn lych-gate. The old stone church with its square tower stood amid trees, its eastern window faintly aglow with crimson and purple. He could hear a steady, rather nasal voice through its open lattices.
The pony slowed to a walk as the road mounted an incline, and after a few minutes they came in sight of the church, which stood on rather higher ground, with its square tower and grey flint walls wreathed in ivy. It was approached from the road by a flight of worn stone steps surmounted by a lych-gate, through which could be seen a flagged pathway leading to the church door.
A prettier little place could scarcely have been discovered, with its tree-shaded high-road, its cluster of thatched cottages, its blacksmith's shop, rustic inn with the signboard on a high post before the door, and last but not least, the quaint little church standing some hundred yards back from the main road, and approached from the lych-gate by an avenue of limes.
Then the carriage stopped before the lych-gate, through which the fresh-faced school children were trooping; and while the bell clanged its last monotonous summons, we walked up between the village graves to the old church porch that older yews overshadow, where the village lads were loitering, as Sunday after Sunday their sleeping forefathers had loitered before them.
Her name was Anne de Barrigan, and she came of good old Breton stock, but much less great and powerful than that of Yves de Cornault; and her father had squandered his fortune at cards, and lived almost like a peasant in his little granite manor on the moors... I have said I would add nothing of my own to this bald statement of a strange case; but I must interrupt myself here to describe the young lady who rode up to the lych-gate of Locronan at the very moment when the Baron de Cornault was also dismounting there.
'I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the greatest decorative artists of the age, was among his sayings, & a great lych-gate, bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched roof, meant to shelter bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front garden, to show that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement.
Beside the Plymouth road, as it plunges down-hill past Ruan Lanihale church towards Ruan Cove, and ten paces beyond the lych-gate where the graves lie level with the coping, and the horseman can decipher their inscriptions in passing, at the risk of a twisted neck the base of the churchyard wall is pierced with a low archway, festooned with toad-flax and fringed with the hart's-tongue fern.
We had been walking very slowly, had passed through the quaint lych-gate, and now the old woman had got the key in the lock of the door, whose archway was figured and fashioned as I have described above, with a dozen mouldings or more, most of them "carved so curiously."
"Where?" said my lady, and turned about to see. Mr. Fairfax knew her. He descended the steps, came out at the lych-gate, and met her. At that instant the cast of his countenance reminded Bessie of her cynical friend Mr. Phipps, and a thought crossed her mind that if Lady Latimer had not recognized her grandfather and made a movement to speak, he would not have challenged her.
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