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The organist and he had met twice and thrice a day for a year past. They had discussed the minster that both loved so well, within whose walls both were occupied; they had discussed the nebuly coat, and the Blandamers, and Miss Euphemia. There was only one subject which they did not discuss namely, Miss Anastasia Joliffe, though she was very often in the thoughts of both.
He seemed once more to be making his way up the ghostly nave, on past the pillars that stood like gigantic figures in white winding-sheets, on under the great tower arches. Once more he was groping in the utter darkness of the newel stair, once more he came out into the organ-loft, and saw the baleful silver and sea-green of the nebuly coat gleaming in the transept window.
I wish all Blandamers were in their graves," he said, raising his thin and strident voice till it rang again in the vault above, "and wrapped up in their nebuly coat for a shroud. I should like to fling a stone through their damned badge." And he pointed to the sea-green and silver shield high up in the transept window. "Sunlight and moonlight, it is always there.
Here he stopped for a moment while the lodge-keeper was unfastening the bolt, and remembered afterwards that he had noticed the elaborate iron-work, and the nebuly coat which was set over the great gates.
And then death put a term to Sharnall's talk, and Lord Blandamer was free again. Free for a longer space, free this time finally for ever; and he married, and marriage set the seal on his security, and the heir was born, and the nebuly coat was safe. But now a new confuter had risen to balk him. Was he fighting with dragon's spawn?
There will be another shorter green line lower down." It was as he said, and in a minute more there shone out the silver field and the three sea-green bars of the nebuly coat, and below it the motto Aut Fynes aut finis, just as it shone in the top light of the Blandamer window.
Westray looked up, and in the head of the centre light saw the nebuly coat shining among the darker painted glass with a luminosity which was even more striking in daylight than in the dusk of the previous evening. After a week's trial, Westray made up his mind that Miss Joliffe's lodgings would suit him.
Westray smoothed away the deprecating expression with which he had felt constrained to discountenance such excesses, and set Mr Sharnall's tongue going again with a question: "What did you say Joliffe used to go away for?" "Oh, it's a long story; it's the nebuly coat again. I spoke of it in the church the silver and sea-green that turned his head.
Of course, the Cullerne wags had many a tale to tell of him, and when he came back, greyer each time and wilder-looking, from his wanderings, they called him `Old Nebuly, and the boys would make their bow in the streets, and say `Good-morning, Lord Blandamer. You'll hear stories enough about him, and it was a bitter thing for his poor sister to bear, to see her brother a butt and laughing-stock, all the time that he was frittering away her savings.
Even in her devotions thought wandered far from the pew where she and her aunt sat in Cullerne Church; she found her eyes looking for the sea-green and silver, for the nebuly coat in Abbot Vinnicomb's window; and from the clear light yellow of the aureole round John Baptist's head, fancy called up a whirl of faded lemon-coloured acacia leaves, that were in the air that day the hero first appeared.
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