Only The Crypt

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Title:     Only The Crypt
Author: Elizabeth Rundle Charles [More Titles by Charles]

Only the Crypt.[1]

We are entering the Beautiful Temple of God, said the children, a brother and a sister, as they passed reverently under the arched doorway for the first time.

But the roof was low, and the light faint. A feeling of chill and depression crept over them.

The weight of the vaulted stone roof seemed to crush the spirit. Through the small, narrow windows, with their diamond panes, the sunbeams crept in thin silver threads, and soon seemed to grow dim in the damps that came up from below, or to lose their way among the massive pillars of the low arched aisles.

"Can this be the Cathedral?" whispered the brother to the sister; "the glorious House of God our fathers told us of, and we have dreamt of?"

"They said it was the Cathedral," said the sister; "therefore it must have glories. We may not doubt the Builder, or Him to whom it is built. Let us rather doubt ourselves. Our eyes will grow used to the light, and then we shall learn its beauty. Our mother used to say the eyes of little children had to get used to the light before they could understand this world."

"Used to the darkness!" murmured the boy.

At that moment a patient sunbeam made its way in through one of the larger windows and lit up patches of the pillars, falling at last in a golden glory on a brazen cross with an inscription round it, inlaid in the slab at the base of one of the pillars.

The children knelt down to read the letters. They were a tender record of the sorrow of parents for the loss of a child.

And as they examined further they found that every stone beneath their feet bore some similar memorial words.

"Can we be right?" said the boy with a shudder. "I thought we were coming to a house of worship. We seem to have come into a house of graves."

They sat down sad and perplexed on the base of one of the pillars.

As they sat there silent, hand in hand, the sound of soft music, happy, and of an overpowering sweetness, came to them they could not tell whence, faint, and yet not, it seemed, far off, more as if there were some barrier between them and it. It seemed around, above, everywhere; yet the ear could fix on no point to trace it to that they might follow it.

Soon it ceased. But then the strains were taken up by voices nearer at hand. This second music had not the delicious perfectness of the first. Individual voices could be distinctly heard, not blended into a perfect whole; and some of these were harsh, some were shrill, some tremulous and broken as if with tears, some too low with fear, some too high as if from eagerness to be heard; yet the tones were those of reverent worship, and something of the joy of the first music broke through them often, like the sunbeams through the dim, chill air.

"We will go near and try to join," said the children. As they went towards the sound they saw some lamps which had hitherto been hidden from them by the pillars. These lit up the forms of a kneeling company of worshippers.

The children came near, and knelt in adoration beside them. In the worship their hearts took wing and rose into the light, and for a time they forgot the chill and the gloom.

Yet, even as they knelt, they saw that the little company was not abiding. There was a continual movement and change in it. The voices changed. The sweetest and best trained were continually breaking off, in obedience to some summons the children could not hear; and others who, like themselves, had all their music to learn, were coming in their place.

An awe and trembling came again over the children; and the brother whispered,--

"Can we be right? Can this be the Cathedral? No one seems to stay! Whither can they go?"

And the sister answered in a soft whisper,--

"We will wait to see. Can they be going to the other music?"

Scarcely had the words died from her lips when a maiden who had been kneeling close beside them, from whose liquid voice and clear reverent utterance the children had been learning the words of the song, and from whose pale radiant face they had been drinking in its joyful meaning, suddenly ceased her singing, and looking up for a moment with an earnest listening gaze, she seemed to hear some welcome irresistible call, for she said,--

"For me? Can it be indeed for me?" And softly touching the children's forehead with a touch that seemed to them a blessing, she murmured, "You will be called too, by-and-by." Then noiselessly she rose and glided away through the shadow of the arches towards the east, and up a flight of steps the children had not observed before.

They followed her with eager, anxious gaze, and for a moment, ere she glided out of sight, there was the streaming of a flood of golden sunshine down the gloom, from an open door, and once more the sound of that perfect music they had heard at first.

At that moment there was a pause in the service, and a silver-haired old man came to the children and bid them welcome.

"You look sad and bewildered, my children," he said.

"Oh, father! tell us what it means," they whispered. "Can we be in the right place? We thought we were coming to a place of light and of heavenly singing, full of rejoicing worshippers who delighted to stay there. But this seems a place of gloom and of graves. Here the worshippers are a little broken band, and even these do not stay. All is changing and imperfect. What does it mean?"

The old man smiled. "Where do you think you are?" he said.

"In the Cathedral," they answered. "Are we not in the Cathedral?"

"You are, and you are not!" he said. "This is part of the Cathedral. But it is only the Crypt. The Church cemetery and the Cathedral school. The choir children are trained here. But the true Cathedral is above; and, of necessity, when the choristers are trained, they are called up to join the services there."

When the children heard this they understood it all.

Thankfully they went to learn their part in the Psalm with the choir children.

And knowing the Crypt to be only a crypt, its gloom was wonderfully brightened to them. Its stray sunbeams grew clear and golden, now that they were understood to be only earnests of the golden day above. Its broken hymns grew tenfold sweeter, now that they were felt to be but the learning of the anthems to be sung above.

Precious was every hard lesson of the singing, precious every thin silver thread of the light, for they were the foretaste or the preparation of the moment when the door of the true Temple should open, and the shadows flee away.

BURIED WITH CHRIST.

Moans of sharpest agony,
Faintly moaning ceaselessly,
"Earth is all one grave to me!"
Greenest fields but churchyard turf,
Sunniest seas but deadly surf;
Purest skies one vaulted tomb,
Death in all homes most at home.

Moans of sharpest agony!
Back from far they came to me,
Echoed from the crystal sea,
As a chant of victory;
From the sea's translucent verge
Back in triumph pealed the dirge:--
"Earth is all one grave to thee?
What besides could earth now be,
Since He died upon the tree,
Since He died on earth for thee?
Since beneath it He lay, dim,
Cold and still each tortured limb,
Buried are His own with Him,
Yet the dirge is all a hymn.
Wouldst thou take the crypt's chill damps,
And its few sepulchral lamps,
For His temple spaces high,
For His depths of starry sky?
Wouldest thou? Not so would they
Who one moment breathe His day,
Who for one brief moment's space
Have the vision of His face.
Earth has light for earth's great strife,--
Where He liveth, there is Life.

"Earth is all one grave to thee?
Yet lift up thine eyes and see!
For the stone is rolled away,
And He standeth there to-day;
Patiently by thee will stay
Till thy heart 'Rabboni' say!
(He will not forget the clay,
Thine, nor theirs, by night or day.)
That 'Rabboni!' faint through fears,
Sobbed in agony of tears,--
That alone thy heart can clear
Those far-off Amens to hear,
That alone can tune thy heart
In those songs to take her part.

"Then thy cry of agony:
'Earth is all one grave to me,'
Echoing shall come back to thee
In a chant of victory,
Echoed from the crystal sea,
From the living victors free,
Ransomed everlastingly."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Partly suggested by a passage in Longfellow's "Hyperion."

[The end]
Elizabeth Rundle Charles's short story: Only The Crypt

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