What Mark enjoyed most in his personal relations with the community were
the walks on Sunday afternoons. Sir Charles Horner made a habit of
joining these to obtain the Abbey gossip and also because he took
pleasure in hearing himself hold forth on the management of his estate.
Most of his property was woodland, and the walks round Malford possessed
that rich intimacy of the English countryside at its best. Mark was not
much interested in what Sir Charles had to ask or in what Sir Charles
had to tell or in what Sir Charles had to show, but to find himself
walking with his monastic brethren in their habits down glades of mighty
oaks, or through sparse plantations of birches, beneath which grew
brakes of wild raspberries that would redden with the yellowing corn,
gave him as assurance of that old England before the Reformation to
which he looked back as to a Golden Age. Years after, when much that was
good and much that was bad in his monastic experience had been
forgotten, he held in his memory one of these walks on a fine afternoon
at July's end within the octave of St. Mary Magdalene. It happened that
Sir Charles had not accompanied the monks that Sunday; but in his place
was an old priest who had spent the week-end as a guest in the Abbey and
who had said Mass for the brethren that morning.
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