The Dawn of All Part 25

"Under restrictions--yes."

"What sort of restrictions?"

"Well, they won't be allowed to have an army or an aery----"

"Eh?"

"An aery," repeated Father Jervis--"an air-fleet, I mean. That wouldn't do: they might make war."

"I see."

"I don't see what better safety-valve could be suggested. They could work out their own ideas there as much as they liked. Of course, details would come later."

"And the rest of the Proclamation?" asked the other, lifting the sheet.

"I think we've got at the essentials," said the priest, glancing again at his own copy, "and at the immediate results. Of course, all his other measures don't come into force till the Houses pa.s.s them. In fact, nothing of the Proclamation has force until that happens. I expect the Bill for the Establishment of Catholicism will take some time. We shall get ours through before that.

They'll pa.s.s a few small measures immediately, no doubt--as to the Court chaplains and so on."

There was a pause.

"I really think we've got at the principles," said the priest again, meditatively. "Are they clear to you?"

Monsignor rose.

"I think so," he said. "I'm very much obliged, Father. I'm sorry I was stupid just now; but you know it's extraordinarily bewildering to me. I still don't seem to be able to grasp all you said about Democracy."

The old priest smiled rea.s.suringly.

"Well, you see, the universal franchise reduced Democracy _ad absurdum_ fifty years ago. Even the uneducated saw that. And then there came the reaction to the old king-idea again."

Monsignor shook his head.

"I don't see how the people ever consented to give up the power when once they'd got it."

"Why, in the same way that kings used to lose it in the old days--by revolution."

"Revolution? Who revolted?"

"The many who were tyrannised over by the few. For that's what democracy really means."

Monsignor smiled at what he conceived to be a paradox.

"Well, I must go to the Cardinal," he said. "It's just on ten o'clock."

CHAPTER II

(I)

It was three weeks later that the Benedictines took formal possession of Westminster Abbey, and simultaneously that Pontifical High Ma.s.s was sung in the University churches of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, to mark the inauguration of their new life.

Monsignor Masterman was appointed to attend upon the Cardinals in the Abbey; and as he awoke that morning, it seemed to him once more as if he were living in a dream of strange and intoxicating unreality. Everywhere in the house, as he pa.s.sed along the corridors, as he gave and received last instructions before starting, there seemed the same tension of expectancy. Finally, as he went up to the Cardinals' rooms to announce the start, he found the two prelates, both in their scarlet, sitting in silence, looking out over the crowded silent streets.

He bowed at the door without speaking, and then, turning, led the way.

As they came down to the door where the horsed State carriages were waiting, for a moment the wall and the avenue of faces, in front and to right and left, struck him almost with a sense of hostility. A murmur that was almost a roar greeted the gleam of scarlet as the Cardinals came out; then silence again, and a surge of down-bent heads as the two raised their hands in blessing.

Monsignor himself sat facing the Cardinals in the gla.s.s coach, as at a foot-pace the six white horses, with grooms and postillions, drew them slowly past the long length of the Cathedral, round to the right, and into Victoria Street. There he drew a long breath, for he had never seen or dreamed of such a sight as that which met him. From end to end of the side street, and in the direction of Old Victoria Station, across the roadway as well, from every window and from every roof, looked a silent sea of faces, that broke into sound and rippling motion as the last carriage came in sight. He had not realized till this moment the tremendous appeal to the imagination which this formal restoration of the old Abbey to the sons of its original founders and occupants made to the popular mind. Here again there had been working in his mind an undefined sense that the Church had her interests, and the nation hers. He had not understood that the two were identified once more; and identified, too, to a degree which had perhaps never before been reached. Even in medieval days there had been crises and even periods during which the secular power stood on one side and the sacred on another; as when Henry had faced St. Thomas, with the nation torn in factions behind the two champions. But the lesson, it seemed, had been learned at last; Caesar had learned that G.o.d was his ultimate sanction: and Church and nation, now perhaps for the first time, stood together as soul and body united in one personality.

If Victoria Street suggested such a thought as this, Parliament Square drove it home. As the coach drew up at the west door of the Abbey, and Monsignor stepped out with his robes about him, he heard, like a ground-ba.s.s to the ecstatic pealing of the bells overhead, the great roar of welcome roll out over the wide s.p.a.ce, reverberate back from Westminster Hall and the Government Buildings opposite, and die down into heart-shaking silence again, as the vermilion flash was seen at the Abbey doors. The great s.p.a.ce was filled in every foot with a crowd that was of one heart and soul in its welcome of this formal act of rest.i.tution.

Within, the monks waited, headed by their abbot, in a wide circle of some hundred persons, in the extreme end of the nave about the door. The proper formalities were carried out; and the seculars, led by the Cardinals, pa.s.sed up the enormous church, between the tapestries that hung from every pillar, to the music of the _Ecce Sacerdos magnus_.

The old monuments were gone, of course--removed to St.

Paul's--and for the first time for nearly three hundred years it was possible to see the monastic character of the church as its builders had designed it. Over the screen hung now again the Great Rood with Mary and John; and the altars of the Holy Cross and St. Benedict stood on either side of the choir-gates.

And so they waited, the Cardinals in their thrones beside the high-altar, and the man who had lost his memory beside them; while the organ pealed out continuously overhead and endless footsteps went to and fro over the carpeted ways and the open stone s.p.a.ces of the transepts. Once more upon this man, so bewildered by this new world in which he found himself, descended a flood of memories and half-perceived images. He looked up to the far-off vaulted roof and the lantern beneath the central tower; he looked down the long row of untenanted stalls; across the transepts, clean and white again now as at the beginning, filled from end to end across the floor with the white of surplices and the dusky colours of half the religious habits of the world; he caught here and there the gleam of candle-flames and gold and carving from the new altars, set back again, so far as might be, in their old stations; and again it seemed to him that he had lived in some world of the imagination, as if he saw things which kings and prophets had desired to see and had not seen unless in visions of faith and hope that never found fulfilment.

He whispered softly to himself sometimes; old forgotten names and scenes and fragments came back. It seemed to him as if in some other life he had once stood here--surely there in that transept--a stranger and an outcast--watching a liturgy which was strange to him, listening to music, lovely indeed to the ear, yet wholly foreign in this home of monks and prayer. Surely great statues had stood before them--statesmen in perukes who silently declaimed secular rhetoric in the house of G.o.d, swooning women, impossible pagan personifications of grief, medallions, heathen wreaths, and broken columns. Yet here as he looked there was nothing but the decent furniture of a monastic church--tall stalls, altars, images of the great ones of heaven, wide eloquent s.p.a.ces that gave room to the soul to breathe. . . . He had dreamed the other perhaps; he had read histories; he had seen pictures. . . .

The organ broke off in full blast; and under the high roofs came pealing the cry of a trumpet. He awoke with a start; the Cardinals were already on their feet at a gesture from a master of ceremonies. Then he stepped into his place and went down with them to the choir-gates to meet the King. . . .

(II)

It was in the Jerusalem chamber when the King was gone, a couple of hours later, that the new abbot of Westminster came up to him.

He was a small, rosy man with very clear, beautiful eyes.

"Can you speak to me for five minutes, Monsignor?" he said.

The other glanced across at the Cardinals.

"Certainly, father abbot."

The two went out, down a little pa.s.sage, and into a parlour. They sat down.

"It's about Dom Adrian," said the abbot abruptly.

Monsignor checked the sudden shock that ran through him. He knew he must show no emotion.

"It's terribly on my conscience," went on the other, with distress visibly growing as he spoke. "I feel I ought to have seen which way he was going. He was one of my novices, you know, before we were transferred. . . . He would have been here to-day if all had been well. He was to have been one of my monks. I suggested his name."

Monsignor Masterman began to deprecate the self-accusation of the other.