The Dawn of All
Page 31
(I)
It was three weeks later that the Benedictines took formalpossession of Westminster Abbey, and simultaneously thatPontifical High Mass was sung in the University churches ofOxford, Cambridge, and Durham, to mark the inauguration oftheir new life.
Monsignor Masterman was appointed to attend upon the Cardinals inthe Abbey; and as he awoke that morning, it seemed to him oncemore as if he were living in a dream of strange and intoxicatingunreality. Everywhere in the house, as he passed along thecorridors, as he gave and received last instructions beforestarting, there seemed the same tension of expectancy. Finally,as he went up to the Cardinals' rooms to announce the start, hefound the two prelates, both in their scarlet, sitting insilence, 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 carriageswere waiting, for a moment the wall and the avenue of faces, infront and to right and left, struck him almost with a sense ofhostility. A murmur that was almost a roar greeted the gleam ofscarlet as the Cardinals came out; then silence again, and a surgeof down-bent heads as the two raised their hands in blessing.
Monsignor himself sat facing the Cardinals in the glass coach, asat a foot-pace the six white horses, with grooms and postillions,drew them slowly past the long length of the Cathedral, round tothe right, and into Victoria Street. There he drew a long breath,for he had never seen or dreamed of such a sight as that whichmet him. From end to end of the side street, and in the directionof Old Victoria Station, across the roadway as well, from everywindow and from every roof, looked a silent sea of faces, thatbroke into sound and rippling motion as the last carriage came insight. He had not realized till this moment the tremendous appealto the imagination which this formal restoration of the old Abbeyto the sons of its original founders and occupants made to thepopular mind. Here again there had been working in his mind anundefined sense that the Church had her interests, and the nationhers. He had not understood that the two were identified oncemore; and identified, too, to a degree which had perhaps neverbefore been reached. Even in medieval days there had been crisesand even periods during which the secular power stood on one sideand the sacred on another; as when Henry had faced St. Thomas,with the nation torn in factions behind the two champions. Butthe lesson, it seemed, had been learned at last; Caesar hadlearned that God was his ultimate sanction: and Church andnation, now perhaps for the first time, stood together as souland body united in one personality.
If Victoria Street suggested such a thought as this, ParliamentSquare drove it home. As the coach drew up at the west door ofthe Abbey, and Monsignor stepped out with his robes about him, heheard, like a ground-bass to the ecstatic pealing of the bellsoverhead, the great roar of welcome roll out over the wide space,reverberate back from Westminster Hall and the GovernmentBuildings opposite, and die down into heart-shaking silenceagain, as the vermilion flash was seen at the Abbey doors. Thegreat space was filled in every foot with a crowd that was of oneheart and soul in its welcome of this formal act of restitution.
Within, the monks waited, headed by their abbot, in a wide circleof some hundred persons, in the extreme end of the nave about thedoor. The proper formalities were carried out; and the seculars,led by the Cardinals, passed up the enormous church, between thetapestries that hung from every pillar, to the music of the _EcceSacerdos magnus_.
The old monuments were gone, of course--removed to St.Paul's--and for the first time for nearly three hundred years itwas possible to see the monastic character of the church as itsbuilders had designed it. Over the screen hung now again theGreat Rood with Mary and John; and the altars of the Holy Crossand St. Benedict stood on either side of the choir-gates.
And so they waited, the Cardinals in their thrones beside thehigh-altar, and the man who had lost his memory beside them;while the organ pealed out continuously overhead and endlessfootsteps went to and fro over the carpeted ways and the openstone spaces of the transepts. Once more upon this man, sobewildered by this new world in which he found himself,descended a flood of memories and half-perceived images. Helooked up to the far-off vaulted roof and the lantern beneaththe central tower; he looked down the long row of untenantedstalls; across the transepts, clean and white again now as atthe beginning, filled from end to end across the floor with thewhite of surplices and the dusky colours of half the religioushabits of the world; he caught here and there the gleam ofcandle-flames and gold and carving from the new altars, set backagain, so far as might be, in their old stations; and again itseemed to him that he had lived in some world of theimagination, as if he saw things which kings and prophets haddesired to see and had not seen unless in visions of faith andhope that never found fulfilment.
He whispered softly to himself sometimes; old forgotten names andscenes and fragments came back. It seemed to him as if in someother life he had once stood here--surely there in thattransept--a stranger and an outcast--watching a liturgy which wasstrange to him, listening to music, lovely indeed to the ear, yetwholly foreign in this home of monks and prayer. Surely greatstatues had stood before them--statesmen in perukes who silentlydeclaimed secular rhetoric in the house of God, swooning women,impossible pagan personifications of grief, medallions, heathenwreaths, and broken columns. Yet here as he looked there wasnothing but the decent furniture of a monastic church--tallstalls, altars, images of the great ones of heaven, wide eloquentspaces that gave room to the soul to breathe. . . . He haddreamed the other perhaps; he had read histories; he had seenpictures. . . .
The organ broke off in full blast; and under the high roofs camepealing the cry of a trumpet. He awoke with a start; theCardinals were already on their feet at a gesture from a masterof ceremonies. Then he stepped into his place and went down withthem to the choir-gates to meet the King. . . .