CHAPTER XXIIIN HIS NAME
MORNING, and the London streets, with Westminster lifting its stately heights above them. Jane had been quite sure that Black meant to take her there; somehow there seemed no place where they could so much want to go. Miss Stoughton had told her that all through the war the great Abbey, like St. Paul’s, had been thronged with the people who had gone, on week days as on the Sabbath, to pray, as the new war-time phrasing had it, “for those serving upon land and sea and in the air.” And now, early as they had left the little house almost under the Abbey’s shadow, they found the streets filled with those who like themselves were pressing toward the place where since the eleventh of November the nation’s gratitude for victory was being voiced in each prayer and song which rose from those sombre walls.
So presently Jane found herself kneeling beside her companion, in this place of places which stood for the very heart of England. More than once on former visits to London she had entered at those doors, but then it had been only as a sightseer. Now, it was as a worshipper that she had come. Everything in her life was changed, since those former visits, and she herself was more changed than all.
It was in the midst of a great prayer, one not read from the printed page but proceeding straight from the heart ofone of Westminster’s best-loved administrants, that Jane felt a hand come upon hers. Fingers touched the fastening of her glove, making known a wish. She drew off the glove, and the bare hands clasped and so remained throughout the whole period of kneeling through this and other prayers. Strangers were all about, pressed close in the rows of straight-backed chairs which were set even more thickly this day than there had ever been need before, yet Jane Ray and Robert Black were almost as much alone in the midst of the throng as they could have been anywhere. It seemed to Jane, as that warm, firm hand held hers, that life flowed to her from it, so vital was the sense of union. Though not a word had as yet been said, the touch of this man’s hand seemed all but to speak aloud to her of the love that was only waiting the hour for its expression. The promise of that clasp was to her only a shade less binding than the word that he should afterward speak.
When the service had ended and they were upon the street again, Black did not lead her home. Instead he took her slowly about and about the place until the crowds had left it. Then he said, with a gesture toward the nave:
“Shall we go back? There will still be people about, but there’s room for all. I know a corner where I’m sure we can be quite alone. Somehow, Jane—I want it to be there. Don’t you?”
She looked up, met such a glance as told her that the hour had come, and bent her head in assent.
“Church walls never meant so much to me as now,” he said, very low, as they entered, “now, when the Church has come into her own as never before. What does it mean when the people crowd like that into her doors? What did it mean when all those soldiers, as you told me,crowded into that war-ruined cathedral? Why, it must mean that the instinct to go where the Name of God is most deeply associated with every stone and window is something which is in every man who has ever heard song and prayer ascend from such a place. He can’t do without it—he can’t do without it.... And no more can we—now.”
He said no more, while he led her down the great nave, nearly deserted. People lingered here and there in famous corners, beside distinguished name on statue or tablet, but as Black had said, there was room for all in that vast space. And presently they had come to a spot behind a stone column where they were in sight of none, and all were far away. Black took Jane’s hand in his again, and himself drew off the glove.
“Jane,” he said, with that in his low tone which spoke his feeling, “it seemed to me that I must have our first prayer together in this place. I came to Westminster and this very spot, when our regiment was in London, more than a year ago. I knelt here, all alone, and asked God, as I had never asked before, that He would make Himself real to you. He has done it, as you have told me, and I wanted to bring you here and thank Him, on my knees. Because now, we can work together—all the rest of our lives—in His Name. Is it so—Jane?”
She could not look up. Great sobbing breaths caught her unawares and shook her from head to foot. She felt his arm come about her, felt his hand press her face against his shoulder, and there, for a few minutes, she cried her heart out. He held her silently, and with such a tender strength that it seemed to her that she had come into some wonderful refuge, such as she had never dreamed of. All the tension, all the weariness, all the heart-wrenchingsights and sounds of the last year, had come back to her in one overwhelming flood at his words, as they had come many times before. But never, at such times, could she let go; always she had had to hold fast to her courage and her will, lest giving way weaken her for the pressing, unremitting tasks yet to be done. In the old, ruined cathedral a month before, she had had all she could do to keep control and not suffer a very hysteria of reaction, such as, alone among those hundreds of men, would have done both herself and them a harm. But now—she knew for the first time in her independent, resourceful life, what it might mean to lean upon an arm stronger than her own, and to feel, as she was momently feeling more sustainingly, that another life was tied so closely to her own that neither sorrow nor joy could ever shake her again that it should not shake that life too.
By and by the storm passed. No longer did she want to weep—a great peace came upon her. She stood still within the right arm which held her—the uninjured arm—she didn’t know that he could not lift that left arm yet nor use it beyond slight effort. Now, at last, he spoke.
“Will you kneel with me, here? No one will see—and if they did—everyone prays now.”
So they knelt, and Robert Black poured out his heart in a few low-spoken words which, if she had still been unbelieving that they could be heard, must have stirred her to the depths. As it was, convinced past all power of sceptic argument to shake, Jane’s own soul spoke with his to the God who had brought her where she was.
With the last words his hand came again upon her cheek and turned her face gently toward his. His lips sealed his betrothal to her with a reverent passion of pledging which told her, more plainly than any words could havedone, that that life of his was now fully hers. It was the life of no pale saint, she well knew, but that of a man whose blood was red and swift-flowing, whose pulses beat as fast and humanly as her own. But he had chosen to devote that virile life to service in the Church, with the same ardour with which, during these months just past, he had given of his best to help defeat the enemies of that Church and all for which it stands. No fear for her now that service with him back on the old home grounds would be dull or tame or weak; it would call for the best she had to give. And she would give it, oh, but she would give it! She knew, at last, that no task of his in that service could seem to her uncongenial, if to him it was worth while.
As they walked slowly back up the long, quiet nave, it was as from some high rite. At the door Robert Black turned and looked back into the dim distance of the great vaulted interior. Then he looked down into Jane’s face.
“It’s done,” he said, with a smile which lighted his eyes into altars upon which burned holy fires of love and joy, “and never can be undone. And when you’re home again—oh, please promise me—we’ll have—the rest of it—without any delay at all?”
“I promise.” The smile she gave him back, he thought, was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
At the door of the little house under the shadow of the great Abbey, Miss Stoughton met them with a message, sent in haste from Dr. John Leaver, forwarding Black’s orders to sail that night.
“But if,” he said, standing with Jane at the last moment, alone with her in the small drawing room, “by any strange happening this should be all that we ever had of each other in this life, we have had—it all! Jane, we have had it all—all the best of it!”
“Yes!” she breathed it. “But”—she lifted her face and whispered it—“I want—a life-time to say that in!”
“So do I—bless you!—and we shall have it—somehow I’m very sure. God keep you safe, my Best Beloved, I know He will!”
Then he went away, limping a very little with his cane, but walking very erect and looking as if he had won all the wars of all the worlds. He could hardly have been so happy if he had.