The Dawn of All Part 21

The front of the long procession, Monsignor saw, had reached now the doors of the basilica, and would presently, after making the complete round, pour down into the arena to allow the Blessed Sacrament to move more quickly. It was an exquisite sight, even from here, as the prelate set foot on the platform and began to move to the left. The long lines of tapers, four deep, went like some great serpent, rippling with light, above the heads of the sick; and here and there in the slopes of the crowded spectators shone out other lights, steady as stars in the motionless half-lit evening air. Then, as he went, slowly, pace by pace, he remembered the sick and glanced down, as the music on a sudden ceased.

Ah! there they lay, those living crucifixes . . . . shrouded in white, their faces on either side turned inwards that they might see their Lord. . . . There lay a woman, her face shrivelled with some internal horror--some appalling disease which even the science of these days dared not handle, or at least had not; her large eyes staring with an almost terrible intensity, fixed, it seemed, in her head, yet waiting for the Vision that even now might make her whole. There a child tossed and moaned and turned away his head. There an old man crouched forward upon his litter, held up on either side by two men in the uniform of the brancardiers. . . . And so, in endless lines, they lay; from every nation under heaven: Chinese were there, he saw, and negroes; and the very air in which he walked seemed alight with pain and longing.

A great voice broke in suddenly on his musings; and, before he could fix his attention as to what it said, the words were taken up by the hundreds of thousands of throats--a short, fervent sentence that rent the air like a thunder-peal. Ah! he remembered now. These were the old French prayers, consecrated by a century of use; and as he pa.s.sed on, slowly, step by step, watching now with a backward glance the blessing of the sick that had just begun--the sign of the cross made with the light golden monstrance by the bishop who carried it--now the agonized eyes of expectation that waited for their turn, he too began to hear, and to take up with his own voice those piteous cries for help.

"_Jesu! heal our sick. . . . Jesu! grant that we may see--may hear--may walk. . . . Thou art the Resurrection and the Life. . . . Lord! I believe; help Thou mine unbelief_." Then with an overwhelming triumph: "_Hosanna to the Son of David! Hosanna, Hosanna!_" Then again, soft and rumbling: "_O Mary, conceived without sin, hear us who have recourse to thee._"

The sense of a great circ.u.mambient Power grew upon him at each instant, sacramentalized, it seemed, by the solemn evening light, and evoked by this tense ardour of half a million souls, and focused behind him in one burning point. . . .

Ah! there was the first miracle! . . . A cry behind him, an eddy in the circle of the sick and the waiting attendants, a figure with shrouding linen fallen from breast and outstretched arms, and then a roar, mighty beyond reckoning, as the whole amphitheatre swayed and cried out in exultation. He saw as in a vision the rush of doctors to the place, and the gesticulating figures that held back the crowd behind the barrier. Then a great moan of relief; and a profound silence as the _miracule_ kneeled again beside the litter which had borne him. Then again the canopy moved on; and the pa.s.sionate voice cried, followed in an instant by the roar of response:

"_Hosanna to the son of David._"

It was half-way round, at the foot of the church steps, that the German girl was laid; and as the prelates drew near Monsignor looked rapidly to this side and that to identify her.

Ah! there she lay, still with closed patient eyes and colourless face, in the outer circle facing inwards towards the pulpit. A doctor knelt on either side of her--one of them the young man who had announced her coming into the hall this morning, with a rosary between his fingers. It was known to the crowd generally, Monsignor had learnt, that her case was exceptional; but it had been kept from them as to where she would lie, for fear that the excitement might be too much concentrated.

He looked at her again, intently and carefully--at that waxen, fallen face, her helpless hands clasped across her breast with a string of beads interwoven within them; and even as he looked distrust once more surged within him, It was impossible, he told himself--in spite of what he had seen that day in spite of that score of leaping figures and the infectious roar that more than twenty times in that short journey had set his pulses a-beat. . . . He pa.s.sed her, quickening his steps a little; then faced about and watched.

Slowly came the canopy. Its four bearers sweated visibly with the effort; and the face of the bishop who bore the monstrance was pale and streaked with moisture from the countless movements he had made. Behind him came row after row of downcast faces, men and women of every Religious Order on earth, and the tapers seen in perspective appeared as four almost continuous waving lines of soft light.

There had been a longer pause than usual since the last exulting cry of a sick man healed; and the silence between the cries from the pulpit grew continually more acute. And yet nothing happened.

The bishop was signing now outwards over a man who lay next the German, with his face altogether hidden in a white and loathsomely suggestive mask; but there was no stir in answer. The bishop turned inwards and signed over a woman, and again there was no movement.

"Thou art the Resurrection and the Life," cried the voice from the pulpit.

"_Thou art the Resurrection and the Life,_" answered the amphitheatre, as the bishop turned again outwards.

Monsignor heard him sigh with the effort, and with the consciousness too, perhaps, of who it was that lay here; he lifted the monstrance; the eyes of the girl opened. As he signed to left and right she smiled. As he brought the monstrance back she unclasped her hands and sat up.

(V)

The three priests stood together that evening on the high roof of a Carmelite priory, on the other side of the river, half a mile away, yet opposite the grotto, as the German girl came down to make her thanksgiving.

From where they stood it was impossible to make out a single detail of that at which they looked. The priory stood on high ground, itself towering above the crowded roofs that lay between them and the river; and opposite rose up the ma.s.ses of the hill at the foot of which was the sacred place itself.

It resembled to-night a picture all of fire. The churches on the left were outlined in light, up to the last high line of roof against the dark starlit sky; and upon the s.p.a.ces in between lay the soft glow from the tens of thousands of torches that the crowds carried beneath. Above the grotto the precipitous face of the cliff showed black and sombre, except where the zigzag paths shone out in liquid wandering lines, where the folks stood packed together, unseeing, yet content to be present. In front, at the foot, over the lake of fire where the main body of wors.h.i.+ppers stood, glowed softly the cavern where Mary's feet had once rested, and where her power had lived now far beyond the memory of the oldest man present.

From this distance few sounds could be heard except the steady murmur of voices of those countless thousands. It was as the steady roll of far-off wheels or of the tide coming in over a rocky beach; and even the sudden roar of welcome and triumph that announced that the little procession had left the Place was soft and harmonious. There followed a long pause.

Then, on a sudden, trumpets rang out, clear as silver, sharpened and reverberated by the rocks from which they sounded, and like the voice of a dreaming giant, came the great words, articulate and distinct:--

"Magnificat anima mea Dominum."

"And you, Monsignor," asked Dom Adrian, as they stood half an hour later, still watching the lines of light writhe this way and that as the crowds went home, "you have asked Our Lady to give you back your memory?"

"I was at the grotto this afternoon," he said. "It is not for me."

"Then there will be something better instead," smiled the young monk.

CHAPTER VIII

(I)

"So you go back to England to-morrow?" said Father Adrian, as they sat a night or two later in the guest-room of the French Benedictines, where the monk was staying.

"We start to-morrow night," said the old priest. "Monsignor is infinitely better, and we must both get back to work. And you?"

"I stay here to finish the revising of my book," said the monk quietly.

The man who had lost his memory had piled impression on impression during the last forty-eight hours. There was first the case of the German girl. She had been examined by the same doctors as those who had certified to her state half an hour before the cure, and the result had been telegraphed over the entire civilized world. The fracture was completely repaired; and although she was still weak from her long illness, she gained strength every hour. Then there was the case of the Russian. He too had received back his sight, although not instantaneously; it had come to him step by step. An hour ago he had been p.r.o.nounced healed, and had pa.s.sed the usual tests in the examination-rooms.

But these cases, and others like them which the priests had investigated, were only a part of the total weight of impressions which Monsignor Masterman had received. He had seen here for himself a relation between Science and Faith--a co-operation between them, with the exigencies of each duly weighed and observed by them both--which set Nature and Supernature before him in a completely new light. As Mr. Manners had said at Westminster a week or two before, the two seemed to have met at last, each working from different quarters, on a platform on which they could work side by side. The facts were no longer denied by either party. Science allowed for the mysteries of Faith; Faith recognized the achievements of Science. Each granted that the other possessed a perfectly legitimate sphere of action in which the methods proper to that sphere were imperative and final. The scientist accepted the fact that Religion had a right to speak in matters that lay beyond scientific data; the theologian no longer denounced as fraudulent or disingenuous the claims of the scientist to exercise powers that were at last found to be natural. Neither needed to establish his own position by attacking that of his partner, and the two accordingly, without prejudice or pa.s.sion, worked together to define yet further that ever-narrowing range of ground between the two worlds which up to the present remained unmapped. Suggestion, for example, acting upon the mutual relations of body and mind, was recognized by the theologian as a force sufficient to produce phenomena which in earlier days he had claimed as evidently supernatural. And, on the other side, the scientist no longer made wild acts of faith in nature, in attributing to her achievements which he could not for an instant parallel by any deliberate experiment. In a word, the scientist repeated, "I believe in G.o.d "; and the theologian, "I recognize Nature."

Monsignor sat apart in silence, while the others talked.

He had thought in Rome that he had reached interior conviction; he understood now in Lourdes that his conviction had not gone so deep as he had fancied. He had learned in Versailles that the Church could reorganize society, in Rome that she could reconcile nations; he had seen finally in Lourdes that she could resolve philosophies.

And this very discovery made him the more timid. For he began to wonder whether there were not yet further discoveries which he would have to make--workings out and ill.u.s.trations of the principles he had begun to perceive. How, for example, he began to ask himself, would the Church deal with those who did not recognize her claims--those solitary individuals or groups here and there who, he knew, still clung pathetically to the old dreams of the beginning of the century--to the phantom of independent thought and the intoxicating nightmare of democratic government? It was certain now that these things were dreams--that it was ludicrously absurd to imagine that a man could profitably detach himself from Revelation and the stream of tradition and development that flowed from it; that it was ridiculous to turn creation upside-down and to attempt to govern the educated few by the uneducated many. Yet people did occasionally hold impossible and absurd theories. . . . How, then, would these be treated by the Church when once her power had been finally consolidated? How was she to reconcile the gentleness of the Christian spirit with the dogmatism of the Christian claim? . . . He recalled one or two hints that Father Jervis had let drop, and he was conscious of a touch of fear.

He woke up to externals again at the sound of a sentence or two from the monk.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "What was that?"

"I was saying that the news from Germany is disquieting."

"Why?"

"Oh! nothing definite. They expect trouble. They say that the Emperor is extraordinarily interested in this girl's case, and that the Socialists of Berlin are watching him. Berlin is their last stronghold, you know."

"By the way," interrupted Father Jervis suddenly, "I've enquired about that man with the curious name--Zola. I find he had quite a vogue at one time. And now I come to think of it, I believe Manners mentioned him."

"Zola?" mused the monk. "Yes, I'm nearly sure I've heard of him.

Wasn't he an Elizabethan?"