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Page 21
Day after day slipped past in the lotus-eating land whose unreality
makes it almost a change of planets from every-day America. Each day
brought health with great rapidity, and soon each day brought new
friends. Mrs. Newbold was full of charm, and the devotion between the
ill mother and the blooming daughter was an attractive sight. Yet the
girl was not light-hearted. Often the mother, waking in the night, heard
a shivering sigh through the open door between their rooms; often she
surprised a harassed look in the young eyes which, with all that the
family had gone through, was new to them. But Katherine laughed at
questions, and threw herself so gayly into the pleasures which came to
her that Mrs. Newbold, too happy to be analytical, let the straws pass
and the wind blow where it would.
There came a balmy morning when the two were to take, with half a dozen
others, the long drive to St. George's. The three carriage-loads set off
in a pleasant hubbub from the white-paved courtyard of the hotel, and as
Katherine settled her mother with much care and many rugs, her camera
dropped under the wheels. Everybody was busy, nobody was looking, and
she stooped and reached for it in vain. Then out of a blue sky a voice
said:
"I'll get it for you," She was pushed firmly aside and a figure in a
blue coat was grovelling adventurously beneath the trap. It came out,
straightened; she had her camera; she was staring up into a face which
contemplated her, which startled her, so radiant, so everything
desirable it seemed to her to be. The man's eyes considered her a moment
as she thanked him, and then he had lifted his hat and was gone,
running, like a boy in a hurry for a holiday, toward the white stone
landing. An empty sail flopped big at the landing, and the girl stood
and looked as he sprang in under it and took the rudder. Joe, the head
porter, the familiar friend of every one, was stowing in a rug.
"That gen'l'man's the Reverend Norman North,--he come by the _Trinidad_
last Wednesday; he's sailin' to St. George's," Joe volunteered. "Don't
look much like a reverend, do he?" And with that the carriage had
started.
Seeing the sights at St. George's, they came to the small old church,
on its western side a huge flight of steps, capped with a meek doorway;
on its eastern end a stone tower guarding statelily a flowery graveyard.
The moment the girl stepped inside, the spell of the bright peace which
filled the place caught her. The Sunday decorations were still there,
and hundreds of lilies bloomed from the pillars; sunshine slanted
through the simple stained glass and lay in colored patches on the
floor; there were square pews of a bygone day; there was a pulpit with a
winding stair; there were tablets on the walls to shipwrecked sailors,
to governors and officers dead here in harness. The clumsy woodwork, the
cheap carpets, the modest brasses, were in perfect order; there were
marks everywhere of reverent care.
"Let me stay," the girl begged. "I don't want to drive about. I want to
stay in this place. I'll meet you at the hotel for lunch, if you'll
leave me." And they left her.
The verger had gone, and she was quite alone. Deep in the shadow of a
gallery she slid to her knees and hid her face. "O God!" she
whispered,--"O God, forgive me!" And again the words seemed torn from
her--"O God, forgive me!"
There were voices in the vestibule, but the girl in the stress of her
prayer did not hear.
"Deal not with us according to our sins, neither reward us according to
our iniquities," she prayed, the accustomed words rushing to her want,
and she was suddenly aware that two people stood in the church. One of
them spoke.
"Don't bother to stay with me," he said, and in the voice, it seemed,
were the qualities that a man's speech should have--strength, certainty,
the unteachable tone of gentle blood, and beyond these the note of
personality, always indescribable, in this case carrying an appeal and
an authority oddly combined. "Don't stay with me. I like to be alone
here. I'm a clergyman, and I enjoy an old church like this. I'd like to
be alone in it," and a bit of silver flashed.
If the tip did it or the compelling voice, the verger murmured a word
about luncheon, was gone, and the girl in her dim corner saw, as the
other turned, that he was the rescuer of her camera, whose name was,
Joe had said and she remembered, Norman North. She was about to move, to
let herself be seen, when the young man knelt suddenly in the
old-fashioned front pew, as a good child might kneel who had been taught
the ways of his mother church, and bent his dark head. She waited
quietly while this servant spoke to his Master. There was no sound in
the silent, sun-lanced church, but outside one heard as from far away
the noises of the village. Katherine's eyes rested on the bowed head,
and she wondered uncertainly if she should let him know of her presence,
or if it might not be better to slip out unnoticed, when in a moment he
had risen and was swinging with a vigorous step up the little corkscrew
stairway of the pulpit. There he stood, facing the silence, facing the
flower-starred shadows, the empty spaces; facing her, but not seeing
her. And the girl forgot herself and the question of her going as she
saw the look in his face, the light which comes at times to those who
give their lives to holiness, since the day when the people, gazing at
Stephen, the martyr, "saw his face as it had been the face of an
angel." When his voice floated out on the dim, sunny atmosphere it
rested as lightly on the silence as if the notes of an organ rolled
through its own place. He spoke a prayer of a service which, to those
whose babyhood has been consecrated by it, whose childhood and youth
have listened to its simple and stately words, whose manhood and
womanhood have been carried over many a hard place by the lift of its
familiar sentences,--he spoke a prayer of that service which is less
dear only, to those bred in it, than the voices of their dearest. As a
priest begins to speak to his congregation he began, and the hearer in
the shadow of the gallery listened, awed:
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