It was a fortnight after the day when she had picked him out from among all the men of St. Benedict's as Pamela Gwatkin's brother. He was sitting in the same place, and he was very little changed; he was paler, Lucy thought, and he was muffled up round the throat for that warm May day. She couldn't help looking at him. Her eyes would wander over to the bench where he sat, do what she would to keep them fixed in quite an opposite direction.
The Master took such a long time over the Litany that morning. He had read it for so many years in that college chapel, Sunday after Sunday, but he had never read it so slowly as he was reading it to-day. The men yawned and fidgeted as he read, and the old fellows in the stalls opposite looked across with grave, questioning eyes—they would have to elect another Master shortly—and the women-folk kneeling by his side looked up anxiously; but Lucy's eyes had wandered again to the end seat on the last bench, while her lips were murmuring:
'"That it may please Thee to raise up them that fall, and finally to beat down Satan under our feet."'
Wyatt Edgell looked up while she was praying for him—she was distinctly praying for him, she had prayed this very prayer for him every night and morning since Eric had told her how he needed her prayers—and their eyes met.
Lucy was covered with confusion. She was quite sure in that swift momentary glance that he had read her inmost thoughts. She was ashamed that he should know that she had been praying all this time that he should be strengthened and comforted and helped and picked up again when he fell, and that the enemy should be beaten down under his feet. She never looked at that end of the chapel again all the rest of the service.
It was over at last—the long, long Litany and the slow, faltering prayers: the men need not have been so restless, they would not hear them much longer. The old walls would echo another voice soon, and the feeble lips would be repeating another Litany elsewhere.
The old college chapel was full of echoes and shadows; there would be another shadow shortly, and the echo of a tremulous, quavering voice would join those other ancient echoes in the roof. It was a dark, gloomy old chapel; it had been built for hundreds of years, and it was full of old memories. Every bench and stall and desk had a memory of its own, stretching back, far back, into quite early ages—memories of old Masters and Fellows and scholars and undergraduates who had worshipped there through, oh! so many generations.
There was a musty smell of old Masters rising up from the vaults beneath and pervading the chapel, and in the ante-chapel beyond there were monuments on the walls, and brasses—quite lovely old brasses—on the pavement, and great hideous tombs of long dead and gone Masters and Fellows. It was touching to see how they were forgotten after a generation or two; how even their very tomb-stones were hidden away in a corner, and covered up with organ pipes. There was the marble effigy of an old, old Master, whose learning and virtues were recited in a long Latin epitaph on an elaborate tablet hidden away behind the organ.
Everyone had forgotten him years ago, and his old monument was in the way, and so they had covered it up. Music is so much more delightful than old memories. They will all be swept away soon, and a new chapel will be built. There will be no old memories and old ghosts and old storied windows, no decaying woodwork or musty odour of old Masters. It will all be fresh and bright and sweet-smelling and shiny as new paint and varnish can make it, and there will be a new organ with electric stops. It will be dark and shadowy no longer; the old echoes and the old ghosts will all be scared away—they will vanish quite away in the blaze of the new electric lamps with which the chapel will be lighted.
Lucy vanished out of the college chapel almost as rapidly as the ghosts will by-and-by. She did not linger in the cloisters to-day. She hurried back to the lodge, and left Cousin Mary and the Master's wife to toddle back beside the Master.