“Your prayers are requested for your friend David Blaize,” it said, “who is lying dangerously ill.”
Then the three remaining prayers were said, but before the final hymn was given out, there came another pause, and the Head rose. He spoke more intimately now.
“You will all want to know what news I have to give you,” he said, “so before we finish the service I will tell you. I saw David Blaize just before chapel. He was quite conscious and not frightened at all. He knew quite well, for his father had told him, that he was in extreme danger. I only saw him for a minute, but I said we were going to pray for him this evening, as we have done. Perhaps you would like to hear what he said to me.”
The Head paused a moment, began once, and then mastered his voice better.
“He said, ‘Thanks awfully, sir. That’ll do me good.’ ”
A little rustle and stir went round chapel, and all that any one had known of David came and stood quite close to him. Bags, sitting at the end of the seat of the sixth form, leaned forward, putting his head on his hands. Frank, who had come down an hour before, just looked at the Head, waiting.
Then the Head spoke again.
“I have told you this on purpose,” he said, “to show you how he faces death, if it is that God wishes him to face. Also to show you that, as he still hopes to live, we must hope it with him in all the power that prayer gives us. But he faces death with all the—the gay courage with which he faced that which has brought him into peril of it. There are many of you who loved him, and I am among them, and we must be level with him in our courage. Now we will sing the hymn, ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us.’ ”
The whole school, of course, knew what had happened. Two days before a young horse harnessed to a light cart, and frightened by a traction-engine, had bolted straight down the steep High Street at Marchester, full at its lower end with the crowded traffic of market-day, and the driver had been pitched off the box, so that it galloped on, unchecked and mad with fright. At the moment, David, with a bag of macaroons which he had just bought, came out of school-shop; throwing the parcel to Bags, who was with him, he had shouted out, “Catch hold, and don’t eat any,” and had rushed straight out into the road, taking a header, so to speak, at the horse. He had got hold of a rein, and then, still holding it, had been jerked off his feet, and the wheel of the cart had gone over him. But the horse was checked, and when they picked the boy up they found that the rein was still wrapped round his wrist.