His smile was like sunshine. “We’ll go to a service together. Will you trust me to choose the place?”
“I want you to.”
“I’ll come for you in the morning,” he said. Then he lifted first one of her hands to his lips and then the other, said, “Good-night!” and was gone, with a military sort of abruptness that was rather an emphasis of his former self than a change from it.
It was easy to know what he had to say to her, that he had chosen to defer until the following day. It had been in all his manner to her; there was no need that he should tell her it was coming; it was a most characteristic postponement and a highly significant one. Why, since he could choose it, should he not select the great Day of the week on which to say the words which he was not less eager to speak than she to hear? That he should do so could but show her how sacred an event it was to him, nor fail to make it quite as sacred to her.
CHAPTER XXII
IN 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 of one 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?”