Jeremy regarded this in the light of a victory and marched away, his head more in the air than ever. He should now have hurried home. The midday chimes had rung out and Jeremy's duties were performed. But he lingered, listening to the last notes of the chimes, hearing the cries of the Cathedral choir-boys as they moved across the green to the choir-school, watching all the people hurry up and down the street. Ah, there was the Castle carriage! Perhaps the old Countess was inside it. He had only seen her once, at some service in the Cathedral to which his mother had taken him, but she had made a great impression on him with her snow-white hair. He had heard people speak of her as “a wicked old woman.” Perhaps she was inside the carriage... but he only saw the Castle coachman and footman and the coronet on the door. It rolled slowly up the hill with its fine air of commanding the whole world—then it disappeared around the corner of the Close.
Jeremy decided then that he would go home across the green and down Orchard Lane. He had a wish to enter the Cathedral for a moment; such a visit would, after all, complete the round of his experiences. He had never entered the Cathedral alone, and now, as he saw it facing him, so vast and majestic and quiet, across the sun-drenched green, he felt a sudden fear and awe. He found a ring in a stone near the west end through which he might fasten Hamlet's lead, then, slowly pushing back the heavy door, he passed inside. The Cathedral was utterly quiet. The vast nave, stained with reflections of purple and green and ruby, was vague and unsubstantial, all the little wooden chairs huddled together to the right and left, leaving a great path that swept up to the High Altar under shafts of light that fell like searchlights from the windows. The tombs and the statues peered dimly from the shadow, and the great east end window, with its deep purple light, seemed to draw the whole nave up into its heart and hold it there. All was space and silence, light and dusk; a little doll of a verger moved in the far distance, an old woman, so quiet that she seemed only a shadow, passed him, wiping the little chairs with a duster.
It seemed to Jeremy that he had never been in the Cathedral before; he stood there, breathless, as though in a moment something must inevitably happen. Although he did not think of it, the moment was one of a sequence that had come to him during the year—his entry into the theatre with his uncle, his first conversation with the sea-captain, the hour when his mother had been so ill, the evening on the beach when Charlotte had been frightened, the time when Hamlet had been lost and he had slept with him under a tree. All these moments had been something more than merely themselves, had had something behind them or inside them for which simply they stood as words stand for pictures. He analysed, of course, nothing, being a perfectly healthy small boy, but if afterwards he looked back these were the moments that he saw as one sees stations on a journey. One day he would know for what they stood.
He simply now waited there as though he expected something to happen. Thoughts slipped through his mind quite casually, whether Hamlet were behaving well outside, what the old lady did when she was tired of dusting, who the stone figure lying near him might be, a figure very fine with his ruff and his peaked beard, his arms folded, his toes pointing upwards, whether the body were inside the stone like a mummy, or underneath the ground some-where; how strangely different the nave looked now from its Sunday show, and what fun it would be to run races all the way down and see who could reach the golden angels over the reredos first; he felt no reverence, and yet a deep reverence, no fear, but, nevertheless, awe; he was warm and happy and comfortable, and yet suddenly, giving a little shudder, he slipped out into the sunlight, released Hamlet and started for home.
II
Back again in the bosom of his family he felt that they were beginning to be aware of his departure.
“What shall we do this evening, Jeremy—your last evening?” said his mother.
Everyone looked at him.
“Oh, I don't know,” he said uncomfortably. “Just as usual, I suppose.”