William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

The deep voice of the organ filled the warmed air with a thousand vibrations. Afar off were bright-burning candles and solemn songs. He pressed his temples closer to the chill flags. He panted like a hunted deer.

Hours later, when he staggered out of the enervating warmth of the cathedral, the night was pitch dark. The chill airs of the evening made his jaws clap together. He did not know where he was. Moving with little tottering steps, his flesh as water, his eyes blind with night, he followed the line of railings that engirdled the cathedral. He clutched at them; he hugged them blindly to his bosom; he was like a mariner in uncharted seas who has lost his compass. He followed the course of the railings, dragging one foot after another almost as one who is bereft of the power of volition. It took him nearly an hour to complete the circuit of the railings, and then he found himself back again at the point whence he had started, the steps of the cathedral.

Still clinging to the railings he started to go round them again. Within him the instinct was paramount that if he did not keep his faint limbs in motion he was lost. He would perish in the streets of the great city. Passing each iron rail in its turn through his numb hands he went on and on, and in the process of time returned again whence he started to the steps of the cathedral.

For the third time he set out to traverse the line of the railings. He was very cold. Yet the flesh must continue to obey, or that nameless destination which he had ceased to remember would never be won. As before, railing by railing, he made the circuit, and for the third time returned whence he started. Without an instant’s tarrying he set out again. The impassive face upon the cathedral boomed the hour of midnight. The dark heavens looked like Erebus. A sharp cold spray of rain was dashed suddenly upon his cheeks.

This blessed succour seemed to give him a flicker of power. “Courage, Achilles!” he muttered faintly. He could not feel his feet as they crept over the wet pavements; they seemed to be poised in the jaws of an abyss. His form seemed to be disembodied in the air of the night. But the flesh was still making its answer; the unending procession of the railings still continued to slide through his hands. Yet his fingers could feel nothing. How soft and vague everything was growing! A delicious softness had begun to creep out of the sharp airs of the night.

As his eyes were closing he grew conscious that a pair of arms were enfolding him.

“My father,” he muttered, “my father.”

He pressed his closed eyes against a garment which was wet yet protective. He was lying against his father’s bosom. His father had followed in his steps as he set out in the morning, and had never been more than fifty yards from him during the whole of the day.

XII

The next day the boy returned to the study of the practical sciences under his father’s guidance. The brief hour of self-reliance, of actual motive power, seemed to pass almost as suddenly as it had come. Yet although he had been ground down into the dust again, the sap and fibre had appeared to increase in his frame. He went alone no more into the streets of the great city in search of pieces of silver, but the need of obtaining them by his own address was never absent from his thoughts.