“I know, I know, old chap; you’ve certainly given him more than half a chance, and if you think it pays, all right all right. I think, you know, that Pinch isn’t worth the trouble you’ve taken with him. But I’ll admit that I had no right to call him a sneak. However he hasn’t made good here.”
“Perhaps not,” said Tony. “But I wish he could. Where’s the crowd?”
“Unpacking, I guess. What sort of a summer have you had, old man? We missed you a lot here last spring.”
“Bully—I was down in the mountains, North Carolina. Where were you?”
“Oh, home mostly. Confound! there’s the bell for Chapel. Come on, let’s wander down.”
The two boys made their way, arm in arm, through Standerland corridors, across a moonlight-flooded campus to the Chapel. At the entrance they came face to face with Mr. Roylston; he gave them a short greeting and passed rapidly within. Tony was in high spirits, and waited outside until the last moment, greeting boys he had not seen and an occasional master. He could not help wondering, as he took his seat with a feeling of pride in the Sixth Form rows, if the Doctor would announce who was to be Head Prefect that evening.
But he did not. After the customary short service, an adaptation of Evening Prayer from the Prayer-book, the Head made a few general announcements, including a faculty meeting that evening, and then gave the boys a talk. Doctor Forester was at his best in Chapel. There was a simplicity in his sermons and addresses, a rugged kindly earnestness, lit up by occasional flashes of insight and vision, that made him from the Chapel pulpit a genuine moral and religious force amongst his boys. His theme that evening was the Power of Kindness as a source of happiness and goodness in the life of the school. Tony, as he listened, felt a pang of remorse for his jibes at Mr. Roylston and a keen sting of regret for his difference with Kit; otherwise, on the whole, he thought, he did try to be kind. And he liked what the Doctor said because it put his own views into much better, clearer terms than he could have given them.
Tony, though he had absorbed much of the best that the school and the strong men who made the school could give him, had not consciously been deeply touched or drawn to the religious life of the place. He said his prayers at night; once in a long, long time he read his Bible; he tried to do his duty mostly, he wanted usually to be kind; indeed he usually was kind; and, thought little more about it. His family were all churchmen and he supposed that some time he would be confirmed, but he had not yet been, and indeed had never understood what it was that drew people, especially boys of his age, toward a more personal religion. But to-night, the old familiar hymns, sung with such hearty good will; the gracious cadences of the well-known prayers and psalms; the sense of dependence upon and communion with a Higher Power that breathed in the Doctor’s talk to them: and particularly the soft singing in Latin of an old monastic hymn, set to a Gregorian rhythm which the boys always sang at evening services in the Chapel:—to-night, it all touched him more intimately and deeply than it ever had done before.
“I think I will be confirmed this year, Jimmie,” he said to his room-mate, as they strolled across the campus in the soft night, with their arms about each other’s necks.
“I wish you would,” Jimmie replied, somewhat to his surprise. “I was confirmed last spring, and I’m mighty glad I was.”