She went to the window and pushed it wider open. Before her, springing like a long-stemmed flower towards the blue of the sky, was the campanile of Westminster Cathedral. Behind its rose-pink summit white clouds drifted, and round it circled white pigeons. It was a tower that Cecily had learned to love, its very incongruity in the midst of London roofs appealing to her imagination. It was an exotic flower, blossoming radiantly above the gray heart of London. She looked at it to-day with a fresh sense of its beauty. It affected her like the glamour of an Eastern story. With a keen sense of gratitude she realized that beauty once more had power to thrill her. She remembered how at the Priory last year the blue sky had been hateful, the sunshine vain. “I’m getting better,” she half whispered. “When it doesn’t matter at all, any more, I shall be well. Perhaps some day I shall be well.” The thought brought a great wave of consolation. She went quickly into her bedroom, put on her hat and gloves, and without waiting for the lift, walked downstairs.
As she turned the corner of the street, the façade of the cathedral came into sight. Cecily let her eyes wander over its galleries, its recesses, its stone carvings, its mysterious little staircases, its strange domes, and pillared loggias. She loved it all, curious and fantastic as it was. She had not meant to go in, but as she passed, she saw that the unfinished doors of the great entrance were open, and far away in the recesses of what looked like a shadowy cave, the candles burned like a row of stars. Cecily paused. A palm-branch laid between two chairs served as a barricade to the scarcely completed entrance, and she went in at the side door, and sat down just within. She knew the interior of the cathedral well, but to-day its likeness to some gigantic work of nature—a great branching sea-cave perhaps—struck her more forcibly than ever. The uncovered brickwork in its ruggedness and simplicity heightened this effect. It was wonderful now with a mosaic of sunshine which, filtering through the small panes of the west windows, covered the brickwork between the mighty arches with a design in gold. Far beneath, the choir itself was in shadow. In shadow also was the great red cross, with the pallid Christ, suspended, as it seemed, in mid-air.
A service was going on, and from behind curtains, at the back of the altar, came the sound of singing. The sweet boys’ voices filled the vaulted spaces above the altar as though clouds of incense had melted into song. An unfinished chapel on the right, near the door, was almost concealed by scaffolding, over which hung cloths of sacking, but between the folds of this screen Cecily caught a glimpse of one of the mosaic workers—a girl, evidently mounted upon an improvised platform, for Cecily saw only her dark head high up against an already completed background of mosaic. The chapel was flooded with dusty golden sunlight, in the brightness of which her young face looked vague and indistinct. Her right hand moved swiftly as she worked at the halo round the head of a saint. Through a veil of golden haze, Cecily had a vision of burnished silver and gold, of peacock color and rose, lining the walls of the chapel, and her thoughts were carried back to the mediæval artisans in cathedrals now hoary with age; to the workers of long ago whose busy hands are dust. She thought of possible years to come, when the golden halo of that saint should be dim with age, and, like the myriads of artisans before her, the girl-worker should have passed into oblivion.
The service had ceased, but Cecily still sat on, in a sort of dream. She saw in the distance a procession of dim purple-robed figures with white cassocks come down from the choir-loft and disappear. The space before the altar was empty. Silence had fallen, but she did not move.
The cathedral had laid its spell upon her. She felt it like a quiet hand upon her heart. By its actual religious significance, in a narrow sense at least, she was not affected. But in so far as it stood for something detached from the fever and the fret of human existence, it began to assume a great meaning. For the first time in her life she longed for a serenity which should lift her above the storms of passion; for interests independent of the love of man. It was characteristic of Cecily, that, desiring a thing strongly, she should definitely try to gain it.
What was the first step for her, individually, towards spiritual freedom? Surely to create. It was the craving of her whole nature. She longed for freedom; so only could she be free. Then and there she began to think out and plan in detail an idea which long ago she had been too happy, and lately too wretched, to translate into writing. The mosaic of sunshine faded from the walls, the great church grew dim while she sat, still thinking. When at last she rose, and, a little dazed, stepped from the twilight of the nave into the street, the sun had sunk below the opposite houses, and the saffron-colored sky told of evening. Cecily put back her head, and with her eyes followed the soaring campanile till they rested on the cross which at its summit pierced the quiet sky.
With no sense of incongruity, but with a curious feeling of gratitude, she reflected upon the nature of her meditation within the building to which that tower belonged. A few moments later she reached her own doorstep, and that same evening she began to write.
CHAPTER XII
“MY dear!” said Lady Wilmot, as her motor-car stopped in Dover Street before her club. “Who’d have thought of seeing you?” The man opened the door, and she descended with a rustle of silks to shake hands with Rose Summers, who was passing. “What are you doing away from your country cottage? I thought you never left off holding your children’s hands for a minute. Come in and have some tea,” she exclaimed in one breath.
Rose hesitated. “I succumb to tea,” she said, after a second’s pause, “though I’ve enough shopping to do to last a week.”