As soon as I promised to drive over to the school, Sonia announced her intention of accompanying me. For a year or two O'Rane had been something of a public character in Melton, and with Sam to bring her news of him in the holidays, she had not lacked the material of that hero-worship in which all girls of fifteen appear to indulge. O'Rane liked his sympathetic audience as well as another man, and the two were good friends. On Leave-Out Days he would pace the Southampton road dreaming, as Napoleon may have dreamed at eighteen, his wild, romantic vision steadied and kept in focus by the consciousness of his own proved endurance and concentration. Sonia would meet him and trot patiently alongside while he cried to the rolling heavens. Then and now I felt and feel a strange embarrassment in hearing him: he was so unrestrained and lacking in conventional self-consciousness that my skin pricked with a sudden infectious emotion which I tried to suppress. He reminded me of a great actor in everyday clothes declaiming Shakespeare in a fashionable drawing-room. At this time the only two souls on earth who believed in the reality of his dreams were Sonia and—the dreamer.
We panted and clanked through the Forest, pulled up by the roadside to let the boiling water in our radiator cool down and finally arrived at Big Gateway as the school came out of Chapel and wandered up and down Great Court waiting for Roll Call. We watched Burgess coming out of Cloisters and through the Archway, struggling with gown and hood, stole and surplice, all rolled into a tubular bundle and flung over one shoulder like a military overcoat.
"What went ye forth for to see, laddie?" he inquired, as we shook hands. "A reed shaken by the wind?"
"We've come to take O'Rane away with us, sir," I answered.
He sighed pensively, and, as he shook his head, the breeze played with his silky white hair.
"Canst thou find no ram taken by his horns in a thicket?" he demanded.
"What sort of captain did he make, sir?" I asked.
Burgess stroked his long beard and looked from me to Sonia and back again to me.
"Greater love hath no man than this," he said, "that a man lay down his life for his friends. He is an austere man, yet reapeth not that he did not sow, neither gathereth he up that he did not straw. And at the sound of his voice the young men will leave all and follow him even to the isles of Javan and Gadire." He paused till the bell for Roll Call had finished ringing. "Nicodemus, come and see."