EASTER EVE.
The midnight chimes had just done ringing, and the old church was very still. All day long there had been comers and goers, and the altar had been wreathed, the stone church carpeted, the clustered pillars entwined with flowers and with evergreens. Round the altar, that stood among the carven stalls like a May-shrine in a dark forest-glade, was an amphitheatre of blossoming verdure; boys’ hands had piled up the lilies, the violets, the roses, the fuchsias; and monks’ hands had reared up the pyramid of palm, and ivory magnolia, and many-colored rhododendron beyond. The palms were golden, not green it is true, but they were very precious, and could not be spared to-day from the festive decoration, for they had come from Palestine, and only last Sunday had been offered to the church. An Eastern guest had walked in the procession on Palm Sunday, and had dedicated these lovely foreign boughs to the God of East and West alike.
Everything was ready for the early celebration of the Paschal Mass—even the golden chalice lay under its pall of satin upon the altar of sculptured cedar-wood. Perhaps the transverse timbers of the rare wood had not forgotten the time when the sea-breezes blew on them on Lebanon’s heights, and when the voice of the young crusader, Hugh of Devereux, had bidden them fall in the service of God and help to build him another sepulchre in a Christian land.
“The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars!”
And now there was no one in the old church but the youngest chorister, Benignus, the nephew of the monk Cuthbert. The child was never happy save by the altar, and had no friend but Cuthbert, because he was of the blood of the lords of Devereux, and his poor betrayed mother was no more.
Midnight chimes are sweet, and the child had a weird passion for their sound, and would sit entranced while they slowly rang out an old well-known church-chant. But when they had done, and he thought there was silence, he heard a sound he knew not growing out of the chimes, but different from them, something graver than his childish companions’ prattle, something sweeter than the monks’ low tones, something that seemed like his own soul speaking to itself.
It came from the belfry, straight like an arrow of sound, and muffled itself in a faint echo among the flower-forest round the altar.
And presently he could make out the words:
“I have spoken to God, and offered him the last vows of dying Lent, and woven into song the speechless prayers breathed over and yet trembling on thy jewelled brim.”
And the child knew it was the angel of the bell who spoke.