Dawn of All - Robert Hugh Benson (the read aloud family txt) 📗

articulate now as the listener emerged, rose up a song to Mary, as from one soft and gigantic voice, appealing to Her Presence who for over a century and a half, it seemed, had chosen to dwell here by virtue and influence, the Great Mother of the redeemed and the Consoler of the afflicted, whose Divine Son was even now on His way, as at Cana itself, to turn the water of sorrow into the wine of joy. . . . Then, as the canopy came out, at an imperious gesture from the tiny swaying figure in the pulpit, the music ceased; great trumpets sounded a phrase; there was a rustle and a movement as of a breaking wave as the crowds knelt; and the Pange Lingua rose up in solemn adoration. . . .

As he came down the steps, his eyes quick with tears, he saw for the first time the lines of the sick in the place to which he had been told to look. There they lay, some four thousand in number, placed side by side in two great circling rows round the whole arena, a fringe of pain to the exultant crowds, in litters laid so close together that they seemed but two great continuous beds, and between them the high flower-strewn platform along which Jesus of Nazareth should pass by. There they lay, all of them bathed to-day in the strange water that had sprung up a hundred and fifty years ago under the fingers of a peasant child, waiting for the sacramental advent of Him who had made both that water and those for whose healing it was designed.

And yet not all were cured--not perhaps one in ten of all who came in confidence. That surely was wonderful. . . . Was it then that that same Sovereign Power who had permitted the pain elected to retain His own sovereignty, and to show that the Lawgiver was fettered by no law? One thing at least was certain, if those records which the priest had examined this morning were to be believed, that no receptiveness of temperament, no subjective expectancy of cure, guaranteed that the cure would take place. Natures that had responded marvellously in the mental laboratories seemed ineffective here; natures that were inert and immovable under the influence of sympathetic science leapt up here to meet the call of some Voice whose very existence a hundred years ago had been in doubt.

The front of the long procession, Monsignor saw, had reached now the doors of the basilica, and would presently, after making the complete round, pour down into the arena to allow the Blessed Sacrament to move more quickly. It was an exquisite sight, even from here, as the prelate set foot on the platform and began to move to the left. The long lines of tapers, four deep, went like some great serpent, rippling with light, above the heads of the sick; and here and there in the slopes of the crowded spectators shone out other lights, steady as stars in the motionless half-lit evening air. Then, as he went, slowly, pace by pace, he remembered the sick and glanced down, as the music on a sudden ceased.

Ah! there they lay, those living crucifixes . . . . shrouded in white, their faces on either side turned inwards that they might see their Lord. . . . There lay a woman, her face shrivelled with some internal horror--some appalling disease which even the science of these days dared not handle, or at least had not; her large eyes staring with an almost terrible intensity, fixed, it seemed, in her head, yet waiting for the Vision that even now might make her whole. There a child tossed and moaned and turned away his head. There an old man crouched forward upon his litter, held up on either side by two men in the uniform of the brancardiers. . . . And so, in endless lines, they lay; from every nation under heaven: Chinese were there, he saw, and negroes; and the very air in which he walked seemed alight with pain and longing.

A great voice broke in suddenly on his musings; and, before he could fix his attention as to what it said, the words were taken up by the hundreds of thousands of throats--a short, fervent sentence that rent the air like a thunder-peal. Ah! he remembered now. These were the old French prayers, consecrated by a century of use; and as he passed on, slowly, step by step, watching now with a backward glance the blessing of the sick that had just begun--the sign of the cross made with the light golden monstrance by the bishop who carried it--now the agonized eyes of expectation that waited for their turn, he too began to hear, and to take up with his own voice those piteous cries for help.

"Jesu! heal our sick. . . . Jesu! grant that we may see--may hear--may walk. . . . Thou art the Resurrection and the Life. . . . Lord! I believe; help Thou mine unbelief." Then with an overwhelming triumph: "Hosanna to the Son of David! Hosanna, Hosanna!" Then again, soft and rumbling: "O Mary, conceived without sin, hear us who have recourse to thee."

The sense of a great circumambient Power grew upon him at each instant, sacramentalized, it seemed, by the solemn evening light, and evoked by this tense ardour of half a million souls, and focused behind him in one burning point. . . .

Ah! there was the first miracle! . . . A cry behind him, an eddy in the circle of the sick and the waiting attendants, a figure with shrouding linen fallen from breast and outstretched arms, and then a roar, mighty beyond reckoning, as the whole amphitheatre swayed and cried out in exultation. He saw as in a vision the rush of doctors to the place, and the gesticulating figures that held back the crowd behind the barrier. Then a great moan of relief; and a profound silence as the miracule kneeled again beside the litter which had borne him. Then again the canopy moved on; and the passionate voice cried, followed in an instant by the roar of response:

"Hosanna to the son of David."

* * * * * * *


It was half-way round, at the foot of the church steps, that the German girl was laid; and as the prelates drew near Monsignor looked rapidly to this side and that to identify her.

Ah! there she lay, still with closed patient eyes and colourless face, in the outer circle facing inwards towards the pulpit. A doctor knelt on either side of her--one of them the young man who had announced her coming into the hall this morning, with a rosary between his fingers. It was known to the crowd generally, Monsignor had learnt, that her case was exceptional; but it had been kept from them as to where she would lie, for fear that the excitement might be too much concentrated.

He looked at her again, intently and carefully--at that waxen, fallen face, her helpless hands clasped across her breast with a string of beads interwoven within them; and even as he looked distrust once more surged within him, It was impossible, he told himself--in spite of what he had seen that day in spite of that score of leaping figures and the infectious roar that more than twenty times in that short journey had set his pulses a-beat. . . . He passed her, quickening his steps a little; then faced about and watched.

Slowly came the canopy. Its four bearers sweated visibly with the effort; and the face of the bishop who bore the monstrance was pale and streaked with moisture from the countless movements he had made. Behind him came row after row of downcast faces, men and women of every Religious Order on earth, and the tapers seen in perspective appeared as four almost continuous waving lines of soft light.

There had been a longer pause than usual since the last exulting cry of a sick man healed; and the silence between the cries from the pulpit grew continually more acute. And yet nothing happened.

The bishop was signing now outwards over a man who lay next the German, with his face altogether hidden in a white and loathsomely suggestive mask; but there was no stir in answer. The bishop turned inwards and signed over a woman, and again there was no movement.

"Thou art the Resurrection and the Life," cried the voice from the pulpit.

"Thou art the Resurrection and the Life," answered the amphitheatre, as the bishop turned again outwards.

Monsignor heard him sigh with the effort, and with the consciousness too, perhaps, of who it was that lay here; he lifted the monstrance; the eyes of the girl opened. As he signed to left and right she smiled. As he brought the monstrance back she unclasped her hands and sat up.


(V)

The three priests stood together that evening on the high roof of a Carmelite priory, on the other side of the river, half a mile away, yet opposite the grotto, as the German girl came down to make her thanksgiving.

From where they stood it was impossible to make out a single detail of that at which they looked. The priory stood on high ground, itself towering above the crowded roofs that lay between them and the river; and opposite rose up the masses of the hill at the foot of which was the sacred place itself.

It resembled to-night a picture all of fire. The churches on the left were outlined in light, up to the last high line of roof against the dark starlit sky; and upon the spaces in between lay the soft glow from the tens of thousands of torches that the crowds carried beneath. Above the grotto the precipitous face of the cliff showed black and sombre, except where the zigzag paths shone out in liquid wandering lines, where the folks stood packed together, unseeing, yet content to be present. In front, at the foot, over the lake of fire where the main body of worshippers stood, glowed softly the cavern where Mary's feet had once rested, and where her power had lived now far beyond the memory of the oldest man present.

From this distance few sounds could be heard except the steady murmur of voices of those countless thousands. It was as the steady roll of far-off wheels or of the tide coming in over a rocky beach; and even the sudden roar of welcome and triumph that announced that the little procession had left the Place was soft and harmonious. There followed a long pause.

Then, on a sudden, trumpets rang out, clear as silver, sharpened and reverberated by the rocks from which they sounded, and like the voice of a dreaming giant, came the great words, articulate and distinct:--

"Magnificat anima mea Dominum."

* * * * * * * *


"And you, Monsignor," asked Dom Adrian, as they stood half an hour later, still watching the lines of light writhe this way and that as the crowds went home, "you have asked Our Lady to give you back your memory?"

"I was at the grotto this afternoon," he said. "It is not for me."

"Then there will be something better instead," smiled the young monk.


CHAPTER VIII


(I)

"So you go back to England to-morrow?" said Father Adrian, as they sat a night or two later in the guest-room of the French Benedictines, where the monk was staying.

"We start to-morrow night," said the old priest. "Monsignor is