He put his watch and the piece of paper back in his pocket, got up and went out into the center of the nave. He walked back a little way toward the west door, and then stopped. There it was, the other Michael clock. It was just as it had been described to him. Above the beautiful gilded clock face, with winged angels in the spandrels, was a canopied platform. To one side of it Michael in gold armor sat his white horse, his lance in rest and his visor down. On the other side the dragon’s head, blue and green with a crimson forked tongue, rose wickedly from a heap of scaly coils. The stillness of both figures was ominous. They waited only for the striking of the bell to have at each other. It was a wonderful bit of work. The tip of Isaac’s nose glowed rosily, so happy was he in the contemplation of this clock. And to think that he had lived in the city all these years and had not seen it! To think he had lived here for nearly a lifetime and never come inside the Cathedral. Fool that he had been! Slowly he turned his back on the clock and looked down the length of the Cathedral. For a moment he ducked his head and gasped, as though a wave had crashed over him, and then he went steadily on down the nave.
For an hour he wandered around the Cathedral. Once, far away, he heard the clock strike twelve, and knew that Michael was fighting the dragon. The splendor, the vastness and the beauty no longer terrified him, though they made him feel like an ant. For he was at home. He was not able to take in very much today but he would come again and learn this glory by heart, like a man turning over the leaves of some grand old painted book. But the Dean would not be with him to turn the leaves. He thought this, and suddenly the tears started to his eyes. A few trickled down his cheeks and he fished in the tail pocket of his old coat for his scarlet spotted handkerchief. He blew his nose and was startled by the noise it made in the great silence of the place. It was not fitting. Tears were not fitting. He put his handkerchief away and looked about him.
He was in a small enclosed place like a chapel, where a lady lay upon her tomb. Close to the tomb was a plain stone altar and beside it a recess in the wall, like a cupboard, though the door was no longer there. Over it was a small, beautifully carved arch. Though he did not know what it was it appealed instantly to the craftsman of small things that he was himself and he walked over to it. He had never heard of an ambry but he thought to himself that some holy thing had once been housed here. It was a house, the Cathedral in miniature. He touched the tracery of the small arch with his fingers, delighting in it, and then without realizing what he was doing he put his right hand inside the recess, and found that the roof of the tiny place was carved as a replica of the great ribbed roof of the choir. With his heart pounding with excitement he slipped his fingers along the delicate curved flutings, like the convolutions of a sea shell. They were hidden away here in the darkness where no one could see them. Here was this loveliness, and his craftsman’s fingers could read the beauty as the eyes of a musician read a score of music, and it was hidden. But the treasure within had known of it. Love, that had made it, had known. None else.
“The watch cock, Mr. Peabody.”
He stood where he was, without moving. He had heard the Dean’s voice, though not with his ears. Yet he had never heard anything more clearly. There was a chair near him and presently he moved to it and sat down. Yes, that is how it is, he thought. He had known it when he had sat on the bench by the pillar. Love was vast and eternal as this great fane appeared to his sight, yet so small that he could possess it hiddenly, as once the cupboard in the wall had housed its treasure. He did possess it. When his good times lifted him to the place of safety he was always in love with something. The love of Adam Ayscough was not dead but at every step that he had taken within the Cathedral had accompanied him. Love, and nothing else, was eternal. “Love is the Lord by whom we escape death.”
He sat and thought of his father and he no longer hated him. “Now I shall get to know him better,” he said. “And I’ll get to know Emma.” He sat for a long time and thought to himself that he wished he knew how to pray, yet he knew, untaught, how by abandonment of himself to let the quietness take hold of him. Then he got up and wandered away, and found a door and went through it. Outside, sitting on a stone bench by a small glowing brazier, was old Tom Hochicorn.
“Good day, Isaac,” said Tom. “Been in there long?”
Far up above their heads Michael struck his bell. Isaac took out the Dean’s watch and verified the fact that Michael was correct in recording the hour as one o’clock. “About an hour, Tom,” he said.
Tom Hochicorn’s eyes twinkled with amusement. He said, “So it’s got you, eh? I allus thought it would.”
Isaac walked out into the sunshine and said to himself, “I shall make the celestial clock again. I shall make it for Mrs. Ayscough.”
The Dean's Watch Page 36
