The Altar Steps | Page 2

this splendid excuse to detain his mother for awhile.
"Well, it wasn't ergzackly a dream," he began to improvise. "Because I was awake. And I heard a terrible plump and I said 'what can that be?' and then I was frightened and. . . ."
"Yes, well, my sweetheart, you must tell Mother in the morning."
Mark perceived that he had been too slow in working up to his crisis and desperately he sought for something to arrest the attention of his beloved audience.
"Perhaps my Guardian Angel was beside me all the time, because, look! here's a feather."
He eyed his mother, hoping against hope that she would pretend to accept his suggestion; but alas, she was severely unimaginative.
"Now, darling, don't talk foolishly. You know perfectly that is only a feather which has worked its way out of your pillow."
"Why?"
The monosyllable had served Mark well in its time; but even as he fell back upon this stale resource he knew it had failed at last.
"I can't stay to explain 'why' now; but if you try to think you'll understand why."
"Mother, if I don't have any gas at all, will you sit with me in the dark for a little while, a tiny little while, and stroke my forehead where I bumped it on the knob of the bed? I really did bump it quite hard--I forgot to tell you that. I forgot to tell you because when it was you I was so excited that I forgot."
"Now listen, Mark. Mother wants you to be a very good boy and turn over and go to sleep. Father is very worried and very tired, and the Bishop is coming tomorrow."
"Will he wear a hat like the Bishop who came last Easter? Why is he coming?"
"No darling, he's not that kind of bishop. I can't explain to you why he's coming, because you wouldn't understand; but we're all very anxious, and you must be good and brave and unselfish. Now kiss me and turn over."
Mark flung his arms round his mother's neck, and thrilled by a sudden desire to sacrifice himself murmured that he would go to sleep in the dark.
"In the quite dark," he offered, dipping down under the clothes so as to be safe by the time the protecting candle-light wavered out along the passage and the soft closing of his mother's door assured him that come what might there was only a wall between him and her.
"And perhaps she won't go to sleep before I go to sleep," he hoped.
At first Mark meditated upon bishops. The perversity of night thoughts would not allow him to meditate upon the pictures of some child-loving bishop like St. Nicolas, but must needs fix his contemplation upon a certain Bishop of Bingen who was eaten by rats. Mark could not remember why he was eaten by rats, but he could with dreadful distinctness remember that the prelate escaped to a castle on an island in the middle of the Rhine, and that the rats swam after him and swarmed in by every window until his castle was--ugh!--Mark tried to banish from his mind the picture of the wicked Bishop Hatto and the rats, millions of them, just going to eat him up. Suppose a lot of rats came swarming up Notting Hill and unanimously turned to the right into Notting Dale and ate him? An earthquake would be better than that. Mark began to feel thoroughly frightened again; he wondered if he dared call out to his mother and put forward the theory that there actually was a rat in his room. But he had promised her to be brave and unselfish, and . . . there was always the evening hymn to fall back upon.
_Now the day is over,_ _Night is drawing nigh,_ Shadows of the evening _Steal across the sky._
Mark thought of a beautiful evening in the country as beheld in a Summer Number, more of an afternoon really than an evening, with trees making shadows right across a golden field, and spotted cows in the foreground. It was a blissful and completely soothing picture while it lasted; but it soon died away, and he was back in the midway of a London night with icy stretches of sheet to right and left of him instead of golden fields.
_Now the darkness gathers,_ _Stars begin to peep,_ Birds and beasts and flowers _Soon will be asleep._
But rats did not sleep; they were at their worst and wake-fullest in the night time.
_Jesu, give the weary_ _Calm and sweet repose,_ With thy tenderest blessing _May mine eyelids close._
Mark waited a full five seconds in the hope that he need not finish the hymn; but when he found that he was not asleep after five seconds he resumed:
Grant to little children _Visions bright of Thee;_ Guard the sailors tossing _On