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.

And presently there rose a sound from the dim-robed altar, and the voice of the angel of the chalice made answer: “My cup is as a bell uplifted, with its song of joy hushed in the very words of God, and drowned in the flood of ruby light that quivers, living and sensitive, within my golden walls.”

“And my cup,” returned the voice of the bell, “is as a chalice inverted, with its saving wealth outpoured in strains that reach the human ken; endowed with a speaking, living tongue that can touch the human heart.”

“I speak of men to God, while my fragile stem bears the wondrous purple flower of the precious blood, and while I am reared aloft with the divine burden weighing on me, even as the cross was reared up high over Jerusalem’s walls.”

“And I speak of God to men while my brazen clangor is heard afar like the trumpets of Israel before the crumbling walls of Jericho.”

And here the soft breeze from the open lancet-windows rustled among the sweet-smelling shrubs around the altar’s base, and, as the night-wind passed over them, their voices seemed to be blended into its sighs, and to have found an interpreter in its fitful sound.

“We are children of many climes, and some of us are exiles in this land, but under this roof we are at home again, and at this festival none of us are strangers. We too, in all our variety, have scarce one blossom among us that is not a chalice or a bell; that holds not high its crimson cup towards heaven to receive the crystal dew, or hangs not its white or purple bell with golden tongue towards the unheeding earth. On the altar of green turf, on the swaying columns of interwoven boughs, on the storm-tossed belfries of vine-surrounded trees, in southern swamp or northern forest, in tropical wilderness or rosy-tinted orchard, everywhere is stamped the semblance of the church, with chalices upreared, with bells anxiously bent human-ward. O brothers of the altar and the tower, let us sing together the same hymn.”

And the child Benignus said softly to himself:

“O God! make my heart a chalice, and my lips a Christian bell.”

The voices of the flower-chorus spoke again, and the lilies of the valley sang a silver peal behind their grass-green curtains:

“Every day we die by thousands, but our seed is borne afar, and drops in some fair nook at last, beside a running brook or beneath a spreading beech, even as the last echo of the unwearied bell that knocks at some heart’s door, far away in the mountains of worldly care, and strikes a well-known, long-silent chord, and draws the exile back to the fruitful plains of God’s own church.”

The voice from the wind-rocked steeple came in swift and loving answer:

“Even so, my blossom-sisters, for to us the word was given to increase and multiply and fill the earth, and at every step bring forth fresh glory and conquer fresh realms for the God of our creation.” Then the living gems stirred again under the breath of the still midnight breeze, and the voice came forth anew as the royal cactus and the purple morning-glories flashed like sun-touched clouds in the dusky foliage:

“Every day our lives are drained and our treasures rifled to adorn with living beauty the banquets of great men, and to strew the halls of marble palaces, and yet every day, as the sun comes forth again, our parent stem is laden once more with exhaustless riches and a more abundant harvest of loveliness, even as the lavished treasures and the scattered wealth of the daily chalice are ever being shed without intermission from the altar into the hearts of thankless men.”

And the sweet low voice came back from the shrouded altar: “Yes, dear emblems of God’s loving prodigality, for hath he not said: ‘Cast your bread upon the waters, and after many days it shall return to thee‘’?”

The scarlet fuchsia shook its clusters of purple bells, planted on a blood-red cross, as if it would say to men that none could proclaim God save they proclaimed him from Calvary. The tall Nile lily, whose cup is as a spotless shroud wrapped round a golden nail, swayed in the night air as if whispering that the way to the resurrection lay across the instruments of the passion: the ivory-tinted roses, the first-born among their kind, whose clustering, half-blown buds made a sculptured reredos of living alabaster behind the altar-cross, wept tears of dew when the midnight breeze shook their curled petals, as if weeping like sinless virgins over the wrongs they knew only by name. A carpet of violets was spread below, the last offering of Lent, the fringes of the sweet pall of penance under whose folds the church spends her yearly vigil of reparation.

The heart of the child Benignus was breaking with joy and love, and he longed to be a flower himself, that he might sing the hymn the living grove had sung.

The voice of the angel of the bell answered his unspoken wish:

“Wish not that thou wert other than that thou art, for Jesus said, ‘Unless ye become even as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’”

And the flowers sighed, and gave forth a sweeter fragrance, because they longed to be little children, and could not.

Then Benignus wished he might be an angel, if he could not be a flower, and the voice from the altar sounded very softly, so low he thought no one could hear it but himself:

“This wish will I put into my cup, and when to-morrow dawns, and Jesus finds the first-fruits of this new Easter laid at his feet, thou shalt have thy answer.”

Then came a soft chorus of welcome and congratulation, breaking forth among the flowery worshippers, but the angel of the bell held his peace.

And in the morning, when the sun flung his golden curtains across the east window and crowned the saints and virgins thereon with richer gems than living monarchs wear, the Paschal procession came winding through All Hallow’s church, and no one missed the little chorister Benignus. But when his turn in the anthem came, a voice seemed to float from some unseen corner, and a shower of bell-like crystal tones rang in triumphant cadence to the very roof, and no one could tell if it were Benignus or an angel singing. The organ ceased, and the monk Cuthbert looked anxiously along the lines of white-robed choristers, but the child was not there. Still the voice sang on, and it seemed as if it floated now from the chalice on the altar to the distant belfry-tower, and then back again to the fragrant forest of exotics in the choir. And Cuthbert, looking up among the half-opened buds of the early roses that were piled up directly over the tabernacle, thought he saw one more lovely than the others just break gently from the frail green stem, and fall in showering petals around the pall-covered chalice, at the very minute the wondrous voice ceased in one long reverberating “Alleluia.”

Then Cuthbert knew who had been singing and where Benignus was, and he sang the “Gloria in Excelsis” as he had never done before.

But the angel of the bell was sad, because the child would have helped him to bear abroad the message of God’s truth to men.