The Cathedral | Page 8

behind her, her
companions, girls of about eighteen for the most part, clasped their
hands and shut their eyes; and slowly a change came over them.
Under the breath of prayer, the soul, buried under the ashes of worldly
cares, flamed up, and the air that fanned it made it glow like an inward
fire, lighting up the thick cheeks, the stolid, heavy features. It smoothed
out the crackled surface of wrinkles, softened in the younger women
the vulgarity of chapped red lips, gave colour to the dull brown flesh,
overflowed in the smile on lips half parted in silent prayer, in timid
kisses offered with simple good faith, and returned no doubt in an
ineffable thrill by the Holy Child they had cherished from His birth,
who, since the martyrdom of Calvary, had grown to be the Spouse of
Sorrows.
They felt, perhaps, something of the raptures of the Blessed Virgin who
is Mother and Wife and at the same time the beatified Handmaid of
God.
And in the silence a voice as from the remotest ages arose, and the
ancestress said, "Pater Noster," and they all repeated the prayer, and
then dragged themselves on their knees up the steps of the way of
crosses, where the fourteen upright posts, each with its cast metal

bas-relief, bordered a serpentine path, dividing the statues from the
groups. Thus they went forward, stopping long enough to recite an Ave
on each step they climbed, and then, helping themselves with their
hands, they mounted to the next. And when the rosary was ended the
old woman rose, and they solemnly followed her into the church, where
they all prayed a long time, prostrate before the altar; and the
grandmother stood up, gave each holy water at the door, led her flock
to the spring where they all drank again, and then they went away,
without speaking a word, one after another up the narrow path, ending
as black specks just as they had come, and vanishing on the horizon.
"Those women have been two days and two nights crossing the
mountains," said a priest, coming up to Durtal. "They started from the
depths of Savoy, and have travelled almost without rest to spend a few
minutes here; they will sleep to night in a cow-house or a cave, as
chance may direct, and to-morrow by daybreak they will start again on
their weariful way."
Durtal was overpowered by the radiant splendour of such faith.
It was possible, then, to find souls ever young, souls ever new, souls as
of undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not, outside
cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges, and amid
this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who, without
knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God, while
they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation.
They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these
women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle
ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless
ideas, hardly able to express themselves, hardly knowing how to read,
wept with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, whom they
compelled by their humility and single-heartedness to appear, to
become actual to their mind.
"Yes, it was but just that the Virgin should cherish them and choose
them above all others to be Her vessels of election.
"Yes. For they are unburdened with the dreadful weight of doubt, they

are endowed with almost total ignorance of evil.
"And yet are there not some souls too experienced, alas! in the culture
of wrong-doing, who nevertheless find mercy at Her feet? Has not the
Virgin other sanctuaries less frequented, less well known, which yet
have outlived the wear of time, the various caprice of the ages; very
ancient churches where She welcomes you if you love Her in solitude
and silence?"
And Durtal, coming back to Chartres once more, looked about him at
the persons who were waiting in the warm shade of the indefinite forest
till the Virgin should awake, to worship Her.
With dawn, now beginning to break, this forest of the church under
whose shade he was sitting became absolutely unintelligible. The
shapes, faintly sketched, were transformed in the gloom which blurred
every outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the
immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in
wells that held them tightly in the rigid circle of their margin; and the
night, now almost diaphanous on the level of the ground, was thicker as
it rose, cutting them off at the spring of the branches, which were still
invisible.
Durtal, as he raised his head, gazed into deep obscurity unlighted by
moon or