The Cathedral | Page 8

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 star.
Looking up still, but straight before him, he saw in the air, through the hazy twilight, sword-blades already bright, gigantic blades without hilts or handles, thinner towards the point; and these blades, standing on end at an immense height, appeared in the gloom they cut, to be patterned with vague intaglios or in ill-defined relief.
As he peered into space to the right and left, he was aware of a gigantic panoply on each side at a vast height, resting on blocks of darkness, and consisting of a colossal shield riddled with holes, hanging above five broader swords, without hilts, but damascened on