Chapter X: Part 10

Now she was nearing her goal--had come, indeed, almost within range of Monserrato's message. But there was Barcelona to go through first; that wild hell of intrigue and rebellion, the threshold of unbelief. Its noise, its tumult, its gaiety, its dissipation, lay visibly before her as the train crept slowly in, on its long pause in the station. She got out wearily--it was strange how her limbs had dragged these last few days--and took her breakfast in the little _fonda_. She sat there motionless, watching the hurrying cosmopolitan crowd of passengers go swiftly to and fro. Barcelona harbours the refuse of many nations, and of itself breeds anarchy and terror. But on beyond--not very far the great pinnacles of Monserrato were raised high in the heavens. Barcelona might lie and cheat and steal and vomit infamy; nothing could break the force of those eternal hills beyond, and nothing sully them.

She had still a journey of three hours before her. The train came at last and she got in. This was not the season for tourists; in all probability she would be alone in the convent. She knew what she had to expect: a bare room, with its plain bed and chair, a crucifix upon the wall, the mere necessities of life--more, after all, than had been offered to the Mother of God at Bethlehem.

It seemed to her as she approached the little station that she caught an echo of faint Gregorian music, the only music that such mountains could give back. It rang like a distant chant. Sometimes she seemed to catch a word or two, a kind of _Nunc dimittis_, the song of the soul from which all earthly trappings had fallen away, which was setting out, weary and travel-stained, on its last journey.

The train slowed down. She rose. The breath of the mountains was upon her now, solemn and mystic. Above her, in the dusk, they loomed massive and upright, like great giants. Past their base the footsteps of at least one saint had gone; the way was wet with the blood of pilgrims.

The place of suffering--made by sufferers. Well, she had earned her right of entry.

*CHAPTER IV*

"The perfect beauty of the body and soul thou saved
In thy passion for God's sake, He who is Pity.
Was the trial sore?--temptation sharp? Thank God a second time.
Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestaled in triumph?"--R. B. BROWNING.

A night of stupor, in which Evelyn lay wide-eyed, staring out into the darkness, feeling the close presence of the mountains, whose solemn force penetrated even her bare bedroom. A day of comparative peace followed; of quiet detachment. The tranquil life was broken only by the sound of the convent bell.

At the back of the convent was a garden of roses which reminded her of the Valley of Vision in the Bible--roses, miraculously brought, said the legend, from a great distance. They had once bloomed white, but a drop of our Lord's blood, flowing from the Cross at Calvary, had stained them red. The rosery was backed by long lines of hills, each separate hill converged to a point; there were terraces full of perfume and colour, supernatural in their silence. Everything about her breathed prayer and sacrifice. In the chapel, of course, the twin forces concentrated; one expected as much--but they were visible, too, in the quietude of the deep ravines, bordered with ilex and box, the huge gorges, and in the little hermitage, to which a way was found by means of a path most perilous. Here--at the Cueva de Garin--she found a painted figure on the wall depicting a hermit who, having travelled there on hands and knees, lived on in that position till his death.

Only the greatest love, only the greatest suffering can be laid on the altar of Monserrato. It is like the corridor of Eternity; immortal life is only just beyond.

The hours crawled by sluggishly, wearily; Evelyn scarcely knew how. The monks offered the actual lodging free, but near at hand there was a _fonda_ where simple fare could easily be obtained. It was not easy to think of the little ordinary conveniences of life in Monserrato; they scarcely seemed to matter; and Evelyn, setting out early next afternoon, began to make her pilgrimage towards the summit of the mountains, with labouring breath and faltering footsteps, unmindful of the fact that she had not tasted food for many hours.

She reached her goal only when sunset had painted the very ground she stood upon with roseate colours. Between herself and the highest heaven there stretched a gossamer veil of gold. And here at last was the reality for which she longed. She felt as though, had she but faith enough, she could have been carried through the whirling spaces upwards and onwards to a place of rest whose beauties were undreamed of by even the purest saint in the little monastery below.

She stayed there for a long while--longer even than she knew. The light failed. She rose slowly to her feet. Descent was difficult; she knew now how weak she was. Now and again she stumbled. Over her eyes there was a strange dimness, the gradual decay of thought. Presently limbs and brain alike refused their offices. She felt as though she were being taken up bodily into the grip of some great grey, mocking Shape that held her to itself and paralyzed her. But she pressed on, guided by some unswerving instinct, to the door of the convent. There, and there only, she dropped in the act of pulling at the bell.

Some one came; some one carried her into her room. She revived when water was poured on her forehead and her hands were laved. They left her. After a while she recovered sufficiently to undress. Presently all was still.

There was no sound in the convent now, not even in the chapel; the dull droning of monks in their lonely cells, chanting offices of penitence and remorse, did not reach her. And now in this infinitely lonely hour, alike afar from friend and foe, a kinder form seemed to come close, one which she did not recognize, yet which made clear those hidden things about which she still feared to ask.

Away in the distance, very far away, as she passed swiftly through those grey shadows of oblivion which so many of us would welcome as friends, she saw the figure of her lover up to the last standing erect and triumphant on his little pinnacle of fame, the living symbol of that for which she had come near renouncing every hope of the hereafter which held her at that very moment in its grip. The vision dispersed. Through the room, very slowly, she thought she felt little streams of cold air filtering; they made a dull rhythm, like the running water of a Highland burn. She tried to listen to their music, but could not; in the hour of death the brain, last servant to escape from the house of a powerful master, mocks our call. She struggled desperately to come back from the long passage down which her weakened spirit was being compelled--the last effort of one who was born a fighter. Over her body an icy sweat had broken, in her limbs there was no longer warmth or life. She listened to the beats of her heart striking dimly like the hammer of a clock that was running out. This, then, was death--the truce to struggle.

She was too tired even to be glad. But suddenly light broke.

At the beginning of life there had been offered to her, as there is offered to each one in turn, the choice of many banners, one of which she was bound to uphold until the end--fame, wealth, peace, honour, and love and sacrifice, which go together.

She had chosen the banner of love and sacrifice. Very feebly she sought to grasp it now; it seemed to her a visible fragment which she must wave as her breath died. She fell back. And suddenly out of the darkness she seemed to smell the perfume of a rose, a pure white flower that turned deep red before her eyes.

Was it fancy, or did the Figure on the wall, the crucified Christ, turn His head? All was blurred and indistinct, but once again she thought she heard Farquharson's saddened voice in her ears, and Farquharson's touch laid tenderly on her brow. She tried to say his name, but her stiffening lips would not frame it. She tried to grasp her rose, but it fell in dust.

In his cell below, an old monk, weeping, lifted his voice in passionate appeal.

"Oro supplex et acclinis
Cor contritum quasi cinis,
Gere curam mei finis."

In the morning they found her still and quiet, in the possession of the one good gift which life had brought her. Her face was turned, her fingers pointing towards, but not grasping, the little wooden crucifix upon the wall. So they unhung it and laid it on her breast.

THE END

RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.