Chapter XIV (1)

THE RAVEN AND THE DOVE.
CONCLUSION.

The morning they started for Monte Cassino the Signora had a Mass said for her intention, and the intention was that she might be enabled to decide speedily on her state of life, and to decide so clearly and wisely as never again to have a doubt about it. Never had she been nearer to accepting Mr. Vane, and never had she been more tremblingly afraid of doing so. The suspense and trouble were becoming intolerable. She felt that it must be settled within these three days.

But no sooner was the journey begun than all else was lost sight of. It was impossible to pass with a preoccupied mind amid all that beauty; impossible not to feel one’s individual life dwindle in view of the life of centuries there made visible. The Campagna slipped past like an old monotonous song that has been sung over one’s cradle, and heard in quiet intervals all up the years, till every note has grown to be something more than a simple sound, and is rather a long series of octaves caught along the heart-strings. Then

“The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,”

pressing near the track, and looking over each other’s heads at the train as it went, as if wondering what new Jason was ploughing with fiery-snorting monsters down through the green fields of the south. Dim, gray cities stood petrified on their heights, without a sign of life; and the torrent-beds on their sides were like silvery paths up which the souls of all the dead had climbed, and so faded off into space. What fancies went up those converging paths, and spread their wings in the shining clouds that moored themselves on crest after crest! Or, fair as any fancy, what brooks and torrents came rushing down in the rainy October and petulant April, catching the sunshine as they ran, and bringing flowers and harvests and fountains for the thirsty plains. On they went through the smiling, luxuriant paradise waving with solid green and bloom in the valleys. Dark forests hung suspended in gorges, cities lifted themselves between the mountains to look, here and there a castle sat on its rock like a king on his throne. They could no more have pointed out the rapidly-succeeding beauties to each other than they could have indicated the swift flashes of a tempest.

At length, and before they had begun to think they were tired, the cars stopped at the station of San Germano, and here a very tall old man, bent into the shape of a new moon, recognized them as the party he was on the watch for, and informed them that the donkeys were waiting for them outside, and that they were expected to dine at Monte Cassino.

They recollected that they were a little tired and a little hungry, and, very opportunely, a pretty young _contadina_ presented herself with a basket of bread, fruit, boiled eggs, and wine. So they seated themselves in the waiting-room, a circle of admiring _contadini_ standing about and watching every mouthful they ate, as a dog watches.

“Are we expected to take more than we want and give them what remains?” Isabel asked.

The Signora glanced over the company, and demanded to know which men had charge of the donkeys.

Five stout young fellows stood forward, and a sixth made haste to explain that four of them would attend to the party, and a fifth would carry their baggage up on another donkey.

“And have you anything to do with us?” she inquired politely of this informant.

“I belong to the hotel of San Germano,” he replied, and then went on to explain the situation still further.

“Oh! thanks; but don’t trouble yourself,” the Signora interrupted quite coolly. “You need not wait for us. Five men are quite enough to do all we want done.”

He withdrew a little, but did not go away. There was not the slightest sign of resentment or mortification. He was actuated by a simple and unadulterated desire for money, and meant to stay by till the last minute, in the hope that he might snatch at the chance of some small service which would give him a claim.

“Now, girls,” the Signora said, “don’t you give a penny to any one, unless I tell you. Here are twenty people on the watch for money. Don’t let any one do the smallest thing for you, except these five men. We will give them some bread and wine. That is all they will want. The Italian poor live on bread. What does that old man want of us?” she inquired of one of the donkey-men.

The old man, who had been constantly hovering near, came forward at once. He was the letter-carrier for the monastery.

“Oh! I did not know but you had something to do with the donkeys,” she remarked.

He came a step nearer. “I do not go up till evening,” he said with an insinuating smile.

“Go whenever you like,” she answered obligingly. “If you should bring us up any letters, however, we will give you a _soldo_ for each one.”

He glanced longingly at the bread and wine, but she rose without taking any further notice of him.

“How much is your wine a bottle?” she asked of the pretty young vendor.

“Fifteen _soldi_, Signora,” was the innocent reply.

“Nonsense! I will give you five.”

Exclamations, deprecation, grieved reproach on the part of the young woman. The wine was too good for that, she protested. It was the best dry wine of the country, and sincere, as the Signora could see.

The Signora was not so new as they had supposed. She had bought better wine in larger bottles, in Genzano, close to Rome, for seven cents a bottle, and this was high at six. It was not, however, worth while to multiply words about it, and they made a compromise by paying seven _soldi_ a bottle, with which the young woman seemed to be perfectly well satisfied.

Then they went out and mounted their donkeys, followed by the reproachful eyes and extended hands of fourteen men and children, and closely attended by the young hotel servant, who attached himself to Bianca. Marion, having visited Monte Cassino thoroughly not long before, had not accompanied them, being a little delicate, too, about joining himself to a party without an invitation from the monastery, though he would certainly have been included had his connection with the family been known.

Bianca dropped her pocket-handkerchief, and the young volunteer esquire rushed to pick it up and present it to her with a gallant touch of the cap and a smile that displayed a fine set of teeth. She accepted it with blushing thanks.

“My dear, he counts on half a _lira_ for that,” the Signora remarked. “Don’t get any romantic ideas into your head. He would be as gallant as that to a witch, if he thought she would pay him. You must really put on a more severe expression. You have precisely the look at this moment of some young princess of fairyland who goes about giving bags of gold to everybody. If you keep on that sweet face, you will be as surrounded by beggars as a lump of sugar with flies.”

“You are a terribly forbidding and obdurate woman,” Mr. Vane said, looking into the Signora’s laughing face.

“I am sometimes,” she protested. “I pity one beggar, or two beggars, or sometimes three beggars; but when I see a score of healthy cormorants surround poor travellers, and ready for any pretence or any servility to get money out of them, I lose patience. I’ve been victimized too much in days that are gone to be very long-suffering now. Besides, I work for my money and have a feeling of indignation when I see a strong, healthy person stretch out a hand that has done me no service. Aren’t these donkeys little darlings? I do think they are the most useful, faithful creatures in the world.”

“If I could only know just where the backbone of mine is situated,” Isabel said pathetically; for her saddle had been constantly slipping either backward or forward ever since she mounted. “It really seems to me that I could ride a rail more securely. There I go! Oh!”

The hotel-servant rushed enthusiastically to catch the back of her saddle, and lift the rider from her nearly horizontal position, and help her off while they tightened the girths.

“It’s a sort of knack which you will soon learn,” the Signora said consolingly. “The poor little animals are as thin as a rail, but the saddles are like a chair. Just let yourself go, humor the motion of the donkey, and in a little while you will sit like—like Bianca there. Look at that child! All she wants is an infant in her arms!”

They had passed the narrow and stony loops of the path out of the town, and reached the mountain-side, and, as the Signora spoke, Bianca, leading the procession, went round a turn before them and came back higher up. She sat in the saddle as easily as if in a chair, upright, her hands folded in her lap, and her fair face uplifted as she gazed at the great pile of the monastery on the peak above them.

She needed, indeed, but an infant in her arms to be a ready picture of the Holy Mother and Child in the Flight into Egypt. She had taken off her hat and laid a large veil over her head. A blue mantle hung over her shoulders and came close to her white neck. The beast she rode, the saddle, the rocky path—all were perfect. She passed under a cypress-tree that pressed her eyes down with its black shadow, and, in that downward glance, caught their looks directed to her. She smiled, clasped her hands, and glanced around in mute rapture.

To and fro, to and fro they wound up the height, every turn unwinding and enlarging the scene below. The low hills of the plain disappeared, leaving only a vast level laid out in an exquisite mosaic of varied greens, with houses here and there, single or in clusters, forests that had dwindled to groves, and groves that looked like bouquets. The shining turns of a river lay amid that verdure, like a silver chain dropped and half-hidden in the grass. All round the mountains circled close and jealous, guarding this little paradise. Now they were skirted with trees; now they rose in harsh masses of stone that looked as if not even a blade of grass could find a foothold. A picturesque castle stood on a spur sent off from the mountain they were ascending.

Above them the vast square of the monastery, with its many windows and balconies, grew every moment nearer. After an hour’s ride trees shut them into an avenue, and they found themselves close under the grand walls of the building. They alighted at the lofty open archway and saw before them a long, ascending passage that looked strong enough to support even that pile on its solid arches. The first half was dim, and part way up, at the right, was a shrine in the wall, with its floating flame burning before some saintly face only half-visible behind the wire screen. The upper half was lighted by arched windows at the left, showing a double wall there, with some sort of room or passage between, arched openings in the inner wall answering to the windows. At the upper end of this avenue of stone shut the great black valves of a double iron door, studded thickly with nails, pierced with a little cluster of holes to peep through at one side, and showing the outline of a smaller door in the right valve.

The massive walls and doors, the long, sloping ascent, the light and shade, the one little golden flame, were like nothing of the nineteenth century. The action and business of such a place were not the action and business peculiar and suitable to our times. Ecclesiastical processions might go up there; the scarlet fire of a cardinal’s robe in the midst of a group of attendants would well befit that dim and echoing passage; a cavalcade of knights and ladies, with horn and hound and nodding plumes; a company of soldiers with shield and helmet—these were the figures to animate such a scene. Or, most perfect picture of all, one might imagine there that sublime company, the very thought of which brings tears to the eyes—that long procession of ecclesiastics and people, with their banners and crucifixes and candles, chanting funeral hymns as they ascended, bearing up to the mountain-top for burial the twin saint of the glorious founder and father of the monastery—Santa Scholastica. It is but yesterday, it seems, that the brother and sister parted, having their last conference together under a little roof down the mountain-side, while the tempest stormed about them. It is but this morning that St. Benedict has sent his monks down to bring the holy relics up and lay them in his own tomb under the grand altar, where soon he will join her. So the colossal saints of all time know how to recognize the grandeur of a true woman. These men are so near the most sublime and regal of creatures—the awful, immaculate Virgin—and the very type of penitents—the thrice-purified Magdalen—that the shining veil of the one and the sacred tears of the other flow about their sisters, and woman is honored in whatever work her Creator calls her to do. It was in the times, still illuminated by the twilight of the scarcely-departed presence of the Morning Star and the Son, that St. Gregory the Great ordered his mother’s portrait painted with the mitre of a doctor on her head, and one hand raised in benediction, while with the other she taught her son from the sacred Book on her knees—the queenly St. Sylvia! It was in such days that St. Chrysostom proclaimed that women may participate, as well as men, in combats for the cause of God and the church; that St. Melania, the younger, disputed so eloquently with the Nestorians that she converted many and frightened the rest, showing herself so powerful that Pelagius, who drew away priests and bishops, strove, but in vain, to convert her into an assistant; the same Melania who converted the persecutor, Volusianus, whom all the eloquence of St. Augustine could not convert. It was in such days that saintly women inspired the Fathers of the church to write, and that St. Gregory conceived his Treatise on the Soul and on Resurrection while sitting at his dying sister’s bedside and listening to her discourse on death, as she consoled him for the death of St. Basil.

And not only such thoughts and recollections, dear to women, flowed in as they went up the path that St. Scholastica had passed before them, but other recollections, dear to scholars and precious to the church and to civilization. Here was one of the citadels of learning in times when barbarous invasions overran the land and threatened to extinguish every spark of intellectual and spiritual wealth that the race of man had accumulated. Here the monks, with a zeal kindled to passion, hoarded and preserved the remains of their devastated treasures, and spent unwearied days and nights in multiplying copies of writings that must not die. Here, with the devotion of the bridegroom who brings the most precious gems he can procure to deck his bride, or of parents who shower upon their only child every gift in their power to bestow, genius the most exquisite consecrated itself to the work of adorning the page of the text of praise and prayer with such marvellous miniature beauty of form and color as only the fairy pencil of Nature can rival.

Wrapt and exalted in such recollections, the Signora moved as one in a dream, forgetting her companions entirely. It was only when the great iron doors swung open before her, and she saw a tall gentleman in a black robe hurrying forward, with his hand extended in cordial welcome to Mr. Vane, that she came back to the nineteenth century, and made an effort to salute in a sufficiently-composed manner the prior of Monte Cassino, Father Boniface.

But it was a very beautiful nineteenth century that she recalled herself to. They were within the monastery buildings, which completely surrounded them in a massive square, broken in the middle at the left by a long portico of white travertine supporting a superb terrace called the _Loggia del Paradiso_, and at the right, in the centre, also, by the grand stairs that go up to the higher level of the mountain peak, around which the monastery is built. This _loggia_ and the grand stairs are at the opposite sides of a court with a picturesque well in the centre, and colossal statues of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica. The paved court is between two others, which are turned into gardens, the three separated by double colonnades and surrounded by porticos. At the head of the stairs, which are the whole width of the court, another portico opens into the upper court—that of the church—and has a door at either side leading back to the _Loggia del Paradiso_. The church court, also surrounded by porticos and adorned with statues, is closed on one side by the church. This is built on the very mountain-top, the confession being hewn out of the solid rock.

This plan they caught at first, though but in a glance; for, after welcoming them all, the prior conducted them through two or three dimly-lighted rooms, all of stone, unfurnished and unadorned, into a bright parlor, where a balcony window gave them a view of all the beautiful valley with its surrounding mountains. In a few minutes dinner was announced as prepared in the next chamber, and here they found a table laid out with the freshest of linen, old silver as white almost as the cloth, and a well-cooked and well-served dinner.

Weakening their wine before drinking it, they all observed the quality of the water, limpid and light as some third element half-water and half-air, and the prior explained to them that the monastery used rain-water filtered.

“We have a great cistern, ninety feet square, hollowed out in the mountain under the central court. The well you saw there is in the centre of it. The water is thoroughly filtered. Moreover, the conduits that admit it to the cistern are closed during the four hot months, so that only cold water enters.”

This prior, the “urbane librarian” of Longfellow’s recollections of Monte Cassino, was not only a kind and generous host and an intelligent _cicerone_, but a most agreeable and interesting man. He had a noble figure and a handsome, bright face, and combined in his character qualities which might have been thought to be inharmonious; for he was at the same time an enthusiastic monk, proud of his venerable order, and devoted heart and soul to his monastery, and a man quite up to the times in all that the times have of praise-worthy.

After dinner he led them up to see the church, pointing out the statues as they went. Here were the father and mother of St. Benedict, and with them popes, royal dukes, kings, and emperors. Before entering they paused to look at the great door of bronze, cast in Constantinople, in which is written in silver letters the list of the possessions of the abbey at the time the door was made, in 1066. At this time, more than eight hundred years later, nothing was left of these riches.

Entering the church, they stood astonished. If it had been built of simple marble, moderately varied and ornamented, there would still have been enough to praise warmly in the beautiful form and proportions of the three naves, the grand altar by Michael Angelo, the raised tribune, and the beautiful paintings of the dome, roof, and eight chapels. But these were only the frame-work of a mosaic the most splendid covering every part of the edifice to the dimmest corner or the smallest nook behind a column. And this mosaic is not that comparatively simpler kind, made of small bits, but each flower and figure is cut from a single piece of marble or precious stone, and so perfectly fitted into the groundwork that the point of a pin could not be introduced between them. It was hard at first to believe that the whole was not exquisitely painted in every possible color and shade, and it needed a touch or a near sight of that fine, inimitable gloss of marble to convince one of the incalculable riches of the whole. The very floor was superb enough for the walls of a splendid church; the very steps of the tribune were set with mosaics.

The Signora took pencil and paper, and attempted to make a memorandum of only one chapel, to enumerate its alabaster columns, its flowers of mother-of-pearl, amethyst, agate, and lapis-lazuli, its infinitely-varied marbles and precious stones and its infinitely varied designs, and, after ten minutes’ rapid work, gave up the task. A week would have been necessary for that one chapel; and there were seven more, besides the altar, the confession, and the tribune.

“You like carved wood?” the prior asked, with a smile of anticipated triumph, as they went up the tribune steps.

“Who does not?” the Signora exclaimed. “Carved wood and lace are two of my passions. I have never stolen any lace, and I hope I never shall. Wood-carving is fortunately usually in too heavy pieces to suggest the possibility of being carried away in one’s pocket.”

“We must, however, first visit St. Benedict and Santa Scholastica,” said their guide, too charitable, as well as too enthusiastic for beautiful things, to be shocked at this little escapade.

Thirteen silver lamps burned before the screen at the back of the grand altar, and under that screen reposed the bodies of the twin saints. Above them, written in golden letters, was the inscription:

“Benedictum et Scholasticam
Uno in terris partu editos,
Una in Deum pietate cœlo Redetos,
Unis Hic Excipit Tumulus,
Mortalis depositi pro Aeternitate custos.”

Rising from their knees, they turned and faced the choir—a double row of stalls forming three sides of a large square open to the altar. Looked at from a little distance, these stalls had the appearance of having been closely overgrown at some past time with the finest of vines, which had turned black and petrified there, preserving perfectly every little leaf and tendril, and still covering entirely the plain wood beneath. Looking longer, one saw little figures and faces, and birds and animals. Going nearer scarcely dispelled the illusion, so finely was every particle carved—the vines and leaves in some places quite separated from the ground, so that one slipped the finger-tip behind them. Every stall was different, every one provoked a new exclamation of admiring wonder.

Then they went into the sacristy, a long hall with the sides completely lined with presses of dark wood with gilded metal ornaments. These presses also were carved finely, each department, in front of which a priest would vest himself for Mass, having a bas-relief of a subject suggesting some particular virtue, as that of the Pharisee and the publican in the Temple, suggesting humility.

Back of the sacristy was the relic-chamber, where, in addition to the more sacred treasures, the ladies admired especially two little antique caskets, one of smalt, bright as a jewel, the other of carved ivory of the most delicious tint of creamy white—that tint so soft that it seems as if the material itself must yield like down to the touch. They gave one glance at a crosier by Benvenuto Cellini, on the inner curve of which stood a tiny group, then tore themselves away. The afternoon was waning, and there was left them but a day and a half more, with

“Such rooms to explore,
Such alcoves to importune.”

The air of this place was an ideal atmosphere; one breathed it like a fine wine that exhilarates delicately, but does not inebriate. It was soft but not warm, fresh but not chilly, and as pure as pure can be. The fresh, rosy faces of the troop of young students they met going out showed how this mountain air agreed with them.

“What a place to send boys to!” Mr. Vane exclaimed. “It is a little world in itself, where they can have every amusement and companionship, as well as instruction; and one has but to look at them to see that they are as happy as they are healthy.”

The boys were coming in from their afternoon walk down the mountain-side, and all glowing with just-subsiding fun. Each one, passing the prior, caught at his hand to kiss it; but as he would not permit himself to receive such an homage, they resorted to the amusing substitute of kissing their own hands after they had touched his.

“What beautiful recollections of their school-days those boys will carry with them through their lives!” Mr. Vane remarked, as they went out over the colonnade to the _Loggia del Paradiso_. “In no way, it seems to me, except by being educated here, unless one spend one’s life here, could one become perfectly familiar with the riches, visible and invisible, of the place; and such a familiarity would be of itself an education, especially for the impressible minds of the young.”

The front of the _Paradiso_ fills the gap in the middle of one side of the monastery—that part opposite the church—and is on a level with the church, or the second story of the monastery. It is probably the same width as the church. Leaning on the parapet there, one looks off on a view which may well give the place its name—the beautiful plain and the beautiful circling mountains, with the still, blue splendor of the southern sky gazing down upon them as if enamored of their beauty. There was no need of imagination in such a place. Simple, literal eyes were enough to flood the soul with beauty.

Familiar as he was with the scene, the prior was sympathetic enough to say but little; and even Isabel, whose impressions, being more superficial, ran a good deal into words, hushed herself out of respect for the others.

“Until we reach Rome again,” the Signora remarked to her friends as they went down the stairs to the great court, “I should like to be excused from all social intercourse, except the mere being with you bodily. I don’t want to speak or be spoken to, except to learn of this place. We have no right to talk; we are ghosts. We have come here in a dream or a vision. Father Boniface talks, of course, because he is a part of the place.”

They laughed and agreed.

“But I hope,” the prior said, “that you are not too ghostly to taste the water they are just drawing up now. See how it sparkles!”

Two columns support a cross-piece over this beautiful well, and from the centre drops an iron chain with a copper bucket at each end. When one goes down the other comes up, dripping full of airy water.

They all drank silently—each, probably, to some friend, absent or present. Bianca blushed as she drank, and her pretty mouth seemed to kiss the water. Then, standing on the upper step of the well, they leaned over the stone curb and looked down to where, far below, the surface of the water shone like a huge black diamond set in a gray border.

Tired out with travel and with pleasure, the ladies were not sorry when the prior proposed that they should go down to the house where they were to sleep.

This house is the only building on the mountain except the monastery, and is under the control of the monastery. It was built merely to accommodate lady relatives of the students who might wish to see their sons, or brothers, or nephews without the fatigue of coming up and going down the mountain the same day, and without suffering the embarrassment of spending the whole day in a house inhabited and served only by men. Now and then some benefactress or a friend of the superiors of the monastery has the privilege of stopping there. The house is small and plain, and kept by a _contadine_ and his wife. The ladies stopping there have their coffee in the house, but they dine always in a private dining-room at the monastery, from whence, also, their supper is sent down to them in the evening—supper being after Ave Maria, when the gates are closed.

Mr. Vane stayed with the prior, and the three ladies followed their guide. Their way led them a five minutes’ walk back as they had come up, then turned through an open gate in the stone wall at the right, where they found their lodgings. A _contadina_ with dark cloth draperies pinned smoothly about her, and a huge white edifice of starched linen on her head, overshadowing a pair of bright eyes, met them at the gate and welcomed them with a pleasant voice, but in a tongue where the soft Roman consonants seemed to have each and every one turned itself into the hardest kind of a Z.

The windows looked out on a long terrace with a parapet, and outside the parapet the mountain dropped steeply to the plain.

A stair, which belonged entirely to the strangers’ house, led up to the second floor, and here they found three pleasant bed-chambers awaiting them. An hour later, as they sat at their windows looking out into the twilight, they saw their _donna_, Catarina, come into the terrace with a huge basket on her arm. Her head-dress and sleeves shone white in the light of the rising moon, and there was a soft richness where the scarlet stripe ran round her petticoat, and where the rainbow colors of the apron-like upper mantle bound her without a fold. Her solid step sounded on the stair the next minute, there was the spurt of a match in the outer room of the suite, and, looking through the open doors, they saw the woman, more like a picture than any picture they recollected to have seen, standing with a curious brass lamp in her hand, carefully lighting its wick, the basket she had brought sitting on the floor at her feet.

She came into the Signora’s room with that red light all over her from the lamp she carried in her hand, smiled so as to show two rows of snowy-white teeth, and, with a “_Buona sera_,” announced that their supper had come and would be on the table in a few minutes.

The three went out into the dining-room to witness the preparations and listen to the woman’s pleasant voice as she half-talked, half-sang an account of her life and adventures there, her manner of speech being that so common among the lower classes of Italy, especially at the south—almost a sort of chant, inexpressibly soft and touching. The peculiarity of this manner of speaking consists more, perhaps, in the ending of the sentences than in their progress; for they never come down to the definite tone that ends a period, but stop on some swinging note a little higher up, it may be only half a tone above. It is the voice of weeping, which never has a positive tone, as if the whole gamut were washed over and blurred by tears.

Talking so, the woman brought out from her basket a linen cloth for the table, next a pair of cruets with vinegar and oil, next a decanter of white-wine, next an omelette made with herbs, after that a salad that looked like sliced cucumbers, but was something else. Bread followed, then the necessary dishes.

“I’m ashamed to confess that I am hungry,” Isabel said. “It is a miserable coming down, but we won’t say anything about it.”

“My dear,” responded the Signora, “you are very ungrateful to say so. Let us be just. Our bodies have brought our souls up to this beautiful place, and carried them about from point to point of it, and kept as quiet as possible about their own affairs. Now, if they are hungry, let us feed them. Poor bodies! they have the worst of it. They are extremely useful, and we sublime creatures are always turning up our noses at them; they suffer, and we protest that we want to get rid of them, when, in nine cases out of ten, we have wantonly caused their suffering. Can a body take care of itself, or even know how it should be done? No; the soul has to do it, and ought to do it in gratitude for house-rent, or body-rent. Then, at last, the poor things have got to corrupt, and be devoured by worms, and go to dust. Fortunately, these sufferings will not be felt. It is also a satisfaction to know that this arrogant spirit, which is for ever crowing over its poor companion, will have to suffer consciously for it all and pay the uttermost farthing. You will please to recollect, Miss Isabel Vane, that if ever you should have the happiness of going to heaven, your body will go there too. Sometimes,” she said, holding her hand up before the light, which shone through and made a ruby of it,—“sometimes I think that my poor flesh has a glimmering, a presentiment of the possibility of being one day glorified.”

“Most worshipful body,” said Isabel to herself with great respect, “would you like a piece of that omelette—a large piece, a half of it, say, leaving the other half to those two? Yes? Well, you shall have it.” And she proceeded with all possible dignity to help herself to a hundred and eighty degrees of the circle of herbs and eggs before her.

The _donna_, who, of course, had not understood a word, looked with astonishment at this shocking piece of voracity; and when Bianca, in protection of her client, clasped her arms around the wine, and the Signora, with an air of determination, took possession of the salad, the poor creature evidently thought that she was waiting on a company of maniacs.

“Do let’s laugh,” said the Signora, and at once set the example. “We are frightening the poor soul to death.”

Their supper and their nonsense finished, the three took possession of their rooms.

A full moonlight was filling all the valley, or plain, which looked like the bottom of an emerald chalice full of golden wine. A pure and sacred silence reigned over all—the silence of peace and lofty contemplation. Had it been some such silence that suggested to Charlemagne, when, almost eleven hundred years before, he came to venerate the relics of St. Benedict, the beautiful thought of bestowing on the abbot, with all the other singular privileges he gave him, that of being the sole mediator between the emperor and the rebellious barons—the only person by whose means they could make their peace? It was doubtless by virtue of this ancient title that the prior had written “Pax” at the head of his letter to Mr. Vane.

Yes, Charlemagne came up here ages ago, and popes, and princes, and kings came, and the Saracens swarmed up with fire and sword, and the Lombards and the Normans; and the Crusaders came to pray at the shrine before going to the East. They had seen on the pilasters of the church the different crosses in precious mosaic of the orders of knights which had been formed under the Benedictine rule, among them the familiar names of Calatrava, Alcantara, St. Stephen, St. James of the Sword, and Templars. Ignatius of Loyola came up and stayed fifty days.

“But, _signora mia_,” said the lady who was going over all this part, as she gazed out into the night, “since you are not going to stay here fifty days, you will be so good as to shut your mind and your eyes and go to sleep.”

The next morning they went to see the monastery proper, for which they had a special permission from the Pope, and spent hours in the library, archives, printing and lithograph rooms. It would be vain to tell what old books—worth their weight in gold, printed on creamy vellum in characters that modern type has never excelled, if it has equalled—what drawers filled with scrolls, what autographs, what illuminations, they saw. It were vain to fancy with what feelings one sees for the first time the writing of Charlemagne, of Hildebrand, of Gregory the Great, of Frederick II., of Countess Matilda. Then there was the long, long dormitory of the boys, with a row of snowy beds at either side, and the immense arched window at the end framing a superb outside picture, with Monte Cairo in the centre, and long, long corridors that dwindled people seen from opposite ends, with cracks made by earthquakes in their walls, and solid groined arches that only an earthquake could shake down. Then the nooks, courts, and passages, which they came upon without guessing in the least in what part of the building they were; the round window in the wall—_occhio_, or eye, they call it—through which they looked as through a lens, and saw the three courts and the colonnades. Finally, coming down a stair with a wall at either side and a door at the foot, they were told: “When you have crossed that threshold you cannot return. The cloister ends there.”

“What!” exclaimed Isabel, “if I should run out a minute, couldn’t I come back on to the stairs again for another minute?”

The prior shook his head. “It would be excommunication. That seems unreasonable; but listen: This is a cloister which women can enter only by special permission of the Pope. That permission is not lightly granted, and is for but once. Your running back a minute would do no harm in itself, but would do harm to the principle. If you can return in one minute, you could come back in five, or ten, or half an hour, or an hour, or a day, and so on; and so one visit might be made to cover an indefinite time. The only way, you see, is to be strictly literal in excluding from a second entrance.”

That afternoon they were presented to the Abbot—“Abbot of Abbots” he was called in the palmy days of Monte Cassino—and received, not only his benediction, but each a little souvenir of the place: a tiny photograph of the tomb of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, with a wreath of flowers pressed round it that had been on the tomb, and at the back his own name written, with the date, and under it “Ora pro me.”

They stood in the church speaking with him a few minutes, then went out to the _Paradiso_.

A storm was coming up from the east, and round the angle of the building they could just see that the mountains in that direction were obliterated and mists fast filling the plain. Standing up against these mists, as if to impede their progress, was the lower end of a rainbow, set straight and solid on the green like a jewelled column. The cloud advanced and pushed the column before them.

“It is like the pillar of light leading the Israelites,” Isabel said.

The cloud unrolled itself above, and down through the rainbow ran a crinkling line of white fire.

“How plainly lightning asserts its own force!” Mr. Vane remarked. “Seeing it for the first time, without knowing what it was, one would know at once that it is an irresistible power. What an experience it would be to stand just near enough to a passing flash to perhaps hear it hiss through the air, to be between it and its thunder, and yet not so near nor so in its track as to be smitten!”

Little by little the sun was vanquished, and the rainbow grew dim, faltered, blushed along the line of the advancing shadows, and disappeared. There was an odd murmur growing up, fine and pervading—the sound of rain in the plain below. All the tiny noises of each falling drop joined in a multitude, countless nothings making themselves heard in pauses of the thunder. It was to solid sound as fine carving is to plain wood, as embroidery is to a fine web—a continued succession of millions of infinitesimal watery strokes separated by millions of infinitesimal silences.

The others went into the house at the first drop that splashed on the _Paradiso_, but the Signora went back to the portico and seated herself under its shelter. Behind her the court of the church looked weird and strange. The pillars of the porticos appeared to move as the lightnings came and went, the statues and busts behind them seemed to lean forward and retreat, and the one window in the church front looked blue, as if there were light inside it.

She took herself out of the draught, and went to lean on the wall between the doors. In front of her the grand stairs went down to the central court, and the gardens shone green and wet through the colonnades at either side. On a level with her, across the space, stretched the _Paradiso_, and under the portico that supported it a large, arched door led from the court out on to a beautiful _loggia_. Two or three monks, who had been standing in this _loggia_ watching the storm, were driven in by the rain, and in a minute the whole place seemed to be deserted. The rain and the lightning had it to themselves and were washing and purifying all “so as by fire.”

This one visible witness felt her soul expand as she gazed. If only she also might be purified and enlightened in that time and place! If the littlenesses of life might be washed away from her, and only the realities remain!

“Come, Holy Spirit!” she said, and blessed herself.

Then, content and confident, without saying another word, she waited with her two inarticulate but eloquent companions—Art, consecrated to God, and Nature, informed by God—and felt above and about the illuminating Presence. For faith is the rod that calls the divine Lightning down, whether it came as a dove, or a tongue of fire, or a pointing finger, or a whispering voice.

The landscape of the plain, seen through the arched door under the _Paradiso_, was dim and gray with rain, or glittering and red with lightning; the mountain-tops above it, and the sky, were a changing tumult of shadows veined with threads of fire, and rolled hither and thither in visible thunders. The white pavement of the court below changed every instant into jaspers, the beautiful columns and curb and steps of the well became jewels, and one of the copper buckets that stood on the brink was like a vessel of red gold brimming over with red wine.

St. Benedict with his crosier, and St. Scholastica with her dove, stood immovable but living, and their calmness in that tumult was like a song of triumph. Did he sing with Moses?—“_Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thy inheritance, in thy most firm habitation which thou hast made, O Lord; thy sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established._” And did she reply, like Miriam with her timbrel?—“_Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnified, the horse and his rider he hath thrown into the sea._” Such silence in a tumult seems ever a singing.

When the Signora went down, slipping from colonnade to colonnade, dry-shod, the storm was spent. From the little balcony of the parlor, where she found her companions, she saw a grand arch of rainbow trembling out over the east, as if astonished at its own glory, trembling as it grew, but as strong and bold as light.

Flocks of birds were swinging by in a great circle, screaming impudently as they passed the balcony, as if to say, “Catch us, if you can!” There was a little parallelogram of garden under the window, with a rough pole frame-work supporting a dripping vine, and, below the dropping fields, a crest of land and rock, curling over like a pointed wave, rose boldly in the foreground; then, the plain.

Mr. Vane came to stand beside her, looking at her keenly one instant, then averting his eyes.

“Well,” he said, “what has the storm been saying to you up there?”

“It has washed the drift-wood out of my path, and made it as clear and white as one of those torrent-beds up the mountain-side,” she answered. “I think I ought to work a little harder for the future. Life is short, and I have, perhaps, sometimes played with my talents. They were given me for serious use. When you shall have left me alone, instead of sitting weakly down and thinking that it is rather lonely, I shall begin to carve a new book out of the next year. Do you know that year to come looks to me as the block of marble looked to Michael Angelo when he said, 'I will make an angel of it.’ I am not a Michael Angelo,” she added, smiling; “but I am something, and, firmly and intelligently set to work, I may do what need not be despised. My mind is clear.”

He was answered.

If a shade passed over his face, it was slight. If his lips were compressed a moment, she did not look to see. He stood and watched the rainbow grow and fade, and, as its colors went out, so faded out of his life a sweet hope. But he reflected: “Denials make strong. And the light that made the rainbow is not dead.”

“Yes, life is short,” he said presently, and half-turned away. “God bless you!” he added and hastily left her.

The next morning they made their last visit to the monastery, and the prior, after showing them the tower of St. Benedict and the fine collection of pictures there, had some of the choir-books brought into the parlor for them to see. There are fifty-seven in all of these great volumes, bound in leather, with metal corners and knobs. These are all in manuscript, beautiful black scores and lettering on white parchment. Every capital letter is painted, every one different and every one beautiful, and occasionally the page has a border, and in some cases a picture in the corner, so exquisitely beautiful that one could never tire of examining it—such leaves and flowers, and birds and figures and arabesques, fine as the finest pencil and most delicate imagination could make them, and so executed that one had to touch them to be sure they are not in relief. One long, silver leaf slightly curled over to show a golden lining; Bianca stretched her finger to touch, and drew it back immediately, fearing to break.

Not a tint was faded of them all, though they had been in constant use three hundred years. They are not used every day now, however.

One page was especially rich—the first page of the Christmas service. The whole ground of this inside the border is a deep velvety crimson, the score and text being of gold. On the border imagination had exhausted itself, and in the left upper corner is a picture of the Nativity, delicate and pure, with its cool, pale mountains of Syria, and the heavenly faces of the Mother and Child.

“You should see that at the Midnight Mass of Christmas,” the prior said, “with the light of all the candles shining on it as it lies open on the desk. It is splendid then. I copied that picture in the corner of the page to send the Pope on his great anniversary,” he added, “and it took me a year.”

For the prior was an artist as well, and not only made exquisite copies from these old manuscripts, but played the organ, and had the evening before done the honors of their grand instrument for his visitors, displaying its orchestra stops.

The hours slipped away, and regretfully at length they took leave of this beautiful and sacred place, and the kind host who had made it so pleasant for them. The donkeys stood ready at the gate, and they mounted and went down into the world again. In the valley, before going to the station, they stopped a minute and gazed back with a mute farewell to Monte Cassino. The Signora thought, but did not say aloud: “I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh help.”

The road they took through the plain to the station ran along the river-side. This river—the Rapido—narrowed to a swift, yellow sluice that one could toss a penny across, to be caught by the beggar at the other side, did not look very imposing to American eyes, accustomed to the grand crystalline floods of the New World; but every drop of it moved to the tune of a memory, and farther on it meets the Carnello, and the two, the ancient Vinius and Liri, join to make the Garigliano, the river made famous by Bayard.

Then back to Rome, through crowding mountains at first. But, by dark, the mountains began to draw back, the level widened, they passed the city wall by the stars, and rolled into the _Città vecchia_.

“Now we must begin to look respectfully at the guide-book,” Mr. Vane said the next morning. “We have been sipping the foam of the wine as it came. We must drain the cup, if we can.”

There was nothing more to be said. Their story was finished, and the remaining few weeks were but a study of what all travellers study in Rome.

“I am laying up riches for my life,” Mr. Vane said to the Signora. “I have learned of you to work, and I hope that the last of my life will be more useful than the first has been. These memories that I am preparing now will be the only recreation of my future and my only dream.”

He did not trouble her with sadness or importunities, but took his life up with manly cheerfulness, and she honored him for it and liked him better than ever. But never for an instant did she waver in her decision. Her mind, once cleared, was cleared for ever. She would not have married him, nor any other man, to have possessed the world.

One bright October day they left her. There was sadness and tears, but no heart-break for any one. Marion’s tender sympathy threw a rainbow on Bianca’s gentle sorrow, and Isabel clung to her father’s arm and dropped her head on his shoulder, soothing and soothed.

“I shall never leave you, papa,” she whispered.

Did she suspect what he had missed?

The Signora watched the train roll away, then went back to her silent house, wiping her eyes as she entered.

“What a pity it is that you will have to be alone now!” said Annunciata.

“Alone!” the Signora’s eyes flashed out through the tears. “I am not alone. I never was alone in my life!”

She smiled as she shut herself into her room. “Alone? How little they know!”

What, indeed, did they, who cannot live a day without their gossip, without trying to fill their emptiness with the husks which make up by far the greater part of the world’s talk, of the life of one whose mind was as a fountain for ever overflowing, who had eyes in her finger-tips, and who listened with every pore of her body? What knew the readers of daily newspapers of the hoarded treasures of literature, ever ready with eloquent voices? What knew the Christians of one communion in the year, and one Mass when there was obligation, of long, delicious hours in churches when there was no function to stare at, nor music to talk through? The world has no such society as the cultivated mind can fill its house with; and there are no receptions so splendid as those given by the imagination. Bores never come, tattlers and enemies never are admitted, late hours never weary, and the wine never inebriates. And, better yet, those who are invited are always present and ready to stay. How the possessors of such a society laugh at the “societies” of the outer world, and how truly they can exclaim, “Alone? I never was alone in my life!”

DOUBTS OF A CONTEMPORARY ON THE DESTINY OF MAN.