The Testing of Diana Mallory, Mrs. Humphry Ward [e book reader online TXT] 📗

was there; and she did not even admit the loyal and gentle woman who had taken a sister's place beside her to a knowledge of its ebb and flow. She bore herself cheerfully and simply; went to picture-galleries and churches; sketched and read--making no parade either of sorrow or of endurance. But the impression on Mrs. Colwood all the time was of a desperately struggling soul voyaging strange seas of grief alone. She sometimes--though rarely--talked with Muriel of her mother's case; she would sometimes bring her friend a letter of her father's, or a fragment of journal from that full and tragic store which the solicitors had now placed in her hands; generally escaping afterward from all comment; only able to bear a look, a pressure of the hand. But, as a rule, she kept her pain out of sight. In the long dumb debate with herself she had grown thin and pale. There was nothing, however, to be done, nothing to be said. The devoted friend could only watch and wait. Meanwhile, of Oliver Marsham not a word was ever spoken between them.

* * * * *

The travellers climbed the hill as the sun sank behind the mountains, made for the Subasio Hotel, found letters, and ordered rooms.

Among her letters, Diana opened one from Sir James Chide. "The House will be up on Thursday for the recess, and at last I have persuaded Ferrier to let me carry him off. He is looking worn out, and, as I tell him, will break down before the election unless he takes a holiday now. So he comes--protesting. We shall probably join you somewhere in Umbria--at Perugia or Assisi. If I don't find you at one or the other, I shall write to Siena, where you said you meant to be by the first week in June. And, by-the-way, I shouldn't wonder if Bobbie Forbes were with us. He amuses Ferrier, who is very fond of him. But, of course, you needn't see anything of him unless you like."

The letter was passed on to Muriel, who thought she perceived that the news it contained seemed to make Diana shrink into herself. She was much attached to Sir James Chide, and had evidently felt pleasure in the expectation of his coming out to join them. But Mr. Ferrier--and Bobbie Forbes--both of them associated with the Marshams and Tallyn? Mrs. Colwood noticed the look of effort in the girl's delicate face, and wished that Sir James had been inspired to come alone.

After unpacking, there still remained half an hour before dark. They hurried out for a first look at the double church.

The evening was cold and the wind chill. Spring comes tardily to the high mountain town, and a light powdering of snow still lay on the topmost slope of Monte Subasio. Before going into the church they turned up the street that leads to the Duomo and the temple of Minerva. Assisi seemed deserted--a city of ghosts. Not a soul in the street, not a light in the windows. On either hand, houses built of a marvellous red stone or marble, which seemed still to hold and radiate the tempestuous light which had but just faded from them; the houses of a small provincial aristocracy, immemorially old like the families which still possessed them; close-paned, rough-hewn, and poor--yet showing here and there a doorway, a balcony, a shrine, touched with divine beauty.

"Where _are_ all the people gone to?" cried Muriel, looking at the secret rose-colored walls, now withdrawing into the dusk, and at the empty street. "Not a soul anywhere!"

Presently they came to an open doorway--above it an inscription--"Bibliotheca dei Studii Franciscani." Everything stood open to the passer-by. They went in timidly, groped their way to the marble stairs, and mounted. All void and tenantless! At the top of the stairs was a library with dim bookcases and marble floors and busts; but no custode--no reader--not a sound!

"We seem to be all alone here--with St. Francis!" said Diana, softly, as they descended to the street--"or is everybody at church?"

They turned their steps back to the Lower Church. As they went in, darkness--darkness sudden and profound engulfed them. They groped their way along the outer vestibule or transept, finding themselves amid a slowly moving crowd of peasants. The crowd turned; they with it; and a blaze of light burst upon them.

Before them was the nave of the Lower Church, with its dark-storied chapels on either hand, itself bathed in a golden twilight, with figures of peasants and friars walking in it, vaguely transfigured. But the sanctuary beyond, the altar, the walls, and low-groined roof flamed and burned. An exposition of the Sacrament was going on. Hundreds of slender candles arranged upon and about the altar in a blazing pyramid drew from the habitual darkness in which they hide themselves Giotto's thrice famous frescos; or quickened on the walls, like flowers gleaming in the dawn, the loveliness of quiet faces, angel and saint and mother, the beauty of draped folds at their simplest and broadest, a fairy magic of wings and trumpets, of halos and crowns.

Now the two strangers understood why they had found Assisi itself deserted; emptied of its folk this quiet eve. Assisi was here, in the church which is at once the home and daily spectacle of her people. Why stay away among the dull streets and small houses of the hill-side, when there were these pleasures of eye and ear, this sensuous medley of light and color, this fellowship and society, this dramatic symbolism and movement, waiting for them below, in the church of their fathers?

So that all were here, old and young, children and youths, fathers just home from their work, mothers with their babies, girls with their sweethearts. Their happy yet reverent familiarity with the old church, their gay and natural participation in the ceremony that was going on, made on Diana's alien mind the effect of a great multitude crowding to salute their King. There, in the midst, surrounded by kneeling acolytes and bending priests, shone the Mystic Presence. Each man and woman and child, as they passed out of the shadow into the light, bent the knee, then parted to either side, each to his own place, like courtiers well used to the ways of a beautiful and familiar pageantry.

An old peasant in a blouse noticed the English ladies, beckoned to them, and with a kind of gracious authority led them through dark chapels, till he had placed them in the open space that spread round the flaming altar, and found them seats on the stone ledge that girdles the walls. An old woman saying her beads looked up smiling and made room. A baby or two ran out over the worn marble flags, gazed up at the gilt-and-silver angels hovering among the candles of the altar, and was there softly captured--wide-eyed, and laughing in a quiet ecstasy--by its watchful mother.

Diana sat down, bewildered by the sheer beauty of a marvellous and incomparable sight. Above her head shone the Giotto frescos, the immortal four, in which the noblest legend of Catholicism finds its loveliest expression, as it were the script, itself imperishable, of a dying language, to which mankind will soon have lost the key.

Yet only dying, perhaps, as the tongue of Cicero died--to give birth to the new languages of Europe.

For in Diana's heart this new language of the spirit which is the child of the old was already strong, speaking through the vague feelings and emotions which held her spellbound. What matter the garment of dogma and story?--the raiment of pleaded fact, which for the modern is no fact? In Diana, as in hundreds and thousands of her fellows, it had become--unconsciously--without the torment and struggle of an older generation--Poetry and Idea; and all the more invincible thereby.

Above her head, Poverty, gaunt and terrible in her white robe, her skirt torn with brambles, and her poor cheek defaced by the great iron hook which formerly upheld the Sanctuary lamp, married with St. Francis--Christ himself joining their hands.

So Love and Sorrow pledged each other in the gleaming color of the roof. Divine Love spoke from the altar, and in the crypt beneath their feet which held the tomb of the Poverello the ashes of Love slept.

The girl's desolate heart melted within her. In these weeks of groping, religion had not meant much to her. It had been like a bird-voice which night silences. All the energy of her life had gone into endurance. But now it was as though her soul plunged into the freshness of vast waters, which upheld and sustained--without effort. Amid the shadows and phantasms of the church--between the faces on the walls and the kneeling peasants, both equally significant and alive--those ghosts of her own heart that moved with her perpetually in the life of memory stood, or knelt, or gazed, with the rest: the piteous figure of her mother; her father's gray hair and faltering step; Oliver's tall youth. Never would she escape them any more; they were to be the comrades of her life, for Nature had given her no powers of forgetting. But here, in the shrine of St. Francis, it was as though the worst smart of her anguish dropped from her. From the dark splendor, the storied beauty of the church, voices of compassion and of peace spoke to her pain; the waves of feeling bore her on, unresisting; she closed her eyes against the lights, holding back the tears. Life seemed suspended, and suffering ceased.

* * * * *

"So we have tracked you!" whispered a voice in her ear. She looked up startled. Three English travellers had quietly made their way to the back of the altar. Sir James Chide stood beside her; and behind him the substantial form of Mr. Ferrier, with the merry snub-nosed face of Bobbie Forbes smiling over the great man's shoulder.

Diana--smiling back--put a finger to her lip; the service was at its height, and close as they were to the altar decorum was necessary. Presently, guided by her, they moved softly on to a remoter and darker corner.

"Couldn't we escape to the Upper Church?" asked Chide of Diana.

She nodded, and led the way. They stole in and out of the kneeling groups of the north transept, and were soon climbing the stairway that links the two churches, out of sight and hearing of the multitude below. Here there was again pale daylight. Greetings were interchanged, and both Chide and Ferrier studied Diana's looks with a friendly anxiety they did their best to conceal. Forbes also observed Juliet Sparling's daughter--hotly curious--yet also hotly sympathetic. What a story, by Jove!

Their footsteps echoed in the vast emptiness of the Upper Church. Apparently they had it to themselves.

"No friars!" said Forbes, looking about him. "That's a blessing, anyway! You can't deny, Miss Mallory, that _they_'re a blot on the landscape. Or have you been flattering them up, as all the other ladies do who come here?"

"We have only just arrived. What's wrong with the friars?" smiled Diana.

"Well, we arrived this morning, and I've about taken their measure--though Ferrier won't allow it. But I saw four of them--great lazy, loafing fellows, Miss Mallory--much stronger than you or me--being dragged up these abominable hills--_four of 'em_--in one