The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 49

The driver reined up his horse, pointing with his whip.

Diana and Muriel Colwood stood up eagerly in the carriage, and there at the end of the long white road, blazing on the mountain-side, terrace upon terrace, arch upon arch, rose the majestic pile of buildings which bears the name of St. Francis. Nothing else from this point was to be seen of a.s.sisi. The sun, descending over the mountain of Orvieto, flooded the building itself with a level and blinding light, while upon Monte Subasio, behind, a vast thunder-cloud, towering in the southern sky, threw storm-shadows, darkly purple, across the mountain-side, and from their bosom the monastery, the churches, and those huge substructures which make the platform on which the convent stands, shone out in startling splendor.

The travellers gazed their fill, and the carriage clattered on.

As they neared the town and began to climb the hill Diana looked round her--at the plain through which they had come, at the mountains to the east, at the dome of the Portiuncula. Under the rushing light and shade of the storm-clouds, the blues of the hills, the young green of the vines, the silver of the olives, rose and faded, as it were, in waves of color, impetuous and magnificent. Only the great golden building, crowned by its double church, most famous of all the shrines of Italy, glowed steadily, amid the alternating gleam and gloom--fit guardian of that still living and burning memory which is St. Francis.

"We shall be happy here, sha'n't we?" said Diana, stealing a hand into her companion's. "And we needn't hurry away."

She drew a long breath. Muriel looked at her tenderly--enchanted whenever the old enthusiasm, the old buoyancy reappeared. They had now been in Italy for nearly two months. Muriel knew that for her companion the time had pa.s.sed in one long wrestle for a new moral and spiritual standing-ground. All the glory of Italy had pa.s.sed before the girl's troubled eyes as something beautiful but incoherent, a dream landscape, on which only now and then her full consciousness laid hold. For to the intenser feeling of youth, full reality belongs only to the world within; the world where the heart loves and suffers. Diana's true life 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 a.s.sisi. 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociated 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. a.s.sisi 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 pa.s.ser-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 a.s.sisi itself deserted; emptied of its folk this quiet eve. a.s.sisi 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 partic.i.p.ation in the ceremony that was going on, made on Diana's alien mind the effect of a great mult.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.blest 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 compa.s.sion 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 mult.i.tude 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 _legno_--with one wretched toast-rack of a horse. And not one of them thought of walking. Each of them with his brown petticoats, and an umbrella as big as himself. Ugh! I offered to push behind, and they glared at me. What do you think St. Francis would have said to them? Kicked them out of that _legno_, pretty quick, I'll bet you!"

Diana surveyed the typical young Englishman indulging a typically Protestant mood.

"I thought there were only a few old men left," she said, "and that it was all very sad and poetic?"

"That used to be so," said Ferrier, glancing round the church, so as to make sure that Chide was safely occupied in seeing as much of the Giotto frescos on the walls as the fading light allowed. "Then the Pope won a law-suit. The convent is now the property of the Holy See, the monastery has been revived, and the place seems to swarm with young monks.

However, it is you ladies that ruin them. You make pretty speeches to them, and look so charmingly devout."

"There was a fellow at San Damiano this morning," interrupted Bobbie, indignantly; "awfully good-looking--and the most affected cad I ever beheld. I'd like to have been his f.a.g-master at Eton! I saw him making eyes at some American girls as we came in; then he came posing and sidling up to us, and gave us a little lecture on 'Ateismo.' Ferrier said nothing--stood there as meek as a lamb, listening to him--looking straight at him. I nearly died of laughing behind them."

"Come here, Bobbie, you reprobate!" cried Chide from a distance. "Hold your tongue, and bring me the guide-book."

Bobbie strolled off, laughing.

"Is it all a sham, then," said Diana, looking round her with a smile and a sigh: "St. Francis--and the 'Fioretti'--and the 'Hymn to the Sun'? Has it all ended in lazy monks--and hypocrisy?"

"Dante asked himself the same question eighty years after St. Francis's death. Yet here is this divine church!"--Ferrier pointed to the frescoed walls, the marvellous roof--"here is immortal art!--and here, in your mind and in mine, after six hundred years, is a memory--an emotion--which, but for St. Francis, had never been; by which indeed we judge his degenerate sons. Is that not achievement enough--for one child of man?"

"Six hundred years hence what modern will be as much alive as St.

Francis is now?" Diana wondered, as they strolled on.