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But the grinding sound continued uninterrupted, and I breathed more freely. I mounted the altar-steps, the distant light behind me still feebly guiding me; I ran round to the right, and heaved a great sigh of relief to find my hopes verified, and that the altar of San Domenico was as the altar of other churches I had known.
For devotion was then more needful than bread, and it profited a man more to fight against unbelievers for his soul's sake than to wear hollows in altar-steps with his knees, or to forget his own name and put off his own proper character and being, as a nameless unit in a great religious order. At first the enormous disappointment of Rome had saddened and hurt him.
Trust then to me; these little doves they are my study day and night; happy the man whose wife taketh her fling before wedlock, and who trippeth up the altar-steps instead of down 'em. Marriage it always changeth them for better or else for worse.
The secular dignitaries are seated on benches below the altar-steps. A soft fluttering of fans agitates feathers, lace, and ribbons. Fumes of incense mix with the scent of strong perfumes. Not the smallest attention is paid by the ladies to the mass which is celebrating at the high altar and the altar of the Holy Countenance.
At four in the morning the monks came in to chant their morning prayer. One by one they dropped into their places, scarcely noticing the prostrate figure before the altar-steps. It was usual enough for one of their number, or even a stranger staying in the monastery, to humiliate himself in that manner as a public penance.
'We were only too pleased; and if to-day be wet, to-morrow and the next and the next will be sunshine. And thanking Zoe inwardly for this most appropriate remark, the party ascended the church toward the altar-rails, where Father Shannon was awaiting them. Large, pompous, and arrogant, he stood on his altar-steps, and his hands were crossed over his portly stomach.
The group of women led by Joseph, the shepherd carrying the lamb upon his shoulder, the girl with a basket of white doves, the child with an apple on the altar-steps, the lovely youth in the foreground heedless of the scene; all these are idyllic incidents treated with the purest, the serenest, the most spontaneous, the truest, most instinctive sense of beauty.
She hurried up to Hereward, who lay sleeping quietly on the altar-steps; knelt by him, wrung his hands, called him her champion, her deliverer. "I am not well awake yet," said he, coldly, "and don't know whether this may not be a dream, as more that I have seen and heard seems to be." "It is no dream. I am true. I was always true to you. Have I not put myself in your power?
Calmness would not come even on the altar-steps; it would not come from looking at the serene picture where the saint, writing in the rocky solitude, was being visited by faces with celestial peace in them. Romola was in the hard press of human difficulties, and that rocky solitude was too far off.
We carry our brokenness to God; we put our helpless will at His feet, and He energises it, and sends us back from the altar-steps, or from the glory where we have met with Him, able to say, "I delight to do Thy will, O my God."
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