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"My heavenly Saviour!" sighed the bell-ringer's wife, "what a lot of filth." "But," said Durtal, "in the Middle Ages the mass was celebrated in a different fashion. The altar then was the naked buttocks of a woman; in the seventeenth century it was the abdomen, and now?" "Nowadays a woman is hardly ever used for an altar, but let us not anticipate.
Durtal and the abbot were walking on the banks of the great pond, where the water was alive, it alone wakeful in the slumber of the woods, for the moon, which shone in a cloudless sky, sowed a myriad of goldfish, and this luminous spawn, fallen from the planet, mounted, descended, sparkled in a thousand little points of fire, of which the wind as it blew increased the brightness.
Durtal in his alarm dared not look at the confessor, in whom he recognized the tall Trappist, with the imperious profile, whom he believed to be the abbot of the monastery. His breath was taken away, and he drew back without saying a word. Surprised at this silence, the prior said, "You have asked to make your confession, sir?"
Touched by the timidity of this silent misery, Durtal listened to the mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of St. Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plain chant, better than it was done at St. Sulpice, where, however, the offices were as a rule solemn and correct.
Durtal looked closely at her when, as they passed a street lamp, a shaft of light played over her veil a moment, then winked out. She seemed agitated and nervous beneath her reserve. He took her hand. She did not withdraw it. He could feel the chill of it through her glove, and her blonde hair tonight seemed disordered, dry, and not so fine as usual. "Nearly there?"
Durtal knew his pictures, and they had suggested much the same reflections as those aroused by the Benedictine paintings of Beuron.
"I may add that the dove alone epitomizes all these qualities and is the synthesis of all virtue." "Yes, and she alone is never spoken of as having any evil significance." "A distinction she shares with white and blue, the only colours which are exempt from the law of antithesis and are never ascribed to any vice," said Durtal.
In these groups of souls on fire there was a fulness of devotion, a complete and absolute silence, till the bells again rang out, and invited human life which had been interrupted to wrap itself in a great sign of the Cross and resume its course. The "Laudate" was not ended when Durtal left the church, before the crowd began to move.
At such an hour, kneeling in the dark, you feel as if the Mother were more immediately present, nearer, more intimately your own; but these moments of confidence, when it is easier to tell Her all your trivial woes, were unknown at Notre Dame. No one was worn out by midnight prayer in that church! But though he could not go in, Durtal could prowl round and about it.
And the swarthy image, carved in the early part of the sixteenth century, had listened, Her face invisible, to the same sighs, the same complaints, from succeeding generations, had heard the same cries, echoing down the ages, for ever lamenting the bitterness of life, for ever expressing the desire, all the same, for length of days! Durtal looked at Madame Bavoil.
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