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Then the bell rang for breakfast, and he went down to the refectory. The brothers received him in silence, hardly looking up as he entered, though by their furtive glances he could plainly see that he was the only subject that occupied their thoughts. When the meal was over he tried to mingle among them, that he might say farewell to as many as were willing that he should do so.
As a hunting-post and refectory, the Epeira has contrived a central space, free from glue. As for the glue itself, it is hardly possible to study its chemical properties, because the quantity is so slight. The microscope shows it trickling from the broken threads in the form of a transparent and more or less granular streak. The following experiment will tell us more about it.
When the "Last Supper" painted by Titian reached the Escorial, it was found to be too large for the space it was to occupy in the refectory. The king ordered it to be cut, which so distressed El Mudo that he offered to copy it in six months, in reduced size, and to forfeit his head if he did not fulfil his promise.
But the great master's thoughts were taking a new direction, and he was already preparing designs for the mural painting of the Cenacolo, with which Lodovico had ordered him to decorate the refectory of the Dominicans in his favourite convent of S. Maria della Grazie.
On the night of their arrival there the refectory of the monastery was transfigured to accommodate the numerous noble and very jovial company assembled there to sup. The long, stone-flagged room, lofty and with windows set very high, normally so bare and austere, was hung now with tapestries, and the floor strewn with rushes that were mingled with lemon verbena and other aromatic herbs.
The cloisters are also Gothic with vine-covered capitals, but the entrance to the chapter-house and refectory is quite different. In general design it is like the windows at Sempre Noiva, two horseshoe arches springing from the capitals of thin marble shafts and an ogee moulding above.
The stately abbess received them in the refectory, and asked their pleasure. "Daughter," said the patriarch, "you have in your keeping a lady named Rosamund D'Arcy, with whom we desire to speak. Where is she?" "The novice Rosamund," answered the abbess, "prays by the holy altar in the chapel."
Then he took the path along which he had just come, found the dark passage, then the vast refectory, and again took his place at the end of the silent hall and waited. But the hours of the night sounded successively, until the first gleam of dawn cast its pallid light upon the walls of the cloister. "Well," muttered Roland, "it's over for to-night. Perhaps I shall be more fortunate the next time."
As soon as she took her seat in the choir, she looked through the screen over the congregation below, to see if the strangers were in the chapel; but she saw them not. When the vesper service was over, she took her tea with the nuns in their refectory; and then returned to the play-room in the Infants' Asylum.
Returning to the court, another doorway conducts us into a most superb Gothic hall, with a row of slender columns down the center. This was the monks' refectory in ancient times; adjoining this is another grand hall, divided into four aisles by rows of granite columns, all of the most perfect thirteenth century work. Above these are two other halls, still more magnificent than those below.
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