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She swayed forwards then, like a stately falling column, and lay with outspread arms upon the altar-step. "Jesu.... Mary.... The child!..." The sacred names were stifled in her blood. The last two words were nearly her last sigh.
Perhaps some servant of the church, coming to him with submissive, almost suppliant gesture, begs him to step back just for one moment. The lover of art glares at him with insulted look, and hardly deigns to notice him further: he merely turns his eye to his Murray, puts his hat down on the altar-step, and goes on studying his subject.
Clad in his vestments, Pierre had reached the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul. He there ascended the altar-step and began the mass; and when he turned round with hands spread out to bless the worshippers he showed his hollow cheeks, his gentle mouth contracted by bitterness, his loving eyes darkened by suffering.
After being remodelled in the time of Archbishop Roger, however, this upper storey was evidently open from end to end, and its apsidal termination, containing both piscina and altar-step, indicates that it was a chapel: indeed, as has been well suggested, it was probably the original Lady Chapel.
As the cortege reaches the lowest altar-step the ushers break ranks and go to the right and left; the bridesmaids also separate, going to the right and left, leaving a space for the bridal pair. As the bride reaches the lowest step the bridegroom advances, takes her by her right hand, and conducts her to the altar, where they both kneel.
Romola, kneeling with buried face on the altar-step, was enduring one of those sickening moments, when the enthusiasm which had come to her as the only energy strong enough to make life worthy, seemed to be inevitably bound up with vain dreams and wilful eye-shutting.
The sick woman was not interested in gowns, but she went fairly wild when Susan spoke of Monterey, the riotous gardens with their walls of white plaster topped with red pipe, the gulls wheeling over the little town, the breakers creaming in lazy, interlocking curves on the crescent of the beach, and the little old plaster church, with its hundred-year-old red altar-cloth, and its altar-step worn into grooves from the knees of the faithful.
Apollinare, and with cowl drawn over his head, and frequent prostrations till his forehead touched the marble flags of the altar-step, spent before it most of the remaining hours of that day. Nevertheless, it was true that, be the cause what it might, the aged friar was ill, not in mind only, but also in the body.
He softly breathed her name in such sweet accents that a happy peace pervaded her, and the bright courage of yore shone in her brown eyes. "Come, sirs!" he cried now, with a sudden briskness that startled them into feverish obedience. "You, Fra Domenico, cut off your sacerdotals, and gird high your habit. There is climbing for you. Here, a couple of you, move aside that altar-step.
There is a fortitude born on the altar-step, whereon the wedded pair has knelt, to speak the marriage vows, that none but the wedded can know, that none but souls bound together in a holy wedlock can understand, the fortitude that endures in the breast of a woman, through all the fierce struggles of her married life, that dies only with the last long sigh of relief at the hour of physical death, that is unquenched by the ashes of misery and woe that fall on its flickering flame, from time to time, the fortitude that thrives on sacrifice and endurance, and which if governed by christian motives, becomes a pass-port for the tried soul, before Heaven's far-off gate.
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