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Dom Anthony looked at it, turned and looked at Chris; and without a word the two passed out into the cloister and turned up the dormitory stairs. To both of them it was a sign that the end was at hand. On the following afternoon Mr. Morris ran in to Chris's carrel, and found him putting the antiphonary and his implements up into a parcel.
Gall of the antiphonary of Saint Gregory, which represents the most ancient and the most certain monument which the Church preserves of the true plain chant. "This manuscript, of which photographic facsimiles exist, is the code of Gregorian melodies, and it ought to be, if I may use the expression, the neumatic Bible of choirs.
A later example shows four saints in trefoil-headed panels, with a cornice above, composed of a series of shell-headed tops of niches. These originally formed the doors of a cupboard. There are also said to be a psalter and antiphonary of the fourteenth century, and a Bull of Urban V. relating to the Crusades of 1365.
It was soon after the beginning of the new year that Chris was entrusted with a printed antiphonary that had its borders and initials left white; and he carried the great loose sheets with a great deal of pride to the little carrel or wooden stall assigned to him in the northern cloister.
He limited himself to these things, intending later on to hang a few drawings or paintings on the panels which remained bare; to place shelves and book racks of ebony around the walls; to spread the pelts of wild beasts and the skins of blue fox on the floor; to install, near a massive fifteenth century counting-table, deep armchairs and an old chapel reading-desk of forged iron, one of those old lecterns on which the deacon formerly placed the antiphonary and which now supported one of the heavy folios of Du Cange's Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis.
Chris was not able to ask a word of advice from any of those whom he thought to be in sympathy with him. He sat all day over his antiphonary, in the little carrel off the cloister, and as he worked his mind toiled like a mill. He had progressed a long way with the work now, and was engaged on the pages that contained the antiphons for Lent.
On one of the wells in the cloister is the date 1453; they are decorated with roundels bearing various devices. The remarkable thing which brings tourists to the Paludi is, however, the antiphonary of Padre Bonaventura Radmilović, painted with vegetable colours, and finished after ten years' labour in 1675.
One window, that bore upon the forlorn vacuum of the main street, was speedily stained the deepest and most splendid dyes; from without, it had a pleasing, not to say refining, medieval effect; from within, it was likened unto the illuminated page of an antique antiphonary in flames; yes, positively in flames!
Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him cries of joy, of a kind of religious joy, as in some new "canticle of the creatures," some new hymnal, or antiphonary. "Nature" becomes for him a sacred term. "Conform thyself to Nature! "with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces that precept, to others, to himself!
It was a ludicrously bad piece of work, picked up no doubt by some former Lieutenant who knew more of military than artistic matters, and had hung there how long? Chris wondered. He found himself criticising it detail by detail, comparing it with his own designs in the antiphonary; he had that antiphonary still at home; he had carried it off from Lewes, when Ralph Ralph! had turned him out.
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