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In a corner was a diminutive altar draped with threadbare lace. The red glow of the taper lighted a cheap print of St. Joseph and a brazen crucifix. The human element in the room was furnished by a little, wizened yellow woman, who, black-robed, turbaned, and stern, sat before an uncertain table whereon were greasy cards. Manuela paused, her eyes blinking at the semi-obscurity within.
Nor does an occasional episode of lounging hurt a life with any true claims to the epic form. The day of decision at length arrived. Again the black-robed powers assembled, and again the hoping, fearing lads some of them not lads, men, and mere boys gathered to hear their fate.
A young man, pale and wan as from a long illness, but with a new steadiness and clarity born of suffering in his eyes; a girl, slender and black-robed, her delicate face flushing with an exquisite, spring-like color, her eyes soft and misty and spring-like, too, in their starry fulfillment of love that has been tried and found all-sufficing; another sable-clad figure, but clerically frocked and portly; and the last, a keen-faced, kindly-eyed man approaching middle-age a man with sandy hair and a mustache just slightly tinged with gray.
Everywhere, these black-robed, soft-sandaled, tallow-visaged specters appeared, flitted about and disappeared, noiseless as the creatures of a troubled dream, and as uncanny. The old abbot's joy to see me was pathetic. Even to tears; but he did the shedding himself. He said: "Delay not, son, but get to thy saving work.
"There she is!" cried Bella, and turned toward the door as if to go and meet the newcomer. But Lucia arrested her, saying authoritatively, "Stay here, child. It is her place to come to you, not yours to go to her." "Miss Muir," announced a servant, and a little black-robed figure stood in the doorway.
In front of him was a table, at which sat two black-robed clerks, and on which a huge mace reposed; and behind him was the reporters' gallery, where the gentlemen of the press seemed to be most comfortably accommodated. There was a large open space in front of this table, extending to the bar, at which were seated the messengers of the house, and the Sergeant-at-arms with his sword.
The black-robed Supreme Court of the Republic, in cap and gown, slowly followed and took their places on the right, opposite the Diplomatic Corps. The Marine band struck the first notes of the National Hymn amid a silence whose oppressiveness could be felt. The tension of a great fear had gripped the hearts of the crowd with icy fingers.
And in truth the opening picture was effective. Sixteen black-robed, long-bearded Netherland envoys stalking away, discomfited and indignant upon one side; Catharine de' Medici on the other, regarding them with a sneer, painfully contorted into a pathetic smile; Henry the King, robed in a sack of penitence, trembling and hesitating, leaning on the arm of Epergnon, but quailing even under the protection of that mighty swordsman; Mucio, careering, truncheon in hand, in full panoply, upon his war-horse, waving forward a mingled mass of German lanzknechts, Swiss musketeers, and Lorraine pikemen; the redoubtable Don Bernardino de Mendoza, in front, frowning and ferocious, with his drawn sword in his hand; Elizabeth of England, in the back ground, with the white-bearded Burghley and the monastic Walsingham, all surveying the scene with eyes of deepest meaning; and, somewhat aside, but in full view, silent, calm, and imperturbably good-humoured, the bold Bearnese, standing with a mischievous but prophetic smile glittering through his blue eyes and curly beard thus grouped were the personages of the drama in the introductory scenes.
The pale flames of their shrine-lamps are supplemented by masses of candles in the huge standing candlesticks of silver. A black-robed monk from the monastery is engaged, almost without cessation, in intoning prayers of various sorts, before one or another of the images.
A vaguer picture of Champlain, who, seeking a westward route to China and the East, some three quarters of a century later, had fixed the first trading-post at Montreal, and camped upon the spot where the convent of the Gray Nuns now stands, appeared before him, and vanished with all its fleets of fur-traders' boats and hunters' birch canoes, and the watch-fires of both; and then in the sweet light of the spring morning, he saw Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon the green meadows, that spread all gay with early flowers where Hochelaga once stood, and with the black-robed Jesuits, the high-born, delicately nurtured, and devoted nuns, and the steel-clad soldiers of his train, kneeling about the altar raised there in the wilderness, and silent amidst the silence of nature at the lifted Host.
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