They felt, perhaps, something of the raptures of the Blessed Virgin who is Mother and Wife and at the same time the beatified Handmaid of God.
And in the silence a voice as from the remotest ages arose, and the ancestress said, "Pater Noster," and they all repeated the prayer, and then dragged themselves on their knees up the steps of the way of crosses, where the fourteen upright posts, each with its cast metal bas-relief, bordered a serpentine path, dividing the statues from the groups. Thus they went forward, stopping long enough to recite an Ave on each step they climbed, and then, helping themselves with their hands, they mounted to the next. And when the rosary was ended the old woman rose, and they solemnly followed her into the church, where they all prayed a long time, prostrate before the altar; and the grandmother stood up, gave each holy water at the door, led her flock to the spring where they all drank again, and then they went away, without speaking a word, one after another up the narrow path, ending as black specks just as they had come, and vanishing on the horizon.
"Those women have been two days and two nights crossing the mountains," said a priest, coming up to Durtal. "They started from the depths of Savoy, and have travelled almost without rest to spend a few minutes here; they will sleep to night in a cow-house or a cave, as chance may direct, and to-morrow by daybreak they will start again on their weariful way."
Durtal was overpowered by the radiant splendour of such faith.
It was possible, then, to find souls ever young, souls ever new, souls as of undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not, outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges, and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who, without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God, while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas, hardly able to express themselves, hardly knowing how to read, wept with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, whom they compelled by their humility and single-heartedness to appear, to become actual to their mind.
"Yes, it was but just that the Virgin should cherish them and choose them above all others to be Her vessels of election.
"Yes. For they are unburdened with the dreadful weight of doubt, they are endowed with almost total ignorance of evil.
"And yet are there not some souls too experienced, alas! in the culture of wrong-doing, who nevertheless find mercy at Her feet? Has not the Virgin other sanctuaries less frequented, less well known, which yet have outlived the wear of time, the various caprice of the ages; very ancient churches where She welcomes you if you love Her in solitude and silence?"
And Durtal, coming back to Chartres once more, looked about him at the persons who were waiting in the warm shade of the indefinite forest till the Virgin should awake, to worship Her.
With dawn, now beginning to break, this forest of the church under whose shade he was sitting became absolutely unintelligible. The shapes, faintly sketched, were transformed in the gloom which blurred every outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in wells that held them tightly in the rigid circle of their margin; and the night, now almost diaphanous on the level of the ground, was thicker as it rose, cutting them off at the spring of the branches, which were still invisible.
Durtal, as he raised his head, gazed into deep obscurity unlighted by moon or star.
Looking up still, but straight before him, he saw in the air, through the hazy twilight, sword-blades already bright, gigantic blades without hilts or handles, thinner towards the point; and these blades, standing on end at an immense height, appeared in the gloom they cut, to be patterned with vague intaglios or in ill-defined relief.
As he peered into space to the right and left, he was aware of a gigantic panoply on each side at a vast height, resting on blocks of darkness, and consisting of a colossal shield riddled with holes, hanging above five broader swords, without hilts, but damascened on their flat blades with indefinite designs of bewildering niello.
Little by little the tentative sun of a doubtful winter's day pierced the fog, which vanished in blueness; the shield that hung to the left of Durtal, the north, was the first to come to life; rosy fires and the lurid flames of punch gleamed in its hollows, while below, in the middle blade, there started forth in the steel-grey arch, the gigantic image of a negress robed in green with a brown mantle. Her head, wrapped in a blue kerchief, was set in a golden glory, and she stared out, hieratic and wild-looking, with white, wide-open eyes.
And this engimatical Ethiop had on her knees a black infant whose eyes, in the same way, stood out like snowballs from the dusky face.
All about her, very gradually, the other swords, still so dim, began to glow, blood rippling from their crimsoned points as if from recent slaughter; and this trickling red formed a setting for the shapes of beings come, no doubt, from the distant shores of Ganges: on one side a king playing on a golden harp; on the other a monarch wielding a sceptre ending in the turquoise-blue petals of a fabulous lily.
Then, to the left of the royal musician there was another man, bearded, with a walnut-stained face, the eye-sockets vacant and covered by round spectacles; on his head were a diadem and a tiara, in his hands a chalice and a paten, a censer and a loaf; while to the right of the other sovereign who held the sceptre, a still more harassing shape came forth against the blue background of the sword—a sort of oriental brigand, escaped perhaps from the prison cells of Persepolis or Susa, a bandit as it seemed, wearing a little scarlet cap edged with yellow, in shape like an inverted jam-pot, and a tan-coloured gown with white stripes on the skirt; and this clumsy and ferocious personage bore a green palm and a book.
Durtal turned away to sound the depths of darkness, and before him, at a giddy height on the horizon, more sword-blades gleamed. The scrawls which might have been mistaken in the darkness for patterns embossed or incised on the surface of the steel, developed into figures draped in long, straight, pleated robes; and at the highest point of the firmament there hovered amid a sparkle of rubies and sapphires a woman crowned, pale of face, dressed like the Moorish mother of the northern side in Carmelite-brown and green; and she too held an infant, a child, like herself, of the white race, clasping a globe in one hand, and extending the other in benediction.
Last of all, the still dark side, the late side, to Durtal's right hand and further south, till now wrapped in the half-dispelled morning haze, was lighted up; the shield opposite to that on the north caught the blaze, and below it, against the polished metal of the broad blade facing that which presented the negress queen, appeared a woman of somewhat olive hue, in raiment like the others, of myrtle-green and brown, holding a sceptre, and with her, too, there was a child. And round her again emerged images of men piled up one above the other, shouldering each other in the narrow field they filled.
For a quarter of an hour nothing was clearly defined; then the real things asserted themselves. In the middle of the swords, which were in fact mosaic of glass, the figures stood out in broad daylight. In the field of each window with its pointed arch bearded faces took form, motionless in the midst of fire; and on all sides, in the thicket of flames, as it were the burning bush of Horeb where God showed His glory to Moses, the Virgin was seen in an unchangeable attitude of imperious sweetness and pensive grace, mute and still, and crowned with gold.
She was, indeed, many; She came down from the empyrean to lower levels, to be closer to Her flock, and at last found a place where they might almost kiss Her feet, at the corner of an aisle that was always in gloom; but there She wore a different aspect.
She stood forth in the middle of a window, like a tall, blue plant, and the garnet-red foliage was supported