Her colour was slightly coppery, almost Chinese, with a long nose and rather narrow eyes; on the head there was a black coif, and She looked steadily before Her, while the lower part of the face with its short chin, the mouth rather drawn by two grave lines, gave it an expression of suffering that was even a little morose. And here again, under the immemorial name of Notre Dame de la belle Verrière, she held an infant in a dress of raisin-purple, a child barely visible in the mixture of dark hues all about it.
In short, She to whom all appealed was there; everywhere under the forest roof of this cathedral the Virgin was present. She seemed to have come from all the ends of the earth, under the semblance of every race known in the Middle Ages: black as an African, tawny as a Mongolian, pale coffee colour as a half-caste, and white as an European, thus declaring that, as mediator for the whole human race, She was everything to each, everything to all; and promising by the presence of Her Son, whose features bore the character of each race, that the Messiah had come to redeem all men without distinction.
And it seemed as though the sun, as it mounted higher, followed the growth of the Virgin, taking its birth in the window where She was still a babe in that northern transept where Saint Anne, her mother, of the black face, sat between David, the king of the golden harp, and Solomon, the bearer of the blue-lilied sceptre, each against a background of purple, to prefigure the royal birth of the Son; between Melchizedec, the mitred patriarch, holding the censer, and Aaron, in the curious red cap bordered with lemon yellow, representing prophetically the Priesthood of Christ.
And at the end of the apse, quite high up, there was another Mary—triumphant, looking down the sacred grove, supported by figures from the Old Testament and by Saint Peter. It was She again who in the south transept faced Saint Anne, She, now a woman and herself a mother, amid four enormous men bearing pick-a-back on their shoulders four smaller figures; these were the four Greater Prophets who had foretold the coming of the Messiah—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel, bearing the four Evangelists, and thus artlessly expressing the parallelism of the Old and New Testaments, and the support given by the Old Covenant to the New.
And then, as though Her presence were not fully ubiquitous, as though She desired that, turn where they might, Her worshippers should ever see Her, the Virgin was to be found on a smaller scale in less important positions; enthroned in the centre of the shields, in the heart of the great rose-windows, and finally, ceasing to appear as a mere picture, took shape, materialized as a statue of black wood standing on a pedestal in a full hooped skirt like a silver bell.
The sheltering forest had vanished with the darkness; the tree-trunks remained, but rose with giddy flight from the ground, unbroken pillars to the sky, meeting at a vast height under the groined vault; the forest was seen as an immense church blossoming with roses of fire, pierced with glowing glass, crowded with Virgins and apostles, patriarchs and saints.
The genius of the middle ages had devised the skilful and pious lighting of this edifice, and harmonized the ascending march of day to some extent with its windows. The walls and the aisles were very dark, the daylight creeping, mysteriously subdued, along the body of the church. It was lost in the stained glass, checked by dark bishops, and opaque saints completely filling the dusky-bordered windows with the dead hues of a Persian rug; the panes absorbed the sun's rays, refracting none, arrested the powdered gold of the sunbeams in the dull violet of purple egg-fruit, the tawny browns of tinder or tan, the too-blue greens, and the wine-coloured red stained with soot, like the thick juice of mulberries.
As it reached the chancel, the light came in through brighter and clearer colours, through the blue of translucent sapphires, through pale rubies, brilliant yellow, and crystalline white. The gloom was relieved beyond the transepts near the altar. Even in the centre of the cross the sun pierced clearer glass, less storied with figures, and bordered with almost colourless panes that admitted it freely.
At last, in the apse, forming the top of the cross, it poured in, symbolical of the light that flooded the world from the top of the Tree; and the pictures were diaphanous, just lightly covered with flowing lines and aerial tints, to frame in a sheaf of coloured sparks the image of a Madonna, less hieratic and barbaric than the others, and a fairer Infant, blessing the earth with uplifted hand.
By this time the Cathedral of Chartres was alive with the clatter of wooden shoes, the rustle of petticoats, and the tinkle of mass-bells.
Durtal left the corner of the transept where he had been sitting with his back to a pillar, and turned to the left, towards a bay where there was a framework ablaze with lighted tapers before the statue of the Virgin.
And schools of little girls under the guidance of Sisters, troops of peasant women and countrymen, poured out of every aisle, knelt in front of the image, and then came up to kiss the pedestal.
The appearance of these folks suggested to Durtal that their prayers were not like those that are sobbed out at evening twilight, the supplications of women worn and dismayed by the weary hours of day. These peasant souls prayed less as complaining than as loving; these people, kneeling on the flags, had come for Her sake rather than for their own. There was here and now a pause from grieving, a sort of reprieve from tears; and this attitude was in harmony with the special aspect adopted by Mary in this cathedral; She was seen there, in fact, under the form of a child and of a young mother; She was the Virgin of the Nativity, rather than our Lady of Dolour. The old artists of the Middle Ages seemed to have feared to sadden Her by reminding Her of memories too painful, to have striven to prove by this delicate reserve, their gratitude to Her who in this sanctuary had ever shown Herself to be the Dispenser of Mercies, the Lady Bountiful of Grace.
Durtal felt in himself an answering thrill, the echo of the prayers chanted all round him by these loving souls; and he let himself melt away in the soothing sweetness of the hymns, asking for nothing, silencing his ungratified desires, smothering his secret repining, thinking only of bidding an affectionate good-morning to the Mother to whom he had returned after such distant wanderings in the land of sin, after such a long absence.
And now that he had seen Her, that he had spoken to Her, he withdrew, making room for others who came in greater numbers as the day grew. He went home to get some food; and as he cast a last sweeping glance at the beautiful church, remembering the warlike imagery of its details, the buckler-shape of the rose-windows, the sword-blades of the lower lights, the casque and helmet forms of the ogee, the resemblance of some grisaille glass with its network of lead to a warrior's shirt of mascled mail; as, outside, he gazed at one of the two belfries carved into scales like a pine cone—like scale-armour—he said to himself that the "Builders for God" must have borrowed their ideas from the military panoply of the knights; that thus they had endeavoured to perpetuate the memory of their exploits by representing the magnified image of the armour with which the Crusaders girt themselves when they sailed to win back the Holy Sepulchre.
And the interior of the church seemed, as a whole, to impress the same idea and complete the symbolical images of the details by its vaulted nave, of which the groined roof was so like the reversed hull of a vessel, suggesting the graceful form of the ships that made sail for Palestine.
Only, in the present day, such memories of heroic times were vain. In this city of Chartres, where Saint Bernard preached the second crusade, the vessel was stranded for ever, her hull overset, her anchor out.
And looking down on the unthinking city, the Cathedral kept watch alone, beseeching pardon for the inappetency for suffering, for the inertia of faith that her sons displayed, uplifting her towers to the sky like two arms, while the spires mimicked the shape of joined hands, the ten fingers all meeting and upright one against another, in the position which the image-makers of old gave to the dead saints and warriors they carved upon tombs.
CHAPTER II.
Durtal had already been living at Chartres for three months.
On his return to Paris from La Trappe he had fallen into a fearful state of spiritual anemia. His soul kept