Cuthbert passed through the doorway in the south aisle, and entered the cloisters, which stood at the south side of the great church, forming a square of two hundred and twenty feet, surrounded by an arcade in which the poor monks had once been accustomed to take the air in winter, and to seek the shade in summer, while they held colloquy in their recreation hour.
Leaving the chapter house on the east, he turned the angle of the cloister, and passed along the front of the refectory on his road to the Abbot’s lodgings, which lay to the south-west of the pile.
But here he paused, and recalled the past as he gazed around the cloisters: on the east lay the chapter house, which he had once regarded with such reverent awe, where had been the Lord Abbot’s throne, so worthily filled by its last occupant; behind him the refectory occupied the whole south side of the square, where Cuthbert remembered seven long tables whereat the monks had taken their sober repasts,[56] while one of their number read from the pulpit the Holy Scriptures or some godly tome of the fathers: to the west lay the fratery or apartments of the novices, and to the north was the great south front of the church.
Over the cloisters was a gallery, from which had opened the library, wherein had been many valuable MSS., including one of Livy, which perhaps contained the lost decades: it had been sold to wrap up groceries; the scriptorium, where the ill-fated brethren had made copies of the Holy Scriptures and the Office books of the Church; the common room, wherein around the great hearth the brethren assembled in hours of leisure; the wardrobe, and the treasury.
All lay alike in sad ruin: all that would sell had been sold: the mere shell of the building remained.
Over these rooms, on what we may call the second floor, lay the dormitories, where each monk had had his little cell containing a bed, a table, a crucifix and a drawer for papers and books. Hard by was the schoolroom, and the apartments of the choristers and other boys, who had lived in the house.
While in the cloister, calling back the past to mind, he heard a step,—was it that of Father Ambrose? Cuthbert called in a subdued voice, but no answer was returned; he hurried up to the end of the cloister, his hand on his sword, but saw no one.
Well might the ruined desecrated pile suggest awe in this midnight hour.
“O’er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,