Then Father Andrew sat down before the Father Superior, whose black eyes glowed and dreamed, and felt himself like a small particle of dust, happy in its humility.
"It is as you say," said the Superior. "A door is closed behind it. Consecration is sometimes the more complete."
Father Andrew murmured that it was, and thought of the refectory and a salad he knew of with peppers in it. He was used to thinking of salads when he should not be thinking of them. He was sorry for it, and knew that he had no claim to anything but humility.
"The face promises and threatens," mused the Superior. "How often is it that the highest that is spiritual is based on the strongest that is worldly."
The Superior was a man of symbols and analogies, swarthy of skin and large of frame, one whose conceptions came red from their furnace. Father Andrew's mind was nestled the rather in a certain padded placidity. Moreover, there was the salad, with its peppers. No doubt, if the Superior saw promises of a more than common consecration, and threatenings of peculiar importance in this young person without origin, it was a thing to be expected of the Superior's holy and profound discernment. The Superior's spiritual enterprise was ever extraordinary. He was of such as had from the beginning fought in the vanguard of the Church, and been her glory and adornment. For himself, Father Andrew discerned little further than to feel that his duty of distributing the brotherhood's charities would be easier if every one had the young person's native assurance. He felt that Providence, clearly with a purpose, had bestowed upon himself such limited insight wherewith to be content. It enabled him at least to admire the Superior without limit. He went his way to the salad and the peppers, and Gard remained in the house of the Brotherhood of Consolation.
It was a Catholic order, somewhat quiet in its ways. Not many of the brothers were like the Superior, whose faith was a yearning in the blood as fiery as young love, and for whom night-long struggles of prayer appeared to be a normal way of living. For the most part they seemed to be elderly men, keeping the rule without any apparent effort, but rather as something it would be an effort to vary from. Probably they were happier than most, in the shuffle of fate, manage to be. It would be difficult to show they were not. The monastery bell clinked at small intervals of the day and night, and slippered feet were ever going whispering down the corridors on the heels of the sliding moment, to place some office of performance or prayer accurately in its little division of time. And this method and regulation of hours, so old, so grown from measureless experience and minute knowledge of humanity, seemed to be a kind of setting or framework to keep in place, till their times came, the souls for whom atonement was accomplished; or for the others, to keep the saving of their souls in orderly process of accomplishment. The faces of all except the Superior looked something alike. They broke easily into smiles, but laughter seldom went beyond a happy chuckle.
The window of Gard's little cell looked over the court against the face of a dead wall that ended a block of uniform houses. The cloister covered two of the remaining sides, a brick wall ten feet high the fourth, and a thick wooden door led through this into the street. The court was asphalted, except for a strip under the dead wall, where one Brother Francis planted things hopefully every spring, and found entertainment all summer in the ill-advised efforts they made to grow.
It was Francis who taught Gard his Latin accidents, and later the writings of those dignified heathen, Cæsar and Tullius Cicero; later still his Greek, in which language appeared the writings of one Herodotus, and of others called "Fathers of the Church," of whom he might disbelieve Herodotus if he chose—an unnecessary distinction; he believed them all fervently. One of his vivid memories was the delivering before brothers Francis and Andrew, with violence and tears, the oration, "Tandem aliquando, Quirites," with indignation because both chuckled without intermission, and would not see the importance of condemning Catiline. Francis had general charge of the monastery school, which was filled and emptied daily through a special door on the avenue. But the scholars seldom went further than reading and writing, sums and fractions, and the lives of those saints who had had the more interesting adventures; so that, under the Superior's permission, to lead Gard into these high places of learning was a pleasure to which Francis surrendered himself, he feared, with sinful abandonment.
Music, Gard studied with one Brother Johannes, who played the little organ in the whitewashed chapel, all white except by the altar, where there was a distinction of gilded woodwork, silver candlesticks, and purple cloths, and so cold in winter that one's fingers were numb on the keys. He was an old, bowed-over man, Johannes, with frail, waxen hands, absent-minded, apt to forget his rule and be late, and not understand why the Superior persisted in modifying his discipline. He feared the Superior estimated his sins too lightly, and died in the year '52, when Gard was seventeen. Gard had to play the organ at offices after that, and to go daily three blocks up the avenue to the church of the Sacred Trinity, and take his lesson from Fritz Moselle, a mighty German from Strassburg, near the Rhine. He learned many things besides harmony and counterpoint of Fritz, who was a cosmopolitan, and believed not in the faith of man or woman; but he believed that art was the one country of the soul, and that in conduct it was the duty of every one to "do as he verdammt please."