Michael and Chator looked injured.
“Breakfast after Mass. Bread and cheese at twelve. Cup of tea at five, if you’re in. Supper at eight.”
Dom Gilbert left them abruptly to eat their bread and cheese alone.
“He’s rather a surly chap,” grumbled Michael. “He doesn’t seem to me the right one to have chosen for guest-brother at all. I had a lot I wanted to ask him. For one thing I don’t know where the lav. is. I think he’s a rotten guest-brother.”
The afternoon passed in a walk along the wide ridge of the downs through the amber of this fine summer day. Several hares were seen and a kestrel, while Chator disposed very volubly of the claims of several Anglican clergymen to Catholicism. After tea in the hour of recreation they met the other monks, Dom Gregory the organist, Brother George and Brother William. It was not a very large monastery.
Chator found the Vespers somewhat trying to his curiosity, because owing to the interposition of the curtain he was unable to criticize the behaviour of the monks in quire. This made him very fidgety, and rather destroyed Michael’s sense of peace. However, Chator restrained his ritualistic ardour very well at Compline, which in the dimness of the starlit night was a magical experience, as one by one with raised cowls the monks entered in black procession and silence absolute. Michael, where he knelt in the ante-chapel, was profoundly moved by the intimate responses and the severe Compline hymn. He liked, too, the swift departure to bed without chattering good-nights to spoil the solemnity of the last Office. Even Chator kept all conversation for the morning, and Michael felt he had never lain down upon a couch so truly sanctified, nor ever risen from one so pure as when Dom Gilbert knocked with a hammer on the door and, standing dark against the milk-white dawn, murmured ‘Pax vobiscum.’
Chapter VII: Cloven Hoofmarks
I N the first fortnight of their stay at Clere Abbas Michael and Chator lived like vagabond hermits rejoicing in the freedom of fine weather. Mostly they went for long walks over the downs and through the woodlands of the southern slope. To the monks at recreation time they would recount their adventures with gamekeepers and contumacious farmers, their discoveries of flowers and birds and butterflies, their entertainment at remote cottage homes and the hospitalities of gipsy camps. To be sure they would often indulge in theological discussions, and sometimes, when caught by the azure-footed dusk in unfamiliar lanes, they would chant plainsong to the confusion of whatever ghostly pursuers, whether Dryads or mediæval fiends or early Victorian murderers, that seemed to dog their footsteps. So much nowadays did the unseen world mingle with the ordinary delights of youth.
“Funny thing,” said Michael to Chator. “When I was a kid I used to be frightened at night—always. Then for a long time I wasn’t frightened at all, and now again I have a queer feeling just after sunset, a sort of curious dampness inside me. Do you ever have it?”
“I only have it when you start me off,” said Chator. “But it goes when we sing ‘Te lucis ante terminum’ or chant the Nicene Creed or anything holy.”