Outside the wall was a long strip of woodland which rose gently to the summit of a ridge half a mile away. This woodland was but little used. Into it occasionally a lay-brother drove the gentle monastery cows to pasture, or here a flock sheltered itself beneath forest oaks against the noontide summer heat. Beyond the summit lay the homestead of a gentleman farmer. As one descended this slope towards the abbey, he beheld it from the most picturesque side, and visitors at the homestead usually came to see it by this secluded approach.
If Father Palemon could have seen beyond the wall, he would have discovered that the voices were those of a young man and a young woman—the former a slight, dark cripple, and invalid. He led the way along a foot-path up quite close to the wall, and the two sat down beneath the shade of a great tree. Father Palemon, listening eagerly, unconsciously, overheard the following conversation:
"I should like to take you inside the abbey wall, but, of course, that is impossible, as no woman is allowed to enter the grounds. So we shall rest here a while. I find that the walk tires me more than it once did, and this tree has become a sort of outside shrine to me on my pilgrimages."
"Do you come often?"
"Oh yes. When we have visitors, I am appointed their guide, probably because I feel more interest in the place than any one else. If they are men, I take them over the grounds inside; and if they are women, I bring them thus far and try to describe the rest."
"As you will do for me now?"
"No; I am not in the mood for describing. Even when I am, my description always disappoints me. How is one to describe such human beings as these monks? Sometimes, during the long summer days, I walk over here alone and lie for hours under this tree, until the influences of the place have completely possessed me and I feel wrought up to the point of description. The sensation of a chill comes over me. Look up at these Kentucky skies! You have never seen them before. Are there any more delicate and tender? Well, at such times, where they bend over this abbey, they look as hard and cold as a sky of Landseer's. The sun seems no longer to warm the pale cross on the spire yonder, the great drifting white clouds send a shiver through me as though uplifted snow-banks were passing over my head. I fancy that if I were to go inside I should see the white butterflies dropping down dead from the petals of the white roses, finding them stiff with frost, and that the white rabbits would be limping trembling through the frozen grass, like the hare in 'The Eve of St. Agnes.' Everything becomes cold to me—cold, cold, cold! The bleak and rugged old monks themselves, in their hoary cowls, turn to personifications of perpetual winter; and if I were in the chapel, I should expect to meet in one of them Keats's very beadsman—patient, holy man, meagre, wan—whose fingers were numb while he told his rosary, and his breath frosted as it took flight for heaven. Ugh! I am cold now. My blood must be getting very thin."
"No; you make me shiver also."
"At least the impression is a powerful one. I have watched these old monks closely. Whether it is from the weakness of vigils and fasts or from positive cold, they all tremble—perpetually tremble. I fancy that their souls ache as well. Are not their cowls the grave-clothes of a death in life?"
"You seem to forget, Austin, that faith warms them."