THE GARDEN.
It is the hour of the Compline, the Salve, and the Angelus—the last of the seven services that the Trappist holds between 2 o'clock in the morning and this hour of early nightfall. Standing alone in the silent darkness you allow imagination to carry you once more into the church. You sit in one of the galleries and look down upon the stalls of the monks ranged along the walls of the nave. There is no light except the feeble gleam of a single low red cresset that swings ever-burning before the altar. You can just discern a long line of nameless dusky figures creep forth from the deeper gloom and glide noiselessly into their seats. You listen to the cantus [198] plenus gravitate—those long, level notes with sorrowful cadences and measured pauses, sung by a full, unfaltering chorus of voices, old and young. It is the song that smote the heart of Bossuet with such sadness in the desert of Normandy two and a half centuries ago.
Anon by some unseen hand two tall candles are lighted on the altar. The singing is hushed. From the ghostly line of white-robed Fathers a shadowy figure suddenly moves towards the spot in the middle of the church where the bell-rope hangs, and with slow, weird movements rings the solemn bell until it fills the cold, gray arches with quivering sound. One will not in a lifetime forget the impressiveness of the scene—the long tapering shadows that stretch out over the dimly lighted, polished floor from this figure silhouetted against the brighter light from the altar beyond; the bowed, moveless forms of the monks in brown almost indiscernible in the gloom; the spectral glamour reflected from the robes of the bowed Fathers in white; the ghastly, suffering scene of the Saviour, strangely luminous in the glare of the tall candles. It is the daily climax in the devotions of the Old World monks at Gethsemane. [199]
[200]
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HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
I
