Then something gave way in her aching breast, the four healing words echoed and found response in her heart.
"Ave, ave!" she faltered, her slender figure bowed in the golden light, the healing scent of eucalyptus blossom floating down to her, and the majesty of those soaring mountain peaks and buttressed hill-flanks spreading far above in the hush and glow of the passing day. There, with her face pressed to the sun-warmed wood and her arms clasping it, a huge weight—"the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world"—fell away from her heart, and the great prayer that has no words filled it with peace beyond understanding—the spes unica—the only road to solution of all the tangled mystery of life.
When she rose the world was changed. On either side of the cross stood a tall eucalyptus tree; long tresses of pale fragrant blossom hung among their scimitar-shaped leaves; their cinnamon-coloured trunks, whence rolls of scented bark peeled, were so forked that the branched stems made a comfortable seat; there the tired girl rested in the ruddy glow, silently absorbing the same tranquil pageant of vesper splendour that light-hearted Ermengarde was watching from the hotel garden above. Sea murmurs were faintly audible in the deep stillness, the incense curling bluely from hill-altars was sweet, glorious were the grandly-grouped peaks and mountain masses changing and glowing with life-like motion in the sliding lights, silent, majestic witnesses to the everlasting beauty that underlies and transfuses all things. God was speaking through all that beauty; doubt and fear vanished; in spite of misery, care, and sin, all must be well at last.
Lightened at heart, she leant on the low convent wall and looked down the ravine, that was rapidly filling with shadow, and across it at the white village poised on a hill, its slender tower uplifted like a standard under the purple-shadowed mountain peak.
Suddenly a harsh high laugh broke upon the charmed stillness, and was followed by strident voices and a confused hurry of footsteps, as the whole rout of pleasure-seekers from the hotel gate clattered round the corner under the convent walls unseen, while a polyglot cackle, playing round the words systems, hotels, Monte, tables, winnings, losings, dinners, poured out in passing crescendo and died gradually away in the distance.
But before they were quite out of hearing, as they filed out upon a part of the path visible from the convent wall, the young woman's gaze was startled and arrested by the same lady and attendant youths whose talk had already been overheard from the hotel gardens, and her heart stood still and her colour went at the sight.
These two? Was it these two really beyond doubt? Then what she had heard and what had been feared was true, much too true. And for such as they, of what avail to wrestle, to agonize, to beat at the gate of heavenly mercy with fastings and tears and inward silent heart-bleeding? Even now the boy's mother must be praying at home for him. And of what avail? Yet was not yonder vast cathedral reared to the lucid sky telling in superb and solemn beauty of the infinite power and love and pity of the divine poet and artificer of all? And even if that calm majesty had no power to rebuke fretting or silence despair, there was the spes unica shining in the deepening after-glow, a beacon to storm-driven hearts.
A little withered old woman passed along under the rock wall, leading a self-willed goat, and briskly knitting. She sent up a shrill and cheerful "Buon sera," laughed, and nodded, and went on her tranquil way. Then the lay brother in charge of the deserted garden, passing the eucalyptus on his way home from work, told her she had taken the longest way, and put her on the shorter, and she went down the steps as the first few stars trembled into the sky, and so round through olives and pines to the hotel. And there, in the glowing twilight above the lemon-tops, was the face of her fellow-traveller, brightening at the sight of her with smiles of welcome.
"My dear woman of mystery, where did you spring from?" she cried. "I thought you had gone on to Italy. And how on earth did you climb up this terrific hill? And where is your luggage? And how very glad I am to see you again!"
That Italy was just round the corner, that the parting had been but yesterday, and that it was possible for an able-bodied woman to climb a mile of mountain-path without utter destruction, filled Ermengarde with a wonder only less than her wonder at her own unfeigned delight in unexpectedly meeting this woman, who appeared to be somewhat overpowered by her effusive reception.