The Testing of Diana Mallory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

They turned their steps back to the Lower Church. As they went in, darkness--darkness sudden and profound engulfed them. They groped their way along the outer vestibule or transept, finding themselves amid a slowly moving crowd of peasants. The crowd turned; they with it; and a blaze of light burst upon them.

Before them was the nave of the Lower Church, with its dark-storied chapels on either hand, itself bathed in a golden twilight, with figures of peasants and friars walking in it, vaguely transfigured. But the sanctuary beyond, the altar, the walls, and low-groined roof flamed and burned. An exposition of the Sacrament was going on. Hundreds of slender candles arranged upon and about the altar in a blazing pyramid drew from the habitual darkness in which they hide themselves Giotto's thrice famous frescos; or quickened on the walls, like flowers gleaming in the dawn, the loveliness of quiet faces, angel and saint and mother, the beauty of draped folds at their simplest and broadest, a fairy magic of wings and trumpets, of halos and crowns.

Now the two strangers understood why they had found Assisi itself deserted; emptied of its folk this quiet eve. Assisi was here, in the church which is at once the home and daily spectacle of her people. Why stay away among the dull streets and small houses of the hill-side, when there were these pleasures of eye and ear, this sensuous medley of light and color, this fellowship and society, this dramatic symbolism and movement, waiting for them below, in the church of their fathers?

So that all were here, old and young, children and youths, fathers just home from their work, mothers with their babies, girls with their sweethearts. Their happy yet reverent familiarity with the old church, their gay and natural participation in the ceremony that was going on, made on Diana's alien mind the effect of a great multitude crowding to salute their King. There, in the midst, surrounded by kneeling acolytes and bending priests, shone the Mystic Presence. Each man and woman and child, as they passed out of the shadow into the light, bent the knee, then parted to either side, each to his own place, like courtiers well used to the ways of a beautiful and familiar pageantry.

An old peasant in a blouse noticed the English ladies, beckoned to them, and with a kind of gracious authority led them through dark chapels, till he had placed them in the open space that spread round the flaming altar, and found them seats on the stone ledge that girdles the walls. An old woman saying her beads looked up smiling and made room. A baby or two ran out over the worn marble flags, gazed up at the gilt-and-silver angels hovering among the candles of the altar, and was there softly captured--wide-eyed, and laughing in a quiet ecstasy--by its watchful mother.

Diana sat down, bewildered by the sheer beauty of a marvellous and incomparable sight. Above her head shone the Giotto frescos, the immortal four, in which the noblest legend of Catholicism finds its loveliest expression, as it were the script, itself imperishable, of a dying language, to which mankind will soon have lost the key.

Yet only dying, perhaps, as the tongue of Cicero died--to give birth to the new languages of Europe.

For in Diana's heart this new language of the spirit which is the child of the old was already strong, speaking through the vague feelings and emotions which held her spellbound. What matter the garment of dogma and story?--the raiment of pleaded fact, which for the modern is no fact? In Diana, as in hundreds and thousands of her fellows, it had become--unconsciously--without the torment and struggle of an older generation--Poetry and Idea; and all the more invincible thereby.

Above her head, Poverty, gaunt and terrible in her white robe, her skirt torn with brambles, and her poor cheek defaced by the great iron hook which formerly upheld the Sanctuary lamp, married with St. Francis--Christ himself joining their hands.

So Love and Sorrow pledged each other in the gleaming color of the roof. Divine Love spoke from the altar, and in the crypt beneath their feet which held the tomb of the Poverello the ashes of Love slept.