[CHAPTER III]
TONSURE AND THORN
THE following weeks dragged along in hopeless monotony. The last night of Francesco's novitiate had come. There would not be a loophole of escape for him now. On the morrow, the eternal vows were to pass his lips. This night he was to spend in the chapel of the saint on his knees, supposedly in prayer. It was a solitary vigil, for no companion could be granted him. A dangerous thing for a novice it was, had the monks but realized it:—putting one for ten hours alone at the mercy of his thoughts. And Francesco shuddered as they left him, kneeling upon the stones before the solitary shrine.
Could he have seen himself he would have staggered! How old and emaciated, shrunken and hopeless he looked, as he knelt there in his ungainly garments. The face which had formerly borne an open expression of happiness, was hard now, unreadable and impassive. His hands, once white and well cared for, had become almost transparent. As he held his body straight from the knees upward, it was difficult to perceive how much weaker this body had grown. There was a pathetically haughty poise to the head still; but the skin was colorless.
The love for Ilaria, her witch-like face, her witch-like eyes, had remained with him. He had hoped against hope, that by some human, or divine interposition, the yoke about to be imposed upon him would be shattered, that it would prove but a period of probation, a horrid nightmare forsooth, which would be dispelled by some divine ray, give him back to earth, to life, to love, for which his heart yearned with a feverish longing that was fast sapping his strength. His prayers had been in vain: the moments were fleeting fast towards the consummation of his destiny.
It suffered him no longer in the incense-saturated gloom of the chapel. Escaping from his solitary vigil he traversed the courtyard and almost unconsciously reached the spot whence on the night of his arrival at the cloisters he had looked down upon the mountain world of Central Italy.
Above, space soared. Glancing below, he was seized as with a sudden dizziness. All idea of limitation seemed to have ceased in this infinity, for he looked down upon a firmament of cloud. And even as he looked, it was vanishing dream-wise, revealing in widening rifts the world, that gave it birth. A world,—how flat for all its serrated mountain ranges, how insignificant for all its far horizons, compared with that immensity of the starry vault above.
As he gazed with wide, longing eyes, slowly the consciousness of physical existence seemed to widen, till it extended to the horizon and in the very extension was transfigured. Francesco tried to summon images of devotion. But the images mocked the vast concave. He only saw the deep eyes of Ilaria Caselli. Was not the universe his prayer? Sharp summits, glistening and far, were better cries of the soul than he could use.