Francesco stood before the high altar among the monks and acolytes and read the Introitus aloud in steady tones. All the cathedral was a blaze of light and color, from the holiday dresses of the peasants to the pillars with their flaming draperies and wreaths of flowers. The religious orders from the adjoining monasteries with their candles and torches, the companies of the parishes, with their crosses and pennons, lighted up the dim side-chapels; in the aisles the silken folds of processional banners drooped their gilded staves and tassels, glinting under the arches. The surplices of the choristers gleamed, rainbow-tinted, beneath the colored windows; the sunlight lay on the chancel floor in checkered stains of orange and purple and green. Behind the altar hung a shimmering veil of silver tissue, and against the veil and the decorations and the altar-light, the Prior's figure stood out in its trailing white robe like a marble statue that had come to life.
The light of a hundred candles shone in the deep still eyes about him, eyes that had no answering gleam. At the elevation of the Host the Prior descended from his platform and knelt before the altar. There was a strange, even stillness in his movement. The sea of human life and motion seemed to surge around and below him and die away in the stillness. A censer was brought to Francesco, he raised his hand with the action of an automaton and put the incense into the vessel, looking neither to the right nor left. Then he too knelt, swinging the censer slowly to and fro. He took from the Prior the sacred golden sun, while the choristers burst into a peal of triumphal melody:
Pange linqua gloriosi
Corporis mysterium.
Sanguinisque pretiosi
Quem in mundi pretium
Fructus ventris gloriosi
Rex effudit gentium.
Francesco stood above the monks, motionless under the white canopy, holding the Eucharist aloft with steady hands. Two by two passed the monks, with lighted candles held left to right, with banners and torches, with crosses and images and flags, they swept slowly down the broad nave past the garlanded pillars, the sound of their chanting dying into a rolling murmur, drowned in the pealing of new and newer voices, as the unending stream flowed on and yet new footsteps echoed down the incense-laden nave.
One by one the visiting brotherhoods passed with their white shrouds and veiled faces, the brothers of the Misericordia, black from head to foot, their eyes faintly gleaming through the holes in their masks; the mendicant friars with their dusky cowls and bare brown feet, the russet Benedictines and the white-robed grave Dominicans. They all bore testimony to the irrevocable step the son of the Grand Master had taken. A monk followed, holding up a great cross between two acolytes with gleaming candles. On and on the procession passed, form succeeding to form and color to color. Long white surplices, grave and seemly, gave place to gorgeous vestments and embroidered pluvials. The roses were strewn, the procession filed out.
When the chant had ceased, Francesco passed between the silent rows of the monks, where they knelt, each man in his place, the lighted candles uplifted. And he saw their hungry eyes fixed on the sacred body that he bore. To right and left the white-robed acolytes knelt with their censers, as peal after peal of song rang out, resounding under the arches, echoing along the vaulted roof.
Wearily, mechanically, Francesco went through the remaining part of his consecration, which had no longer any meaning for him, prayer eluding him as a vapor. After the Benediction he covered his face. The voice of the monk reading aloud the indulgences, swelled and sank like a far-off murmur from a world to which he belonged no more.