The sad expression returned to his face.
“There are many temptations in such a land and climate as this,” he said. “And men are weak. But there are still the White Fathers whom he founded. Glorious men. They carry the Cross into the wildest places of the world. The most fanatical Arabs respect the White Marabouts.”
“You wish you were with them?”
“Yes, Madame. But my health only permits me to be a humble parish priest here. Not all who desire to enter the most severe life can do so. If it were otherwise I should long since have been a monk. The Cardinal himself showed me that my duty lay in other paths.”
He pointed out to Domini one or two things in the church which he admired and thought worthy; the carving of the altar rail into grapes, ears of corn, crosses, anchors; the white embroidered muslin that draped the tabernacle; the statue of a bishop in a red and gold mitre holding a staff and Bible, and another statue representing a saint with a languid and consumptive expression stretching out a Bible, on the leaves of which a tiny, smiling child was walking.
As they were about to leave the church he made Domini pause in front of a painting of Saint Bruno dressed in a white monkish robe, beneath which was written in gilt letters:
“Saint Bruno ordonne a ses disciples
De renoncer aux biens terrestres
Pour acquerir les biens celestes.”
The disciples stood around the saint in grotesque attitudes of pious attention.
“That, I think, is very beautiful,” he said. “Who could look at it without feeling that the greatest act of man is renunciation?”
His dark eyes flamed. Just then a faint soprano bark came to them from outside the church door, a very discreet and even humble, but at the same time anxious, bark. The priest’s face changed. The almost passionate asceticism of it was replaced by a soft and gentle look.