When the Abbot’s perfectly cooked and served meal had ended, and the deep-fringed naperies were removed, and the Prior had sent in the keys with word that all was fast in the Monastery, and the keys had been duly returned with the word: “Make it so till Prime,” the Abbot and his guests went out to cool themselves in an upper cloister that took them, by way of the leads, to the South Choir side of the Triforium. The summer sun was still strong, for it was barely six o’clock, but the Abbey Church, of course, lay in her wonted darkness. Lights were being lit for choir-practice thirty feet below.
“Our Cantor gives them no rest,” the Abbot whispered. “Stand by this pillar and we’ll hear what he’s driving them at now.”
“Remember all!” the Cantor’s hard voice came up. “This is the soul of Bernard himself, attacking our evil world. Take it quicker than yesterday, and throw all your words clean-bitten from you. In the loft there! Begin!”
The organ broke out for an instant, alone and raging. Then the voices crashed together into that first fierce line of the “De Contemptu Mundi.”[5]
“Hora novissima—tempora pessima”—a dead pause till, the assenting sunt broke, like a sob, out of the darkness, and one boy’s voice, clearer than silver trumpets, returned the long-drawn vigilemus.
“Ecce minaciter, imminet Arbiter” (organ and voices were leashed together in terror and warning, breaking away liquidly to the “ille supremus”). Then the tone-colours shifted for the prelude to—“Imminet, imminet, ut mala terminet——”
“Stop! Again!” cried the Cantor; and gave his reasons a little more roundly than was natural at choir-practice.
“Ah! Pity o’ man’s vanity! He’s guessed we are here. Come away!” said the Abbot. Anne of Norton, in her carried chair, had been listening too, further along the dark Triforium, with Roger of Salerno. John heard her sob. On the way back, he asked Thomas how her health stood. Before Thomas could reply the sharp-featured Italian doctor pushed between them. “Following on our talk together, I judged it best to tell her,” said he to Thomas.
“What?” John asked simply enough.
“What she knew already.” Roger of Salerno launched into a Greek quotation to the effect that every woman knows all about everything.