His heart stirred, most certainly; for the power and earnestness of the singing, which made a mere cultivated vocalism trivial and tame, and perhaps the sustained high pitch of it—all contained within four notes—touched the chord of the sublime. They sang the titles of the Virgin-Mother, calling on her, by every tender and every glorious privilege of hers, to pray for them; and their prayer was no more the part of an oft-repeated ceremony, but the cry of souls that might each or all, in an instant, be struggling in the waves of death. Life itself grew suddenly awful while he listened, and he remembered that salvation is to be “worked out in fear and trembling.”
He lifted his eyes to the picture over the altar, and it was no longer a picture. The figures floated before him in the misty golden light of many candles, as if there were blood in their veins and meaning in their faces. The Mother extended her Child, and the Child blessed them, and both listened. She was the Mystical Rose, the Morning Star; she was the Help of the weak, the Mother of divine Grace. They sang her glories, and this listener from a far land forgot the narrow walls that hemmed him in, and saw only those faces, and felt, as it were, the universe rock with acclamations. She was a queen, and under her feet, and about her, bearing her up, were
angels, prophets, martyrs, confessors, and patriarchs. Their wings, wide-spread and waving; their garments of light, as varied in hue as the rainbow; their radiant faces were like the crowding clouds of sunset; and over them all, buoyant, glowing with celestial sweetness and joy, floated the woman crowned with stars, the only human being whom sin had never dared to touch. The stars swam about her head like golden bees about a flower; and as a flower curls its petals down, half hiding, half revealing, the shining heart which is its source and life, so the Mother bent above and clasped the Infant. In the centre of this vision was the Blessed Sacrament exposed, more marvellous than any vision, more real than any other tangible thing; so that Imagination was bound to Faith as wings to the shoulders of an angel.
There was a little stir in one corner of the chapel; for the strange gentleman had nearly fallen from his chair, and a lay brother, passing at the moment, supported him, and asked what he would have and what ailed him.
The gentleman replied that nothing ailed him, that he needed nothing but fresher air, and he immediately recovered so far as to go out without assistance. He had, indeed, been more self-forgetting and entranced than fainting, and even when he stood on the sidewalk, with familiar sights and sounds all about, could hardly remember where he was. He walked a little way up the hill opposite, and stood looking absently along a cross-street at the other end of which a new Gothic church was in progress.
A man who had been standing near approached him with an insinuating smile. “Our church is getting
along rapidly,” he said in English, appearing to know whom he addressed. “We shall soon have divine service in it, I hope.”
“Divine service!” repeated Mr. Vane rather absently, not having looked at the meeting-house, and scarcely knowing what was being said to him. “What divine service?”
“Oh! the Protestant, of course,” the stranger answered with great suavity. “I am a minister of the Gospel.”
“What Gospel?” inquired Mr. Vane, looking at the speaker with the air of one who listens patiently to nonsense.