Tears were in her eyes as she led her son away. By and by they came to another edifice. In a niche in the stone wall near the entrance was the figure of Jesus on a cross. He paused and looked at it for several minutes, murmuring, "Strange! Strange!"
In the vestibule she was so awed by the imposing interior of the structure and the fashionable congregation, that she drew him to one side.
"Perhaps we had better stand here," she whispered. "We seem to be unlike the rest. We shall not be in the way out here, and through the door we can see and hear the service."
He made no answer. He was looking at a grand window on which stood a representation of Jesus, in a stream of light from heaven, bearing the words, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." "Strange, very strange!" she heard him whisper, and tears were in his eyes.
No one offered to give them seats, and they remained standing in the vestibule against a wall. A grand organ began to peal out the music of Gounod's Saint Cecilia Mass. Presently it died down; there was a short pause, then, like the rising of a musical storm came the subdued voices of the choristers from the closed vestry. The door was gradually opened, and the music swelled out into the church. The crucifer, a beautiful lad, attired in a blood-red cassock and a white, lace-trimmed cotta, entered. Behind him, chanting, came a long train of choir-boys, followed by two acolytes who swung by chains of brass censers from which rose clouds of fragrant smoke. Two priests brought up the rear; one, the celebrant of the Holy Communion, was magnificently garbed. He wore a trailing black cassock of richest silk, and over it a short lawn cotta trimmed with priceless lace, an enormous cloth-of-gold cope on the back of which blazed a cross wrought in jewels. About his neck he had a white stole, over an arm a snowy maniple, upon his head a priestly beretta.
"Is it not beautiful?" asked the poor woman of her son. But he did not hear her. His eyes, blinded by tears of infinite sorrow, were resting on the white statue of the Virgin near the snowy altar of marble, on which burnt a constellation of tapers and candles around the red lamp of the "Holy Presence."
His breast heaved; a sob escaped him, and his head sank upon his chest.
"And they do this in the name of love," he said, as if in prayer. "They make an idol of my memory while my brothers and sisters are dying for the lack of love and kindness. They do all this to praise me whom they have so little understood. O God, my Father, let this trial pass, or make me as you are that I may, this time, set them right, for I suffer past endurance."
The short sermon ended. The celebration of Mass began. The wafer and the wine were consecrated. The priest raised the wafer before the eyes of the congregation and said, "This is my body," and all heads bowed low.
"At the very instant you hear the bell strike," whispered a man to a boy near the mother and son, "at that very instant the Saviour will be there—listen!"