The donna, who, of course, had not understood a word, looked with astonishment at this shocking piece of voracity; and when Bianca, in protection of her client, clasped her arms around the wine, and the Signora, with an air of determination, took possession of the salad, the poor creature evidently thought that she was waiting on a company of maniacs.
“Do let’s laugh,” said the Signora, and at once set the example. “We are frightening the poor soul to death.”
Their supper and their nonsense finished, the three took possession of their rooms.
A full moonlight was filling all the valley, or plain, which looked like the bottom of an emerald chalice full of golden wine. A pure and sacred silence reigned over all—the silence of peace and lofty contemplation. Had it been some such silence that suggested to Charlemagne, when, almost eleven hundred years before, he came to venerate the relics of St. Benedict, the beautiful thought of bestowing on the abbot, with all the other singular privileges he gave him, that of being the sole mediator between the emperor and the rebellious barons—the only person by whose means they could make their peace? It was doubtless by virtue of this ancient title that the prior had written “Pax” at the head of his letter to Mr. Vane.
Yes, Charlemagne came up here ages ago, and popes, and princes, and kings came, and the Saracens swarmed up with fire and sword, and the Lombards and the Normans; and the Crusaders came to pray at the shrine before going to the East. They had seen on the pilasters of the church the different crosses in precious mosaic of the orders of knights which had been formed under the Benedictine rule, among them the familiar names of Calatrava, Alcantara, St. Stephen, St. James of the Sword, and Templars. Ignatius of Loyola came up and stayed fifty days.
“But, signora mia,” said the lady who was going over all this part, as she gazed out into the night, “since you are not going to stay here fifty days, you will be so good as to shut your mind and your eyes and go to sleep.”
The next morning they went to see the monastery proper, for which they had a special permission from the Pope, and spent hours in the library, archives, printing and lithograph rooms. It would be vain to tell what old books—worth their weight in gold, printed on creamy vellum in characters that modern type has never excelled, if it has equalled—what drawers filled with scrolls, what autographs, what illuminations, they saw. It were vain to fancy with what feelings one sees for the first time the writing of Charlemagne, of Hildebrand, of Gregory the Great, of Frederick II., of Countess Matilda. Then there was the long, long dormitory of the boys, with a row of snowy beds at either side, and the immense arched window at the end framing a superb outside picture, with Monte Cairo in the centre, and long, long corridors that dwindled people seen from opposite ends, with cracks made by earthquakes in their walls, and solid groined arches that only an earthquake could shake down. Then the nooks, courts, and passages, which they came upon without guessing in the least in what part of the building they were; the round window in the wall—occhio, or eye, they call it—through which they looked as through a lens, and saw the three courts and the colonnades. Finally, coming down a stair with a wall at either side and a door at the foot, they were told: “When you have crossed that threshold you cannot return. The cloister ends there.”
“What!” exclaimed Isabel, “if I should run out a minute, couldn’t I come back on to the stairs again for another minute?”
The prior shook his head. “It would be excommunication. That seems unreasonable; but listen: This is a cloister which women can enter only by special permission of the Pope. That permission is not lightly granted, and is for but once. Your running back a minute would do no harm in itself, but would do harm to the principle. If you can return in one minute, you could come back in five, or ten, or half an hour, or an hour, or a day, and so on; and so one visit might be made to cover an indefinite time. The only way, you see, is to be strictly literal in excluding from a second entrance.”
That afternoon they were presented to the Abbot—“Abbot of Abbots” he was called in the palmy days of Monte Cassino—and received, not only his benediction, but each a little souvenir of the place: a tiny photograph of the tomb of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, with a wreath of flowers pressed round it that had been on the tomb, and at the back his own name written, with the date, and under it “Ora pro me.”