Then, content and confident, without saying another word, she waited with her two inarticulate but eloquent companions—Art, consecrated to God, and Nature, informed by God—and felt above and about the illuminating Presence. For faith is the rod that calls the divine Lightning down, whether it came as a dove, or a tongue of fire, or a pointing finger, or a whispering voice.
The landscape of the plain, seen through the arched door under the Paradiso, was dim and gray with rain, or glittering and red with lightning; the mountain-tops above it, and the sky, were a changing tumult of shadows veined with threads of fire, and rolled hither and thither in visible thunders. The white pavement of the court below changed every instant into jaspers, the beautiful columns and curb and steps of the well became jewels, and one of the copper buckets that stood on the brink was like a vessel of red gold brimming over with red wine.
St. Benedict with his crosier, and St. Scholastica with her dove, stood immovable but living, and their calmness in that tumult was like a song of triumph. Did he sing with Moses?—“Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thy inheritance, in thy most firm habitation which thou hast made, O Lord; thy sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established.” And did she reply, like Miriam with her timbrel?—“Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnified, the horse and his rider he hath thrown into the sea.” Such silence in a tumult seems ever a singing.
When the Signora went down, slipping from colonnade to colonnade, dry-shod, the storm was spent. From the little balcony of the parlor, where she found her companions, she saw a grand arch of rainbow trembling out over the east, as if astonished at its own glory, trembling as it grew, but as strong and bold as light.
Flocks of birds were swinging by in a great circle, screaming impudently as they passed the balcony, as if to say, “Catch us, if you can!” There was a little parallelogram of garden under the window, with a rough pole frame-work supporting a dripping vine, and, below the dropping fields, a crest of land and rock, curling over like a pointed wave, rose boldly in the foreground; then, the plain.
Mr. Vane came to stand beside her, looking at her keenly one instant, then averting his eyes.
“Well,” he said, “what has the storm been saying to you up there?”
“It has washed the drift-wood out of my path, and made it as clear and white as one of those torrent-beds up the mountain-side,” she answered. “I think I ought to work a little harder for the future. Life is short, and I have, perhaps, sometimes played with my talents. They were given me for serious use. When you shall have left me alone, instead of sitting weakly down and thinking that it is rather lonely, I shall begin to carve a new book out of the next year. Do you know that year to come looks to me as the block of marble looked to Michael Angelo when he said, 'I will make an angel of it.’ I am not a Michael Angelo,” she added, smiling; “but I am something, and, firmly and intelligently set to work, I may do what need not be despised. My mind is clear.”
He was answered.
If a shade passed over his face, it was slight. If his lips were compressed a moment, she did not look to see. He stood and watched the rainbow grow and fade, and, as its colors went out, so faded out of his life a sweet hope. But he reflected: “Denials make strong. And the light that made the rainbow is not dead.”