THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH
The cool church chequered with sunbeams and crowned with heavenly purple, soothed and charmed Father Clement, as it did Margaret;and more, it carried his mind direct to the Creator of all good and pure delights.Then his eye fell on the great aisle crammed with his country folk; a thousand snowy caps, filigreed with gold.
Many a hundred leagues he had travelled; but seen nothing like them, except snow.In the morning he had thundered; but this sweet afternoon seemed out of tune with threats.His bowels yearned over that multitude; and he must tell them of God's love: poor souls, they heard almost as little of it from the pulpit then a days as the heathen used.He told them the glad tidings of salvation.The people hung upon his gentle, earnest tongue.
He was not one of those preachers who keep gyrating in the pulpit like the weathercock on the steeple.He moved the hearts of others more than his own body.But on the other hand he did not entirely neglect those who were in bad places.And presently, warm with this theme, that none of all that multitude might miss the joyful tidings of Christ's love, he turned him towards the south aisle.
And there, in a stream of sunshine from the window, was the radiant face of Margaret Brandt.He gazed at it without emotion.
It just benumbed him, soul and body.
But soon the words died in his throat, and he trembled as he glared at it.
There, with her auburn hair bathed in sunbeams, and glittering like the gloriola of a saint, and her face glowing doubly, with its own beauty, and the sunshine it was set in-stood his dead love.
She was leaning very lightly against a white column.She was listening with tender, downcast lashes.
He had seen her listen so to him a hundred times.
There was no change in her.This was the blooming Margaret he had left: only a shade riper and more lovely.
He started at her with monstrous eyes and bloodless cheeks.
The people died out of his sight.He heard, as in a dream, a rustling and rising all over the church; but could not take his prodigy-stricken eyes off that face, all life, and bloom, and beauty, and that wondrous auburn hair glistening gloriously in the sun.
He gazed, thinking she must vanish.
She remained,All in a moment she was looking at him, full.
Her own violet eyes!!
At this he was beside himself, and his lips parted to shriek out her name, when she turned her head swiftly, and soon after vanished, but not without one more glance, which, though rapid as lightning, encountered his, and left her couching and quivering with her mind in a whirl, and him panting and gripping the pulpit convulsively.For this glance of hers, though not recognition,was the startled inquiring, nameless, indescribable look that precedes recognition.He made a mighty effort, and muttered something nobody could understand: then feebly resumed his discourse; and stammered and babbled on a while, till by degrees forcing himself, now she was out of sight, to look on it as a vision from the other world, he rose into a state of unnatural excitement, and concluded in a style of eloquence that electrified the ******; for it bordered on rhapsody.