. As
the two windows were both on the inner side of the grating, and the dark
surface of the wood was a bad reflector, the light in the place was so
dim that you could scarcely see the great black crucifix, the portrait
of Saint Theresa, and a picture of the Madonna which adorned the grey
parlour walls. Tumultuous as the General's feelings were, they took
something of the melancholy of the place. He grew calm in that homely
quiet. A sense of something vast as the tomb took possession of him
beneath the chill unceiled roof. Here, as in the grave, was there not
eternal silence, deep peace--the sense of the Infinite? And besides this
there was the quiet and the fixed thought of the cloister--a thought
which you felt like a subtle presence in the air, and in the dim dusk
of the room; an all-pervasive thought nowhere definitely expressed, and
looming the larger in the imagination; for in the cloister the great
saying, "Peace in the Lord," enters the least religious soul as a living
force.

The monk's life is scarcely comprehensible. A man seems confessed a
weakling in a monastery; he was born to act, to live out a life of work;
he is evading a man's destiny in his cell. But what man's strength,
blended with pathetic weakness, is implied by a woman's choice of the
convent life! A man may have any number of motives for burying himself
in a monastery; for him it is the leap over the precipice. A woman
has but one motive--she is a woman still; she betrothes herself to a
Heavenly Bridegroom. Of the monk you may ask, "Why did you not fight
your battle?" But if a woman immures herself in the cloister, is there
not always a sublime battle fought first?

At length it seemed to the General that that still room, and the lonely
convent in the sea, were full of thoughts of him. Love seldom attains
to solemnity; yet surely a love still faithful in the breast of God was
something solemn, something more than a man had a right to look for
as things are in this nineteenth century? The infinite grandeur of the
situation might well produce an effect upon the General's mind; he had
precisely enough elevation of soul to forget politics, honours, Spain,
and society in Paris, and to rise to the height of this lofty climax.
And what in truth could be more tragic? How much must pass in the souls
of these two lovers, brought together in a place of strangers, on
a ledge of granite in the sea; yet held apart by an intangible,
unsurmountable barrier! T