It was in one's
hand--the finger of an Evangelist! The crowned head of Saint Lubin,
bishop of Chartres [31] long centuries since, but still able to
preserve its wheat-stacks from fire; bones of the "Maries," with some
of the earth from their grave; these, and the like of these, was what
the curious eye discerned in the recesses of those variously
contrived reliquaries, great and small, glittering so profusely about
the dusky church, itself ministering, by its very shadows, to a
certain appetite in the soul of Gaston for dimness--for a dim place
like this--such as he had often prefigured to himself, albeit with
some suspicion of what might seem a preference for darkness.
Physical twilight we most of us love, in its season. To him, that
perpetual twilight came in close identity with its moral or
intellectual counterpart, as the welcome requisite for that part of
the soul which loves twilight, and is, in truth, never quite at rest
out of it, through some congenital uneasiness or distress, perhaps,
in its processes of vision.
As complex, yet not less perfectly united under a single leading
motive,--its sister volume, was the ritual order of Notre-Dame de
Chartres, a year-long dramatic action, in which every one had, and
knew, his part--the drama or "mystery" of Redemption, to the
necessities of which the great church had shaped itself.
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