The ceiling consisted of bare
unornamented joists and cross-beams of ilex wood. 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.
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