Page:Balkan Short Stories.djvu/18

6 be easy to say. Perhaps it was something that had to be. There are men in whose lives the fatalism of the past asserts its rights, that fatalism which the middle-age tried vainly to displace by means of faith in Providence, and which the modern world tried to make blind by the light of science, and succeeded only in dimming. It was easy to see that Cœlestin was not contented in the Cloister. What was to him the wonderful, magic beauty of nature, if he could look upon it only through the narrow window of his cell, which was covered with iron bars! The rest of the monks were old, too. They were unfriendly and cross. Perhaps the dreams with which they had stepped over the Cloister threshold had proved false as his own.

The cell of Brother Cœlestin was small; it looked bare and needy. It had one advantage, however; it was in an old tower, the remnant of an older fortification. This tower, with its one little iron-barred window, was the nest of all his dreams. A few boards made his bed; a Bible and breviary his library. The room to him seemed strange and bare. But the view out upon the mountain summits worked magic upon him, breathed into