Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/350

 There was a dreary chill in the chapel and the corridors, and he passed rapidly through them into the delightfully steep and tangled old garden which runs wild over the forehead of the mountain. He had been there before, he came back to it as to a friend. The garden hangs in the air, and you ramble from terrace to terrace and wonder how it keeps from slipping down, in full consummation of its dishonour and decay, to the nakedly romantic gorge beneath. It was just noon at Rowland's visit, and after roaming about a while he flung himself on the sun-warmed slab of a mossy stone bench and pulled his hat over his eyes. The short shadows of the brown-coated cypresses above him had grown very long, later on, and yet he had not passed back through the convent. One of the monks, in a faded snuff-coloured robe, came wandering out into the garden, reading a greasy little breviary. Suddenly he approached the bench on which Rowland had stretched himself and paused for respectful interest. Rowland was still in possession, but seated now with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. He seemed not to have heard the sandalled tread of the good brother, but as the monk remained watching him he at last looked up. It was not the ignoble old man who had admitted him, but a pale, gaunt personage, of a graver and more ascetic and yet of a charitable aspect. Rowland's face might have borne for him the traces of extreme trouble; something he appeared mildly to consider as he kept his finger in his little book and folded his arms picturesquely across his breast. Was his attitude, as he bent his sympathetic Italian eyes, the mere accident of his 316