Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/67

Rh might find rest; there end the turmoil of an unlucky and disappointed life. He saw the quiet cloisters flooded with sunlight looking out into the greenery of the monastery garden. He heard the splashing of the drops from the fountain fall peacefully on the hot silence. Nay, he even smelt the powerful scent of the great myrtle bushes whose shadows fell blue and cool athwart the burning alleys.

His servants' tears fell fast as he distributed amongst them the last fragments of his once immense fortune; they fell faster when they saw the solitary figure disappearing over the ridge of the sandy path, for, although they knew not of his resolution, they felt that they should see his face no more.

But we cannot escape from ourselves, even in the cloister. There he felt the fires of an ambition that untoward circumstances had chilled in his youth. The longing to leave some tangible record of a life that he knew had been useless, fell upon him and consumed him. He opened his mind to the prior. The prior was a man of the world (there have always been such in the cloister), and knew the workings of the human heart.

The monks began to whisper to each other that Brother Sebastian was changed. Sometimes, at vespers, one or other would look at him and note that his eyes had lost their melancholy, and were as bright as stars. Then it got rumoured about amongst them that he was painting a picture.

The monastery is, and especially a mediæval one, full or schisms and cabals. In it the rigour of the ultra-pietists who stormed heaven by fire and sword, and whose hearts were shut to all kindliness and charity, was to be found side by side with mild and gentle spirits, who, through the gift of tears and ecstatic revery, caught sight of the mystic and universal Bond of Love, which, linked together in one common union, Nature, animal, Rh