Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/72

62 Whether Brother Sebastian painted any more pictures; whether Brother Matthais learnt love and charity when they and the Prior passed from the generations of men, the old chronicles which tell the story omit to state, or whether they left any further record of their lives in the convent beyond this scene which has been kept alive by a monkish chronicler's hand.

It is even a matter of doubt what cloister slab covers the dust of the Count of Trevino, Prior of the Augustinian monastery of Toro, or of Sebastian Gomez, the painter, or of Fray Matthias, the peasant's son.

But now comes the strange part of the relation, for the picture, the miracle-working picture, is still to be seen in the monastery of Toro. The Prior, the painter, the peasant died, but the picture lived. For a century at least after their death it listened from its station above the high altar to all the sounds of the monastery church. Vespers trembled in the air before it and the roll of midnight complines. It felt the priest s voice strike against its surface when he sanctified the sacrifice ; the shuffle of the monks feet as they took their places in the choir above, the echo of their coughs, the slamming of the doors were the familiar records of its life. In the redness of the morning, when the friars slept after their orisons, and the birds began to sing in the first light of dawn, it looked on the pavement of the church suffused with the wavering reflections of the painted windows, and watched the thin stains advance, as the day lengthened, and then recede in the weird pallor of the dying day. In the gloaming it watched the mysterious greyness sweep towards it and envelop it as in a shroud. All night long, as from a mirror, it gave back the red flame of the lamps that swung before it, and yet the words of the Prior seemed no nearer their fulfilment. And the picture mourned. Rh