“True,” he said uncertainly. “Still it must be.”
But involuntarily he moved a step nearer his companion.
Both glanced down at the slender feet in the grass. These seemed to move, and the spirit, or woman, turned her head swiftly from side to side. Her breath came quicker, but the monks could not hear it, or they might have taken courage.
“It is astonishing,” murmured Brother Emanuel, uneasily.
While they stood undecided between the attack and the retreat, suddenly from the chapel near by the organ gave voice in a deep, swelling chord, which climbed by subtle and suave modulations and soared aloft into a tender melody.
“It is Brother Angelo,” whispered Anselmo.
“It is holy music!” said Emanuel, devoutly, and he made the sign of the cross in the air before him.
The tremulous notes, growing louder, drowned the rustle of the leaves, the plash of the fountain, the sigh of the wind. It seemed as though the garden hushed half-unwillingly to listen, when a voice, humanly deep and sweet, but spiritualized into something not less than divine, took up the melody and bore it higher and heavenward, pouring out into the night a flood of ecstasy and aspiration. The march of the music was solemn and splendid, and its soul was a joy unearthly and beyond utterance.
The black-robed brothers stood and listened, rebuked and dumb, turning their faces toward the glimmering wall of the chapel, and forgetting for a moment the fears which had agitated them, with their cause. What were all the potencies of the passionate earth, so easily diverted from good, against this royal dominion?
The evil-seeming spell was broken. A sudden movement, no sound but a stirring of the air, recalled their attention. The foliage of the acacia trembled as though a bird had taken wing. The bench was vacant, flowers strewed the ground before it, the presence had vanished. Her white feet or a breath of air had borne her away. The diapason of the organ drowned the sound her flight might have made; and the trees bent as though to bury in shadow her possible path. Emanuel made a long step forward.
“Woman or spirit, she is gone!” he cried, and stooped to see what trace of her those scattered roses might show. Anselmo grasped his companion’s sleeve.