He was guided through a gallery which ran the length of the cemetery, where fountains and trees and numerous arcades gave a cool freshness in keeping with that still and silent spot.  When they reached the end of this long gallery, the priest led his companion into a parlor, divided in the middle by a grating covered with a brown curtain.  On the side which we must call public, and where the confessor left the general, there was a wooden bench along one side of the wall; some chairs, also of wood, were near the grating.  The ceiling was of wood, crossed by heavy beams of the evergreen oak, without ornament.  Daylight came from two windows in the division set apart for the nuns, and was absorbed by the brown tones of the room; so that it barely showed the picture of the great black Christ, and those of Saint Theresa and the Blessed Virgin, which hung on the dark panels of the walls.

The feelings of the general turned, in spite of their violence, to a tone of melancholy.  He grew calm in these calm precincts.  Something mighty as the grave seized him beneath these chilling rafters.  Was it not the eternal silence, the deep peace, the near presence of the infinite?  Through the stillness came the fixed thought of the cloister,—­that thought which glides through the air in the half-lights, and is in all things,—­the thought unchangeable; nowhere seen, which yet grows vast to the imagination; the all-comprising phrase, the peace of God.  It enters there, with living power, into the least religious heart.  Convents of men are not easily conceivable; man seems feeble and unmanly in them.  He is born to act, to fulfil a life of toil; and he escapes it in his cell.  But in a monastery of women what strength to endure, and yet what touching weakness!  A man may be pushed by a thousand sentiments into the depths of an abbey; he flings himself into them as from a precipice.  But the woman is drawn only by one feeling; she does not unsex herself,—­she espouses holiness.  You may say to the man, Why did you not struggle? but to the cloistered woman life is a struggle still.

The general found in this mute parlor of the seagirt convent memories of himself.  Love seldom reaches upward to solemnity; but love in the bosom of God,—­is there nothing solemn there?  Yes, more than a man has the right to hope for in this nineteenth century, with our manners and our customs what they are.

The general’s soul was one on which such impressions act.  His nature was noble enough to forget self-interest, honors, Spain, the world, or Paris, and rise to the heights of feeling roused by this unspeakable termination of his long pursuit.  What could be more tragic?  How many emotions held these lovers, reunited at last on this granite ledge far out at sea, yet separated by an idea, an impassable barrier.  Look at this man, saying to himself, “Can I triumph over God in that heart?”