“I will sing the ‘Ave Maria.’”

The nun sat down to play it, but she had not played many bars when Evelyn interrupted her.  “The intention of the single note, dear Sister, the octave you are striking now, has always seemed to me like a distant bell heard in the evening.  Will you play it so.”

XXIII

And the idea of a bell sounding across the evening landscape was in the mind of the congregation when Sister Mary John played the octave; and the broken chords she played with her right hand awoke a sensation of lights dying behind distant hills.

It is almost night, and amid a lonely landscape a harsh rock appears, and by it a forlorn woman stands—­a woman who is without friend or any mortal hope—­and she commends herself to the care of the Virgin.  She begins to sing softly, tremulous, like one in pain and doubt, “Ave Maria, hearken to the Virgin’s cry.”  The melody she sings is rich, even ornate, but the richness of the phrase, with its two little grace notes, does not mitigate the sorrow at the core; the rich garb in which the idea is clothed does not rob the song of its humanity.

Evelyn’s voice filled with the beauty of the melody, and she sang the phrase which closes the stanza—­a phrase which dances like a puff of wind in an evening bough—­so tenderly, so lovingly, that acute tears trembled under the eyelids.  And all her soul was in her voice when she sang the phrase of passionate faith which the lonely, disheartened woman sings, looking up from the desert rock.  Then her voice sank into the calm beauty of the “Ave Maria,” now given with confidence in the Virgin’s intercession, and the broken chords passed down the keyboard, uniting with the last note of the solemn octaves, which had sounded through the song like bells heard across an evening landscape.

“How beautifully she sings it!” a man said out loud, and his neighbour looked and wondered, for the man’s eyes were full of tears.

“You have a beautiful voice, child,” said the Prioress when they came out of church, “and it is a real pleasure to me to hear you sing, and it will be a greater pleasure when I know that for the future your great gift will be devoted to the service of God.  Shall we go into the garden for a little walk before supper?  We shall have it to ourselves, and the air will do you good.”

It was the month of June, and the convent garden was in all the colour of its summer—­crimson and pink; and all the scents of the month, stocks and sweetbriar, were blown up from St. Peter’s Walk.  In the long mixed borders the blue larkspurs stood erect between Canterbury bells and the bush peonies, crimson and pink, and here and there amid furred leaves, at the end of a long furred stalk, flared the foolish poppy, roses like pale porcelain clustered along the low terraced walk and up the house itself, over the stucco walls; but more beautiful than the roses were the delicate petals of the clematis, stretched out like fingers upon the walls.