Often and long, Hilda lingered before the shrines and chapels of the
Virgin, and departed from them with reluctant steps. Here, perhaps,
strange as it may seem, her delicate appreciation of art stood her
in good stead, and lost Catholicism a convert. If the painter had
represented Mary with a heavenly face, poor Hilda was now in the very
mood to worship her, and adopt the faith in which she held so elevated
a position. But she saw that it was merely the flattered portrait of
an earthly beauty; the wife, at best, of the artist; or, it might be, a
peasant girl of the Campagna, or some Roman princess, to whom he desired
to pay his court. For love, or some even less justifiable motive, the
old painter had apotheosized these women; he thus gained for them, as
far as his skill would go, not only the meed of immortality, but the
privilege of presiding over Christian altars, and of being worshipped
with far holier fervors than while they dwelt on earth. Hilda's fine
sense of the fit and decorous could not be betrayed into kneeling at
such a shrine.
She never found just the virgin mother whom she needed. Here it was
an earthly mother, worshipping the earthly baby in her lap, as any and
every mother does, from Eve's time downward. In another picture, there
was a dim sense, shown in the mother's face, of some divine quality
in the child. In a third, the artist seemed to have had a higher
perception, and had striven hard to shadow out the Virgin's joy at
bringing the Saviour into the world, and her awe and love, inextricably
mingled, of the little form which she pressed against her bosom. So
far was good. But still, Hilda looked for something more; a face of
celestial beauty, but human as well as heavenly, and with the shadow
of past grief upon it; bright with immortal youth, yet matronly and
motherly; and endowed with a queenly dignity, but infinitely tender, as
the highest and deepest attribute of her divinity.
"Ah," thought Hilda to herself, "why should not there be a woman to
listen to the prayers of women? A mother in heaven for all motherless
girls like me? In all God's thought and care for us, can he have
withheld this boon, which our weakness so much needs?"
Oftener than to the other churches, she wandered into St. Peter's.
Within its vast limits, she thought, and beneath the sweep of its great
dome, there should be space for all forms of Christian truth; room both
for the faithful and the heretic to kneel; due help for every creature's
spiritual want.
Hilda had not always been adequately impressed by the grandeur of this
mighty cathedral. When she first lifted the heavy leathern curtain, at
one of the doors, a shadowy edifice in her imagination had been dazzled
out of sight by the reality. Her preconception of St. Peter's was a
structure of no definite outline, misty in its architecture, dim
and gray and huge, stretching into an interminable perspective, and
overarched by a dome like the cloudy firmament. Beneath that vast
breadth and height, as she had fancied them, the personal man might
feel his littleness, and the soul triumph in its immensity. So, in
her earlier visits, when the compassed splendor Of the actual interior
glowed before her eyes, she had profanely called it a great prettiness;
a gay piece of cabinet work, on a Titanic scale; a jewel casket,
marvellously magnified.