GABRIEL'S PRAYER
MEANTIME, though they worked quietly, they were both very industrious;
and at last one day, late in October, when the first snow was beginning
to fall, Brother Stephen finished the last page of the beautiful book.
He gave a sigh as he laid down his paintbrush; not because he was tired,
but because in his heart he was really sorry to finish his work, for he
knew that then it would soon be taken away, and he hated to part with
it.
As he and Gabriel laid all the pages together in the order in which they
were to go, brother Stephen's heart swelled with pride, and Gabriel
thought he had never seen anything half so lovely!
The text was written in beautiful letters of the lustrous black ink
which Gabriel had made; and at the beginnings of new chapters, wonderful
initial letters glittered in gold and colours till they looked like
little mosaics of precious stones.
Here and there through the text were scattered exquisite miniature
pictures of saints and angels; while as for the borders that enclosed
every page, they wreathed around the written words such lovely garlands
of painted blossoms, that to Gabriel the whole book seemed a marvellous
bouquet of all the sweet flowers he had daily gathered from the Norman
fields, and that Brother Stephen, by the magic of his art, had made
immortal.
Indeed the little boy fairly blinked as he looked at the sparkling
beauty of those pages where the blossoms were to live on, through the
centuries, bright and beautiful and unharmed by wind or rain or the
driving snow, that even then was covering up all the bare frost-smitten
meadows without.
And so Gabriel turned over page after page shining with gold and purple
and rose-colour, till he came to the very last of the text; and then he
saw that there was yet one page more, and on turning over this he read
these words:
"I, Brother Stephen, of the Abbey of St. Martin-de-Bouchage, made this
book; and for every initial letter and picture and border of flowers
that I have herein wrought, I pray the Lord God to have compassion upon
some one of my grievous sins!"
This was written in beautifully, and all around it was painted a
graceful border like braided ribbons of blue.
Now in Brother Stephen's time, when any one finished an especially
beautiful illumination of any part of the Bible, it was quite customary
for the artist to add, at the end, a little prayer. Indeed, no one can
make a really beautiful thing without loving the work; and those
old-time artist-monks took such delight in the flowery pages they
painted, that they felt sure the dear Lord himself could not help but be
pleased to have his words made so beautiful, and that he would so grant
the little prayer at the end of the book, because of the loving labour
that had gone before.
As Gabriel again read over Brother Stephen's last page, it set him to
thinking; and a little later, as he walked home in the frosty dusk, he
thought of it again.
It was true, he said to himself, that all the beautiful written and
painted work on King Louis's book had been done by Brother Stephen's
hands,--and yet,--and yet,--had not he, too, helped? Had he not gathered
the thorny hawthorn, and pricked his fingers, and spent days and days
making the ink? Had he not, week after week, ground the colours and the
gold till his arms ached, and his hands were blistered? Had he not made
the glue, and prepared the parchment, and ruled the lines (and one had
to be _so_ careful not to blot them!), and brought all the flowers for
the borders?
Surely, he thought, though he had not painted any of its lovely pages,
yet he had done his little part to help make the book, and so,
perhaps--perhaps--might not the Lord God feel kindly toward him, too,
and be willing to grant a little prayer to him also?
Now of course Gabriel could have prayed any time and anywhere, and
simply asked for what he wanted. But he had a strong feeling that God
would be much more apt to notice it, if the prayer were beautifully
written out, like Brother Stephen's, and placed in the book itself, on
the making of which he had worked so long and so hard.
Gabriel was very pleased with his idea, and by the time he reached home,
he had planned out just what he wanted to say. He ate his supper of hard
black bread very happily, and when, soon after, he crept into bed and
pulled up his cover of ragged sheepskin, he went to sleep with his head
so full of the work of the past few months, that he dreamed that the
whole world was full of painted books and angels with rose-coloured
wings; that all the meadows of Normandy were covered with gold, and the
flowers fastened on with white of egg and eel-skins; and then, just as
he was getting out his ruler to rule lines over the blue sky, he rubbed
his eyes and woke up; and, finding it was morning, he jumped out of bed,
and hastened to make himself ready for his day's work.
When he reached the Abbey, Brother Stephen was busy binding together the
finished leaves of the book; for the monks had to do not only the
painting, but also the putting together of their books themselves.
After Gabriel had waited on Brother Stephen for awhile, the latter told
him he could have some time to himself, and so he hurried to get out the
little jars of scarlet and blue and black ink, and the bits of parchment
that Brother Stephen had given him. He looked over the parchment
carefully, and at last found one piece from which he could cut a page
that was almost as large as the pages of the book. It was an old piece,
and had some writing on one side, but he knew how to scrape it off
clean; and then taking some of the scarlet ink, he ruled some lines in
the centre of the page, and between these, in the nicest black letters
he knew how to make, he wrote his little prayer. And this is the way it
read:
"I, Gabriel Viaud, am Brother Stephen's colour-grinder; and I have made
the ink for this book, and the glue, and caught the eels, and ground the
gold and colours, and ruled the lines and gathered the flowers for the
borders, and so I pray the Lord God will be kind and let my father out
of prison in Count Pierre's castle, and tell Count Pierre to give us
back our meadow and sheep, for we cannot pay the tax, and mother says we
will starve."
Now in the little prayers that the monks added at the end of a book, it
was the custom to ask only that their sins might be forgiven. But
Gabriel, though he knew he had plenty of sins,--for so the parish priest
of St. Martin's village told all the peasant folk every Sunday,--yet
somehow could not feel nearly so anxious to have them forgiven, as he
was to have his father freed from prison in the castle, and their little
farm and flock restored to them; and so he had decided to word his
prayer the way he did.
It took him some time to write it out, for he took great pains to shape
every letter as perfectly as possible. Nor did he forget that Brother
Stephen had taught him always to make the word God more beautiful than
the others; so he wrote that in scarlet ink, and edged it with scallops
and loops and little dots of blue; and then all around the whole prayer
he made graceful flourishes of the coloured inks. He very much wished
for a bit of gold with which to enrich his work, but gold was too
precious for little boys to practise with, and so Brother Stephen had
not given him any for his own. Nevertheless, when the page was finished,
the artistic effect was very pleasing, and it really was a remarkably
clever piece of work for a little boy to have made.
He did not tell Brother Stephen what he was doing, for he was afraid
that perhaps he might not quite approve of his plan. Not that Gabriel
wished for a moment to do anything that Brother Stephen would not like
him to do, but only that he thought their affairs at home so desperate
that he could not afford to risk losing this means of help;--and then,
too, he felt that the prayer was his own little secret, and he did not
want to tell any one about it anyway.
And so he was greatly relieved that Brother Stephen, who was very much
absorbed in his own work, did not ask him any questions. The monk was
always very kind about helping him in every way possible, but never
insisted on Gabriel's showing him everything, wisely thinking that many
times it was best to let the boy work out his own ideas. So Gabriel said
nothing about his page, but put it carefully away, until he could find
some opportunity to place it in the book itself.
Meantime Brother Stephen worked industriously, and in a few days more he
had quite finished the book. He had strongly bound all his painted pages
together, and put on a cover of violet velvet, which the nuns of a
near-by convent had exquisitely embroidered in pearls and gold. And,
last of all, the cover was fastened with clasps of wrought gold, set
with amethysts. Altogether it was a royal gift, and one worthy of any
queen. Even the Abbot, cold and stately though he usually was,
exclaimed with pleasure when he saw it, and warmly praised Brother
Stephen upon the loveliness of his work.