ONE day as he lay there sighing, and groaning, prayerless, tuneless,
hopeless, a thought flashed into his mind. What he had done for the poor
and the wayfarer, he would do for himself. He would fill his den of
despair with the name of God and the magic words of holy writ, and the
pious, prayerful, consolations of the Church.
Then, like Christian at Apollyon's feet, he reached his hand suddenly
out and caught, not his sword, for he had none, but peaceful labour's
humbler weapon, his chisel, and worked with it as if his soul depended
on his arm.
They say that Michael Angelo in the next generation used to carve
statues, not like our timid sculptors, by modelling the work in clay,
and then setting a mechanic to chisel it; but would seize the block,
conceive the image, and, at once, with mallet and steel make the marble
chips fly like mad about him, and the mass sprout into form. Even so
Clement drew no lines to guide his hand. He went to his memory for the
gracious words, and then dashed at his work and eagerly graved them in
the soft stone, between working and fighting.
He begged his visitors for candle ends, and rancid oil.
"Anything is good enough for _me_," he said, "if 'twill but burn." So at
night the cave glowed afar off like a blacksmith's forge, through the
window and the gaping chinks of the rude stone door, and the rustics
beholding crossed themselves and suspected deviltries, and, within, the
holy talismans one after another came upon the walls, and the sparks and
the chips flew day and night, night and day, as the soldier of Solitude
and of the Church plied, with sighs and groans, his bloodless weapon,
between working and fighting.
_Kyrie Eleeison_
_Christe Eleeison_
[Greek: Ton Satanan syntripson hypo tous podas hêmôn.][1]
_Sursum corda_[2]
_Deus refugium nostrum et virtus_[3]
_Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere mihi._[4]
_Sancta Trinitas unus Deus, miserere nobis._[5]
_Ab infestationibus Daemonum, a ventura ira, a damnatione perpetua._[6]
_Libera nos Domine
Deus, qui miro ordine Angelorum ministeria, etc._ (the whole
collect).[7]
_Quem quaerimus adjutorem nisi te Domine, qui pro peccatis nostris juste
irascaris?_[8]
_Sancte Deus, Sancte fortis, Sancte et misericors Salvator, amarae morti
ne tradas nos._
And underneath the great crucifix, which was fastened to the wall, he
graved this from Augustine:--
_O anima Christiana, respice vulnera patientis, sanguinem morientis,
pretium redemptionis.--Haec quanta sint cogitate, et in statera mentis
vestrae appendite, ut totus vobis figatur in corde, qui pro vobis totus
firus est in cruce. Nam, si passio Christi ad memoriam revocetur, nihil
est tam durum quod non aequo animo toleretur._
Which may be thus rendered:--
_O Christian soul, look on the wounds of the suffering One, the blood of
the dying One, the price paid for our redemption! These things, oh think
how great they be, and weigh them in the balance of thy mind: that He
may be wholly nailed to thy heart, who for thee was all nailed unto the
cross. For do but call to mind the sufferings of Christ, and there is
nought on earth too hard to endure with composure._
Soothed a little, a very little, by the sweet and pious words he was
raising all round him, and weighed down with watching and working night
and day, Clement one morning sank prostrate with fatigue; and a deep
sleep overpowered him for many hours.
Awaking quietly, he heard a little cheep; he opened his eyes, and, lo!
upon his breviary which was on a lone stool near his feet, ruffling all
his feathers with a single pull, and smoothing them as suddenly, and
cocking his bill this way and that with a vast display of cunning purely
imaginary, perched a robin redbreast.
* * * * *
Clement held his breath.
He half closed his eyes lest they should frighten the airy guest.
Down came robin on the floor.
When there he went through his pantomime of astuteness; and then, pim,
pim, pim, with three stiff little hops, like a ball of worsted on
vertical wires, he was on the hermit's bare foot. On this eminence he
swelled, and contracted again, with ebb and flow of feathers; but
Clement lost this, for he quite closed his eyes and scarce drew his
breath in fear of frightening and losing his visitor. He was content to
feel the minute claw on his foot. He could but just feel it, and that by
help of knowing it was there.
Presently a little flirt with two little wings, and the feathered
busy-body was on the breviary again.
Then Clement determined to try and feed this pretty little fidget
without frightening it away. But it was very difficult. He had a piece
of bread within reach, but how get at it? I think he was five minutes
creeping his hand up to that bread, and when there he must not move his
arm.
He slily got a crumb between a finger and thumb and shot it as boys do
marbles, keeping the hand quite still.
Cockrobin saw it fall near him, and did sagacity, but moved not.
When another followed, and then another: he popped down and caught up
one of the crumbs, but not quite understanding this mystery fled with
it, for more security, to an eminence; to wit the hermit's knee.
And so the game proceeded till a much larger fragment than usual rolled
along.
Here was a prize. Cockrobin pounced on it, bore it aloft and fled so
swiftly into the world with it, the cave resounded with the buffeted
air.
"Now, bless thee, sweet bird," sighed the stricken solitary; "thy wings
are music, and thou a feathered ray camedst to light my darkened soul."
And from that to his orisons; and then to his tools with a little bit of
courage; and this was his day's work:--
_Veni Creator Spiritus
Mentes tuorum visita
Imple superna gratia
Quae tu creasti pectora_
_Accende lumen sensibus
Mentes tuorum visita
Infirma nostri corporis
Virtute firmans perpetim._
And so the days rolled on; and the weather got colder and Clement's
heart got warmer; and despondency was rolling away; and by-and-by,
somehow or another, it was gone. He had outlived it.
It had come like a cloud, and it went like one.
And presently all was reversed; his cell seemed illuminated with joy.
His work pleased him; his prayers were full of unction; his psalms of
praise. Hosts of little birds followed their crimson leader, and flying
from snow, and a parish full of Cains, made friends one after another
with Abel; fast friends. And one keen frosty night as he sang the
praises of God to his tuneful psaltery, and his hollow cave rang forth
the holy psalmody upon the night, as if that cave itself was Tubal's
sounding shell, or David's harp, he heard a clear whine, not
unmelodious; it became louder and less in tune. He peeped through the
chinks of his rude door, and there sat a great red wolf moaning
melodiously with his nose high in the air.
Clement was rejoiced. "My sins are going," he cried, "and the creatures
of God are owning me, one after another." And in a burst of enthusiasm
he struck up the laud:
"Praise Him all ye creatures of His! Let everything that hath breath
praise the Lord."
And all the time he sang the wolf bayed at intervals.
* * * * *
But above all he seemed now to be drawing nearer to that celestial
intercourse, which was the sign, and the bliss of the true hermit; for
he had dreams about the saints and angels, so vivid, they were more like
visions. He saw bright figures clad in woven snow. They bent on him eyes
lovelier than those of the antelopes he had seen at Rome, and fanned
him with broad wings hued like the rainbow, and their gentle voices bade
him speed upon his course.
He had not long enjoyed this felicity, when his dreams began to take
another and a strange complexion. He wandered with Fra Colonna over the
relics of antique nations, and the friar was lame and had a staff, and
this staff he waved over the mighty ruins, and were they Egyptian,
Greek, or Roman, straightway the temples and palaces whose wrecks they
were, rose again like an exhalation, and were thronged with the famous
dead. Songsters that might have eclipsed both Apollo and his rival,
poured forth their lays; women, godlike in form, and draped like
Minerva, swam round the marble courts in voluptuous but easy and
graceful dances. Here sculptors carved away amidst admiring pupils, and
forms of supernatural beauty grew out of Parian marble in a quarter of
an hour; and grave philosophers conversed on high and subtle matters,
with youth listening reverently; it was a long time ago. And still
beneath all this wonderful panorama a sort of suspicion or expectation
lurked in the dreamer's mind. "This is a prologue, a flourish, there is
something behind; something that means me no good, something mysterious,
awful."
And one night that the wizard Colonna had transcended himself, he
pointed with his stick, and there was a swallowing up of many great
ancient cities, and the pair stood on a vast sandy plain with a huge
crimson sun sinking to rest. There were great palm-trees; and there were
bulrush hives, scarce a man's height, dotted all about to the sandy
horizon, and the crimson sun.
"These are the anchorites of the Theban desert," said Colonna, calmly;
"followers not of Christ and his apostles, and the great fathers, but of
the Greek pupils of the Egyptian pupils of the Brachmans and
Gymnosophists."
And Clement thought that he burned to go and embrace the holy men and
tell them his troubles, and seek their advice. But he was tied by the
feet somehow, and could not move, and the crimson sun sank; and it got
dusk, and the hives scarce visible. And Colonna's figure became shadowy
and shapeless, but his eyes glowed ten times brighter: and this thing
all eyes spoke and said: "Nay, let them be, a pack of fools! see how
dismal it all is." Then with a sudden sprightliness, "But I hear one of
them has a manuscript of Petronius, on papyrus; I go to buy it, farewell
for ever, for ever, for ever."
And it was pitch dark, and a light came at Clement's back like a gentle
stroke; a glorious roseate light. It warmed as well as brightened. It
loosened his feet from the ground; he turned round, and there, her face
irradiated with sunshine, and her hair glittering like the gloriola of a
saint, was Margaret Brandt.
She blushed and smiled and cast a look of ineffable tenderness on him.
"Gerard," she murmured, "be whose thou wilt by day, but at night be
mine!"
Even as she spoke, the agitation of seeing her so suddenly awakened him,
and he found himself lying trembling from head to foot.
That radiant figure, and mellow voice, seemed to have struck his nightly
keynote.
Awake he could pray, and praise, and worship God; he was master of his
thoughts. But, if he closed his eyes in sleep, Margaret, or Satan in her
shape, beset him, a seeming angel of light. He might dream of a thousand
different things, wide as the poles asunder, ere he woke the imperial
figure was sure to come and extinguish all the rest in a moment stellas
exortus uti ætherius sol: for she came glowing with two beauties never
before united, an angel's radiance and a woman's blushes.
Angels cannot blush. So he knew it was a fiend.
He was alarmed, but not so much surprised as at the demon's last
artifice. From Anthony to Nicholas of the Rock scarce a hermit that had
not been thus beset; sometimes with gay voluptuous visions, sometimes
with lovely phantoms, warm, tangible, and womanly without, demons
within, nor always baffled even by the saints. Witness that "angel form
with a devil's heart," that came hanging its lovely head, like a bruised
flower, to St. Macarius, with a feigned tale; and wept, and wept, and
wept, and beguiled him first of his tears and then of half his virtue.
But with the examples of Satanic power and craft had come down copious
records of the hermits' triumphs and the weapons by which they had
conquered.
Domandum est corpus; the body must be tamed; this had been their
watchword for twelve hundred years. It was a tremendous war-cry; for
they called the earthly affections, as well as appetites, body; and
crushed the whole heart through the suffering and mortified flesh.
Clement then said to himself that the great enemy of man had retired but
to spring with more effect, and had allowed him a few days of true
purity and joy only to put him off his guard against the soft
blandishments he was pouring over the soul, that had survived the
buffeting of his black wings. He applied himself to tame the body; he
shortened his sleep, lengthened his prayers, and increased his severe
temperance to abstinence. Hitherto, following the ordinary rule, he had
eaten only at sunset. Now he ate but once in forty-eight hours, drinking
a little water every day.
On this the visions became more distinct.
* * * * *
Then he flew to a famous antidote; to "the grand febrifuge" of
anchorites--cold water.
He found the deepest part of the stream that ran by his cell; it rose
not far off at a holy well; and, clearing the bottom of the large
stones, made a hole where he could stand in water to the chin, and,
fortified by so many examples, he sprang from his rude bed upon the next
diabolical assault, and entered the icy water.
It made him gasp and almost shriek with the cold. It froze his marrow.
"I shall die," he cried, "I shall die: but better this, than fire
eternal."
And the next day he was so stiff in all his joints he could not move,
and he seemed one great ache. And even in sleep he felt that his very
bones were like so many raging teeth, till the phantom he dreaded came
and gave one pitying smile, and all the pain was gone.
Then, feeling that to go into the icy water again, enfeebled by fasts,
as he was, might perhaps carry the guilt of suicide, he scourged himself
till the blood ran, and so lay down smarting.
And when exhaustion began to blunt the smart down to a throb, that
moment the present was away, and the past came smiling back. He sat with
Margaret at the duke's feast, the minstrels played divinely, and the
purple fountains gushed. Youth and love reigned in each heart, and
perfumed the very air.
Then the scene shifted and they stood at the altar together man and
wife. And no interruption this time, and they wandered hand in hand, and
told each other their horrible dreams. As for him "he had dreamed she
was dead, and he was a monk; and really the dream had been so vivid and
so full of particulars that only his eyesight could even now convince
him it was only a dream, and they were really one."
And this new keynote once struck, every tune ran upon it. Awake he was
Clement the hermit, risen from unearthly visions of the night, as
dangerous as they were sweet; asleep he was Gerard Eliassoen, the happy
husband of the loveliest and best, and truest girl in Holland: all the
happier that he had been for some time the sport of hideous dreams, in
which he had lost her.
His constant fasts, coupled with other austerities, and the deep mental
anxiety of a man fighting with a supernatural foe, had now reduced him
nearly to a skeleton; but still on those aching bones hung flesh
unsubdued, quivering with an earthly passion; so however, he thought;
"or why had ill spirits such power over him?" His opinion was confirmed,
when one day he detected himself sinking to sleep actually with a
feeling of complacency, because now Margaret would come and he should
feel no more pain, and the unreal would be real, and the real unreal,
for an hour.
On this he rose hastily with a cry of dismay, and stripping to the skin
climbed up to the brambles above his cave, and flung himself on them,
and rolled on them writhing with the pain: then he came into his den a
mass of gore, and lay moaning for hours; till, out of sheer exhaustion,
he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
He awoke to bodily pain, and mental exultation; he had broken the fatal
spell. Yes, it was broken; another and another day passed, and her image
molested him no more. But he caught himself sighing at his victory.
The birds got tamer and tamer, they perched upon his hand. Two of them
let him gild their little claws. Eating but once in two days he had more
to give them.
His tranquillity was not to last long.
A woman's voice came in from the outside, told him his own story in a
very few words, and asked him to tell her where Gerard was to be found.
He was so astounded he could only say, with an instinct of self-defence,
"Pray for the soul of Gerard, the son of Eli!" meaning that he was dead
to the world. And he sat wondering.
When the woman was gone, he determined, after an inward battle, to risk
being seen, and he peeped after her to see who it could be: but he took
so many precautions, and she ran so quickly back to her friend that the
road was clear.
"Satan!" said he, directly.
And that night back came his visions of earthly love and happiness so
vividly, he could count every auburn hair in Margaret's head, and see
the pupils of her eyes.
Then he began to despair, and said, "I must leave this country; here I
am bound fast in memory's chain:" and began to dread his cell. He said
"A breath from hell hath infected it, and robbed even these holy words
of their virtue." And unconsciously imitating St. Jerome, a victim of
earthly hallucinations, as overpowering, and coarser, he took his
warmest covering out into the wood hard by, and there flung down under a
tree that torn and wrinkled leather bag of bones, which a little ago
might have served a sculptor for Apollo.
Whether the fever of his imagination intermitted, as a master mind of
our day has shown that all things intermit,[G] or that this really broke
some subtle link, I know not, but his sleep was dreamless.
He awoke nearly frozen, but warm with joy within.
"I shall yet be a true hermit, Dei gratiâ," said he.
The next day some good soul left on his little platform a new lambs-wool
pelisse and cape, warm, soft, and ample.
He had a moment's misgiving on account of its delicious softness and
warmth; but that passed. It was the right skin,[H] and a mark that
Heaven approved his present course.
It restored warmth to his bones after he came in from his short rest.
And now, at one moment he saw victory before him if he could but live to
it; at another, he said to himself, "'Tis but another lull; be on thy
guard, Clement."
And this thought agitated his nerves and kept him in continual awe.
He was like a soldier within the enemy's lines.
* * * * *
One night, a beautiful clear frosty night, he came back to his cell,
after a short rest. The stars were wonderful. Heaven seemed a thousand
times larger as well as brighter than earth, and to look with a thousand
eyes instead of one.
"Oh, wonderful," he cried, "that there should be men who do crimes by
night; and others scarce less mad, who live for this little world, and
not for that great and glorious one, which nightly, to all eyes not
blinded by custom, reveals its glowing glories. Thank God I am a
hermit."
And in this mood he came to his cell door.
He paused at it; it was closed.
"Why, methought I left it open," said he. "The wind. There is not a
breath of wind. What means this?"
He stood with his hand upon the rugged door. He looked through one of
the great chinks, for it was much smaller in places than the aperture it
pretended to close, and saw his little oil wick burning just where he
had left it.
"How is it with me," he sighed, "when I start and tremble at nothing?
Either I did shut it, or the fiend hath shut it after me to disturb my
happy soul. Retro Sathanas!"
And he entered his cave rapidly, and began with somewhat nervous
expedition to light one of his largest tapers. While he was lighting it,
there was a soft sigh in the cave.
* * * * *
He started and dropped the candle just as it was lighting, and it went
out.
He stooped for it hurriedly and lighted it, listening intently. When it
was lighted he shaded it with his hand from behind, and threw the faint
light all round the cell.
In the farthest corner the outline of the wall seemed broken.
He took a step towards the place with his heart beating.
The candle at the same time getting brighter, he saw it was the figure
of a woman.
Another step with his knees knocking together.
IT WAS MARGARET BRANDT.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Beat down Satan under our feet.
[2] Up, Hearts!
[3] Oh God our refuge and strength.
[4] Oh! Lamb of God, that takest away the Sins of the world, have mercy
upon me!
[5] Oh! Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy upon us.
[6] From the assaults of demons--from the wrath to come--from
everlasting damnation--
Deliver us O Lord!
[7] See the English collect, St. Michael and all Angels.
[8] Of whom may we seek succour, but of thee, Oh Lord, who for our sins
art justly displeased (and that torrent of prayer, the following verse).
[G] Dr. Dickson, author of _Fallacies of the Faculty_, etc.
[H] It is related of a mediæval hermit, that being offered a garment
made of cats' skins, he rejected it, saying, "I have heard of a lamb of
God, but I never heard of a cat of God."