“Bid him keep land and gold, and give me back my Gerard, that he stole

from me with his treason,” said Margaret, with her head still averted.

“Alas!” said Ghysbrecht, “would I could, what I can I have done. Is it

nought? It cost me a sore struggle; and I rose from my last bed to do it

myself, lest some mischance should come between her and her rights.”

“Old man,” said Margaret, “since thou, whose idol is pelf, hast done

this, God and the saints will, as I hope, forgive thee. As for me, I am

neither saint nor angel, but only a poor woman, whose heart thou hast

broken, Speak to him, Kate, for I am like the dead.”

Kate meditated a little while; and then her soft silvery voice fell

like a soothing melody upon the air, “My poor sister hath a sorrow that

riches cannot heal, Give her time, Ghysbrecht; 'tis not in nature she

should forgive thee all. Her boy is fatherless; and she is neither maid,

wife, nor widow; and the blow fell but two days syne, that laid her

heart a bleeding.”

A single heavy sob from Margaret was the comment to these words.

“Therefore, give her time! And ere thou diest, she will forgive thee

all, ay, even to pleasure me, that haply shall not be long behind thee,

Ghysbrecht. Meantime, we, whose wounds be sore, but not so deep as hers,

do pardon thee, a penitent and a dying man; and I, for one, will pray

for thee from this hour; go in peace!”

Their little oracle had spoken; it was enough. Eli even invited him

to break a manchet and drink a stoup of wine to give him heart for his

journey.

But Ghysbrecht declined, and said what he had done was a cordial to him,

“Man seeth but a little way before him, neighbour. This land I clung

so to it was a bed of nettles to me all the time. 'Tis gone; and I feel

happier and livelier like for the loss on't.”

He called his men, and they lifted him into the litter.

When he was gone Catherine gloated over the money. She had never seen

so much together, and was almost angry with Margaret, for “sitting out

there like an image.” And she dilated on the advantages of money.

And she teased Margaret till at last she prevailed on her to come and

look at it.

“Better let her be, mother,” said Kate, “How can she relish gold, with a

heart in her bosom liker lead?” But Catherine persisted.

The result was, Margaret looked down at all her wealth with wondering

eyes. Then suddenly wrung her hands and cried with piercing anguish,

“TOO LATE! TOO LATE!” And shook off her leaden despondency, only to go

into strong hysterics over the wealth that came too late to be shared

with him she loved.

A little of this gold, a portion of this land, a year or two ago, when

it was as much her own as now; and Gerard would have never left her side

for Italy or any other place.

“Too late! Too late!”

CHAPTER XCI

Not many days after this came the news that Margaret Van Eyck was dead

and buried. By a will she had made a year before, she left all her

property, after her funeral expenses and certain presents to Reicht

Heynes, to her dear daughter Margaret Brandt, requesting her to keep

Reicht as long as unmarried.

By this will Margaret inherited a furnished house, and pictures and

sketches that in the present day would be a fortune: among the pictures

was one she valued more than a gallery of others.

It represented “A Betrothal.” The solemnity of the ceremony was marked

in the grave face of the man, and the demure complacency of the woman.

She was painted almost entirely by Margaret Van Eyck, but the rest

of the picture by Jan. The accessories were exquisitely finished, and

remain a marvel of skill to this day. Margaret Brandt sent word to

Reicht to stay in the house till such time as she could find the heart

to put foot in it, and miss the face and voice that used to meet her

there; and to take special care of the picture “in the little cubboord:”

meaning the diptych.

The next thing was, Luke Peterson came home, and heard that Gerard was a

monk.

He was like to go mad with joy. He came to Margaret, and said--“heed,

mistress. If he cannot marry you I can.”

“You?” said Margaret. “Why, I have seen him.”

“But he is a friar.”

“He was my husband, and my boy's father long ere he was a friar. And I

have seen him, I've seen him.”

Luke was thoroughly puzzled. “I'll tell you what,” said he; “I have

got a cousin a lawyer. I'll go and ask him whether you are married or

single.”

“Nay, I shall ask my own heart, not a lawyer. So that is your regard for

me; to go making me the town talk, oh, fie!”

“That is done already without a word from me.”

“But not by such as seek my respect. And if you do it, never come nigh

me again.”

“Ay,” said Luke, with a sigh, “you are like a dove to all the rest; but

you are a hardhearted tyrant to me.”

“'Tis your own fault, dear Luke, for wooing me. That is what lets me

from being as kind to you as I desire, Luke, my bonny lad, listen to

me. I am rich now; I can make my friends happy, though not myself. Look

round the street, look round the parish. There is many a quean in it

fairer than I twice told, and not spoiled with weeping. Look high; and

take your choice. Speak you to the lass herself, and I'll speak to the

mother; they shall not say thee nay; take my word for't.”

“I see what ye mean,” said Luke, turning very red. “But if I can't have

your liking, I will none o' your money. I was your servant when you were

poor as I; and poorer. No; if you would liever be a friar's leman than

an honest man's wife, you are not the woman I took you for: so part we

withouten malice: seek you your comfort on yon road, where never a she

did find it yet, and for me, I'll live and die a bachelor. Good even,

mistress.”

“Farewell, dear Luke; and God forgive you for saying that to me.”

For some days Margaret dreaded, almost as much as she desired, the

coming interview with Gerard. She said to herself, “I wonder not he

keeps away a while; for so should I.” However, he would hear he was

a father; and the desire to see their boy would overcome everything.

“And,” said the poor girl to herself, “if so be that meeting does not

kill me, I feel I shall be better after it than I am now.”

But when day after day went by, and he was not heard of, a freezing

suspicion began to crawl and creep towards her mind. What if his absence

was intentional? What if he had gone to some cold-blooded monks his

fellows, and they had told him never to see her more? The convent had

ere this shown itself as merciless to true lovers as the grave itself.

At this thought the very life seemed to die out of her.

And now for the first time deep indignation mingled at times with her

grief and apprehension. “Can he have ever loved me? To run from me and

his boy without a word! Why, this poor Luke thinks more of me than he

does.”

While her mind was in this state, Giles came roaring. “I've hit the

clout; our Gerard is Vicar of Gouda.”

A very brief sketch of the dwarf's court life will suffice to prepare

the reader for his own account of this feat. Some months before he went

to court his intelligence had budded. He himself dated the change from

a certain 8th of June, when, swinging by one hand along with the week's

washing on a tight rope in the drying ground, something went crack

inside his head; and lo! intellectual powers unchained. At court his

shrewdness and bluntness of speech, coupled with his gigantic voice and

his small stature, made him a Power: without the last item I fear they

would have conducted him to that unpopular gymnasium, the gallows. The

young Duchess of Burgundy, and Marie the heiress apparent, both petted

him, as great ladies have petted dwarfs in all ages; and the court poet

melted butter by the six-foot rule, and poured enough of it down his

back to stew Goliah in. He even amplified, versified, and enfeebled

certain rough and ready sentences dictated by Giles.

The centipedal prolixity that resulted went to Eli by letter, thus

entitled--

“The high and puissant Princess Marie

of Bourgogne her lytel jantilman hys

complaynt of y' Coort, and

praise of a rusticall lyfe, versificated, and empapyred

by me the lytel jantilman's right lovynge

and obsequious servitor, etc.”

But the dwarf reached his climax by a happy mixture of mind and muscle;

thus:

The day before a grand court joust he challenged the Duke's giant to

a trial of strength. This challenge made the gravest grin, and aroused

expectation.

Giles had a lofty pole planted ready, and at the appointed hour went up

it like a squirrel, and by strength of arm made a right angle with his

body, and so remained: then slid down so quickly, that the high and

puissant princess squeaked, and hid her face in her hands, not to see

the demise of her pocket-Hercules.

The giant effected only about ten feet, then looked ruefully up and

ruefully down, and descended, bathed in perspiration to argue the

matter.

“It was not the dwarf's greater strength, but his smaller body.”

The spectators received this excuse with loud derision. There was the

fact, the dwarf was great at mounting a pole: the giant only great at

excuses. In short Giles had gauged their intellects: with his own body

no doubt.

“Come,” said he, “an ye go to that, I'll wrestle ye, my lad, if so be

you will let me blindfold your eyne.”

The giant, smarting under defeat, and thinking he could surely recover

it by this means, readily consented.

“Madam,” said Giles, “see you yon blind Samson? At a signal from me he

shall make me a low obeisance, and unbonnet to me.”

“How may that be, being blinded?” inquired a maid of honour.

“I'll wager on Giles for one,” said the princess.

“That is my affair.”

When several wagers were laid pro and con, Giles hit the giant in the

bread-basket. He went double (the obeisance), and his bonnet fell off.

The company yelled with delight at this delicate stroke of wit, and

Giles took to his heels. The giant followed as soon as he could recover

his breath and tear off his bandage. But it was too late; Giles had

prepared a little door in the wall, through which he could pass, but not

a giant, and had coloured it so artfully, it looked like a wall; this

door he tore open, and went headlong through, leaving no vestige but

this posy, written very large upon the reverse of his trick door--

Long limbs, big body, panting wit

By wee and wise is bet and bit

After this Giles became a Force.

He shall now speak for himself.

Finding Margaret unable to believe the good news, and sceptical as to

the affairs of Holy Church being administered by dwarfs, he narrated as

follows:

“When the princess sent for me to her bedroom as of custom, to keep her

out of languor, I came not mirthful nor full of country dicts, as is my

wont, but dull as lead.

“'Why, what aileth thee?' quo' she. 'Art sick?' 'At heart,' quo' I.

'Alas, he is in love,' quo' she. Whereat five brazen hussies, which they

call them maids of honour, did giggle loud. 'Not so mad as that,' said

I, 'seeing what I see at court of women folk.'

“'There, ladies,' quo' the princess, 'best let him a be. 'Tis a liberal

mannikin, and still giveth more than he taketh of saucy words.'

“'In all sadness,' quo' she, 'what is the matter?'

“I told her I was meditating, and what perplexed me was, that other folk

could now and then keep their word, but princes never.

“'Heyday,' says she, 'thy shafts fly high this morn.' I told her, 'Ay,

for they hit the Truth.'

“She said I was as keen as keen; but it became not me to put riddles to

her, nor her to answer them. 'Stand aloof a bit, mesdames,' said she,

'and thou speak withouten fear;' for she saw I was in sad earnest.

“I began to quake a bit; for mind ye, she can doff freedom and don

dignity quicker than she can slip out of her dressing-gown into kirtle

of state. But I made my voice so soft as honey (wherefore smilest?), and

I said 'Madam, one evening, a matter of five years agone, as ye sat

with your mother, the Countess of Charolois, who is now in heaven, worse

luck, you wi' your lute, and she wi' her tapestry, or the like, do ye

mind there came came into ye a fair youth with a letter from a painter

body, one Margaret Van Eyck?”

“She said she thought she did, 'Was it not a tall youth, exceeding

comely?'

“'Ay, madam,' said I; 'he was my brother.'

“'Your brother?' said she, and did eye me like all over, (What dost

smile at?”)

“So I told her all that passed between her and Gerard, and how she was

for giving him a bishopric; but the good countess said, 'Gently, Marie!

he is too young; and with that they did both promise him a living:

'Yet,' said I, 'he hath been a priest a long while, and no living. Hence

my bile.'

“'Alas!' said she, ''tis not by my good will; for all this thou hast said

is sooth, and more. I do remember my dear mother said to me, “See thou

to it if I be not here.”' So then she cried out, 'Ay, dear mother, no

word of thine shall ever fall to the ground.'

“I, seeing her so ripe, said quickly, 'Madam, the Vicar of Gouda died

last week.' (For when ye seek favours of the great, behoves ye know the

very thing ye aim at.)

“'Then thy brother is vicar of Gouda,' quo' she, 'so sure as I am

heiress of Burgundy and the Netherlands. Nay, thank me not, good Giles,'

quo' she, 'but my good mother. And I do thank thee for giving of me

somewhat to do for her memory. And doesn't she fall a weeping for her

mother? And doesn't that set me off a-snivelling for my good brother

that I love so dear, and to think that a poor little elf like me could

yet speak in the ear of princes, and make my beautiful brother vicar of

Gouda; eh, lass, it is a bonny place, and a bonny manse, and hawthorn in

every bush at spring-tide, and dog-roses and eglantine in every summer

hedge. I know what the poor fool affects, leave that to me.”

The dwarf began his narrative strutting to and fro before Margaret, but

he ended it in her arms; for she could not contain herself, but caught

him, and embraced him warmly. “Oh, Giles,” she said, blushing, and

kissing him, “I cannot keep my hands off thee, thy body it is so little,

and thy heart so great. Thou art his true friend. Bless thee! bless

thee! bless thee! Now we shall see him again. We have not set eyes on

him since that terrible day.”

“Gramercy, but that is strange,” said Giles. “Maybe he is ashamed of

having cursed those two vagabones, being our own flesh and blood, worse

luck.”

“Think you that is why he hides?” said Margaret eagerly;

“Ay, if he is hiding at all. However, I'll cry him by bellman.

“Nay, that might much offend him.”

“What care I? Is Gouda to go vicarless and the manse in nettles?”

And to Margaret's secret satisfaction, Giles had the new vicar cried in

Rotterdam and the neighbouring towns. He easily persuaded Margaret that

in a day or two Gerard would be sure to hear, and come to his benefice.

She went to look at his manse, and thought how comfortable it might be

made for him, and how dearly she should love to do it.

But the days rolled on, and Gerard came neither to Rotterdam nor Gouda.

Giles was mortified, Margaret indignant, and very wretched. She said to

herself, “Thinking me dead, he comes home, and now, because I am alive,

he goes back to Italy, for that is where he has gone.”

Joan advised her to consult the hermit of Gouda.

“Why, sure he is dead by this time.”

“Yon one, belike. But the cave is never long void; Gouda ne'er wants a

hermit.”

But Margaret declined to go again to Gouda on such an errand, “What can

he know, shut up in a cave? less than I, belike. Gerard hath gone back

t' Italy. He hates me for not being dead.”

Presently a Tergovian came in with a word from Catherine that Ghysbrecht

Van Swieten had seen Gerard later than any one else. On this Margaret

determined to go and see the house and goods that had been left her, and

take Reicht Heynes home to Rotterdam. And as may be supposed, her steps

took her first to Ghysbrecht's house. She found him in his garden,

seated in a chair with wheels. He greeted her with a feeble voice, but

cordially; and when she asked him whether it was true he had seen

Gerard since the fifth of August, he replied, “Gerard no more, but Friar

Clement. Ay, I saw him; and blessed be the day he entered my house.”

He then related in his own words his interview with Clement.

He told her, moreover, that the friar had afterwards acknowledged he

came to Tergou with the missing deed in his bosom on purpose to make him

disgorge her land; but that finding him disposed towards penitence, he

had gone to work the other way.

“Was not this a saint; who came to right thee, but must needs save his

enemy's soul in the doing it?”

To her question, whether he had recognized him, he said, “I ne'er

suspected such a thing. 'Twas only when he had been three days with me

that he revealed himself, Listen while I speak my shame and his praise.

“I said to him, 'The land is gone home, and my stomach feels lighter;

but there is another fault that clingeth to me still;' then told I him

of the letter I had writ at request of his brethren, I whose place it

was to check them. Said I, 'Yon letter was writ to part two lovers, and

the devil aiding, it hath done the foul work. Land and houses I can

give back, but yon mischief is done for ever.' 'Nay,' quoth he, 'not for

ever, but for life. Repent it then while thou livest.' 'I shall,' said

I, 'but how can God forgive it? I would not,' said I, 'were I He.'

“'Yet will He certainly forgive it,' quoth he; 'for He is ten times more

forgiving than I am, and I forgive thee.' I stared at him; and then he

said softly, but quavering like, 'Ghysbrecht, look at me closer. I am

Gerard, the son of Eli.' And I looked, and looked, and at last, lo! it

was Gerard. Verily I had fallen at his feet with shame and contrition,

but he would not suffer me. 'That became not mine years and his, for a

particular fault. I say not I forgive thee without a struggle,' said he,

'not being a saint. But these three days thou hast spent in penitence,

I have worn under thy roof in prayer; and I do forgive thee.' Those were

his very words.”

Margaret's tears began to flow, for it was in a broken and contrite

voice the old man told her this unexpected trait in her Gerard. He

continued, “And even with that he bade me farewell.

“'My work here is done now,' said he. I had not the heart to stay him;

for let him forgive me ever so, the sight of me must be wormwood to

him. He left me in peace, and may a dying man's blessing wait on him, go

where he will. Oh, girl, when I think of his wrongs, and thine, and how

he hath avenged himself by saving this stained soul of mine, my heart is

broken with remorse, and these old eyes shed tears by night and day.”

“Ghysbrecht,” said Margaret, weeping, “since he hath forgiven thee, I

forgive thee too: what is done, is done; and thou hast let me know this

day that which I had walked the world to hear. But oh, burgomaster, thou

art an understanding man, now help a poor woman, which hath forgiven

thee her misery.”

She then told him all that had befallen, “And,” said she, “they will not

keep the living for him for ever. He bids fair to lose that, as well as

break all our hearts.”

“Call my servant,” cried the burgomaster, with sudden vigour.

He sent him for a table and writing materials, and dictated letters to

the burgomasters in all the principal towns in Holland, and one to a

Prussian authority, his friend. His clerk and Margaret wrote them,

and he signed them. “There,” said he, “the matter shall be despatched

throughout Holland by trusty couriers, and as far as Basle in

Switzerland; and fear not, but we will soon have the vicar of Gouda to

his village.”

She went home animated with fresh hopes, and accusing herself of

ingratitude to Gerard. “I value my wealth now,” said she.

She also made a resolution never to blame his conduct till she should

hear from his own lips his reason.

Not long after her return from Tergou a fresh disaster befell.

Catherine, I must premise, had secret interviews with the black sheep,

the very day after they were expelled; and Cornelis followed her to

Tergou, and lived there on secret contributions, but Sybrandt chose to

remain in Rotterdam. Ere Catherine left, she asked Margaret to lend her

two gold angels. “For,” said she, “all mine are spent.” Margaret was

delighted to lend them or give them; but the words were scarce out of

her mouth ere she caught a look of regret and distress on Kate's face,

and she saw directly whither her money was going. She gave Catherine the

money, and went and shut herself up with her boy. Now this money was to

last Sybrandt till his mother could make some good excuse for visiting

Rotterdam again, and then she would bring the idle dog some of her own

industrious savings.

But Sybrandt, having gold in his pocket, thought it inexhaustible: and

being now under no shadow of restraint, led the life of a complete sot;

until one afternoon, in a drunken frolic, he climbed on the roof of the

stable at the inn he was carousing in, and proceeded to walk along it, a

feat he had performed many times when sober. But now his unsteady brain

made his legs unsteady, and he rolled down the roof and fell with a

loud thwack on to an horizontal paling, where he hung a moment in a

semicircle; then toppled over and lay silent on the ground, amidst roars

of laughter from his boon companions. When they came to pick him up he

could not stand; but fell down giggling at each attempt.

On this they went staggering and roaring down the street with him,

and carried him at great risk of another fall to the shop in the Hoog

Straet. For he had babbled his own shame all over the place.

As soon as he saw Margaret he hiccupped out, “Here is the doctor that

cures all hurts, a bonny lass.” He also bade her observe he bore her no

malice, for he was paying her a visit sore against his will. “Wherefore,

prithee send away these drunkards, and let you and me have t'other

glass, to drown all unkindness.”

All this time Margaret was pale and red by turns at sight of her enemy

and at his insolence; but one of the men whispered what had happened,

and a streaky something in Sybrandt's face arrested her attention.

“And he cannot stand up, say you?”

“A couldn't just now. Try, comrade! Be a man now!”

“I am a better man than thou,” roared Sybrandt. “I'll stand up and fight

ye all for a crown.”

He started to his feet, and instantly rolled into his attendant's arms

with a piteous groan. He then began to curse his boon companions, and

declare they had stolen away his legs. “He could feel nothing below the

waist.”

“Alas, poor wretch,” said Margaret. She turned very gravely to the men,

and said, “Leave him here. And if you have brought him to this, go on

your knees, for you have spoiled him for life. He will never walk again;

his back is broken.”

The drunken man caught these words, and the foolish look of intoxication

fled, and a glare of anguish took its place. “The curse,” he groaned;

“the curse!”

Margaret and Reicht Heynes carried him carefully, and laid him on the

softest bed.

“I must do as he would do,” whispered Margaret. “He was kind to

Ghysbrecht.”

Her opinion was verified, Sybrandt's spine was fatally injured; and

he lay groaning and helpless, fed and tended by her he had so deeply

injured.

The news was sent to Tergou, and Catherine came over.

It was a terrible blow to her. Moreover, she accused herself as the

cause. “Oh, false wife; oh, weak mother,” she cried, “I am rightly

punished for my treason to my poor Eli.”

She sat for hours at a time by his bedside rocking herself in silence,

and was never quite herself again; and the first grey hairs began to

come in her poor head from that hour.

As for Sybrandt, all his cry was now for Gerard, He used to whine

to Margaret like a suffering hound, “Oh, sweet Margaret, oh, bonny

Margaret, for our Lady's sake find Gerard, and bid him take his curse

off me. Thou art gentle, thou art good; thou wilt entreat for me, and he

will refuse thee nought.”

Catherine shared his belief that Gerard could cure him, and joined her

entreaties to his, Margaret hardly needed this. The burgomaster and his

agents having failed, she employed her own, and spent money like water.

And among these agents poor Luke enrolled himself. She met him one day

looking very thin, and spoke to him compassionately. On this he began

to blubber, and say he was more miserable than ever; he would like to be

good friends again upon almost any terms.

“Dear heart,” said Margaret sorrowfully, “why can you not say to

yourself, now I am her little brother, and she is my old, married

sister, worn down with care? Say so, and I will indulge thee, and pet

thee, and make thee happier than a prince.”

“Well, I will,” said Luke savagely, “sooner than keep away from you

altogether. But above all give me something to do. Perchance I may have

better luck this time.”

“Get me my marriage lines,” said Margaret, turning sad and gloomy in a

moment.

“That is as much as to say, get me him! for where they are, he is.”

“Not so. He may refuse to come nigh me; but certes he will not deny a

poor woman, who loved him once, her lines of betrothal. How can she go

without them into any honest man's house?”

“I'll get them you if they are in Holland,” said Luke.

“They are as like to be in Rome,” replied Margaret.

“Let us begin with Holland,” observed Luke prudently.

The slave of love was furnished with money by his soft tyrant, and

wandered hither and thither, Coopering, and carpentering, and looking

for Gerard. “I can't be worse if I find the vagabone,” said he, “and I

may be a hantle better.”

The months rolled on, and Sybrandt improved in spirit, but not in body;

he was Margaret's pensioner for life; and a long-expected sorrow fell

upon poor Catherine, and left her still more bowed down; and she lost

her fine hearty bustling way, and never went about the house singing

now; and her nerves were shaken, and she lived in dread of some terrible

misfortune falling on Cornelis. The curse was laid on him as well as

Sybrandt. She prayed Eli, if she had been a faithful partner all these

years, to take Cornelis into his house again, and let her live awhile at

Rotterdam.

“I have good daughters here,” said she; “but Margaret is so tender,

and thoughtful, and the little Gerard, he is my joy; he grows liker his

father every day, and his prattle cheers my heavy heart; and I do love

children.”

And Eli, sturdy but kindly, consented sorrowfully.

And the people of Gouda petitioned the duke for a vicar, a real vicar.

“Ours cometh never nigh us,” said they, “this six months past; our

children they die unchristened, and our folk unburied, except by some

chance comer.” Giles' influence baffled this just complaint once; but a

second petition was prepared, and he gave Margaret little hope that the

present position could be maintained a single day.

So then Margaret went sorrowfully to the pretty manse to see it for the

last time, ere it should pass for ever into stranger's hands.

“I think he would have been happy here,” she said, and turned heart-sick

away.

On their return, Reicht Heynes proposed to her to go and consult the

hermit.

“What,” said Margaret, “Joan has been at you. She is the one for

hermits. I'll go, if 'tis but to show thee they know no more than we

do.” And they went to the cave.

It was an excavation partly natural, partly artificial, in a bank of

rock overgrown by brambles. There was a rough stone door on hinges, and

a little window high up, and two apertures, through one of which the

people announced their gifts to the hermit, and put questions of all

sorts to him; and when he chose to answer, his voice came dissonant and

monstrous out at another small aperture.

On the face of the rock this line was cut--

Felix qui in Domino nixus ab orbe fugit.

Margaret observed to her companion that this was new since she was here

last.

“Ay,” said Reicht, “like enough;” and looked up at it with awe. Writing

even on paper she thought no trifle; but on rock! She whispered, “Tis

a far holier hermit than the last; he used to come in the town now and

then, but this one ne'er shows his face to mortal man.”

“And that is holiness?”

“Ay, sure.”

“Then what a saint a dormouse must be?”

“Out, fie, mistress. Would ye even a beast to a man?”

“Come, Reicht,” said Margaret, “my poor father taught me overmuch, So I

will e'en sit here, and look at the manse once more. Go thou forward and

question thy solitary, and tell me whether ye get nought or nonsense

out of him, for 'twill be one.”

As Reicht drew near the cave a number of birds flew out of it., She gave

a little scream, and pointed to the cave to show Margaret they had come

thence, On this Margaret felt sure there was no human being in the cave,

and gave the matter no further attention, She fell into a deep reverie

while looking at the little manse.

She was startled from it by Reicht's hand upon her shoulder, and a faint

voice saying, “Let us go home.”

“You got no answer at all, Reicht,” said Margaret calmly.

“No, Margaret,” said Reicht despondently. And they returned home.

Perhaps after all Margaret had nourished some faint secret hope in her

heart, though her reason had rejected it, for she certainly went home

more dejectedly.

Just as they entered Rotterdam, Reicht said, “Stay! Oh, Margaret, I am

ill at deceit; but 'tis death to utter ill news to thee; I love thee so

dear.”

“Speak out, sweetheart,” said Margaret. “I have gone through so much, I

am almost past feeling any fresh trouble.”

“Margaret, the hermit did speak to me.”

“What, a hermit there? among all those birds.”

“Ay; and doth not that show him a holy man?”

“I' God's name, what said he to thee, Reicht?”

“Alas! Margaret, I told him thy story, and I prayed him for our Lady's

sake tell me where thy Gerard is, And I waited long for an answer, and

presently a voice came like a trumpet: 'Pray for the soul of Gerard the

son of Eli!”

“Ah!”

“Oh, woe is me that I have this to tell thee, sweet Margaret! bethink

thee thou hast thy boy to live for yet.”

“Let me get home,” said Margaret faintly.

Passing down the Brede Kirk Straet they saw Joan at the door. Reicht

said to her, “Eh, woman, she has been to your hermit, and heard no good

news.”

“Come in,” said Joan, eager for a gossip.

Margaret would not go in; but she sat down disconsolate on the lowest

step but one of the little external staircase that led into Joan's

house, and let the other two gossip their fill at the top of it.

“Oh,” said Joan, “what yon hermit says is sure to be sooth, He is that

holy, I am told, that the very birds consort with him.”

“What does that prove?” said Margaret deprecatingly. “I have seen my

Gerard tame the birds in winter till they would eat from his hand.”

A look of pity at this parallel passed between the other two, but they

were both too fond of her to say what they thought.

Joan proceeded to relate all the marvellous tales she had heard of this

hermit's sanctity; how he never came out but at night, and prayed among

the wolves, and they never molested him; and now he bade the people not

bring him so much food to pamper his body, but to bring him candles.

“The candles are to burn before his saint,” whispered Reicht solemnly.

“Ay, lass; and to read his holy books wi'. A neighbour o' mine saw his

hand come out, and the birds sat thereon and pecked crumbs. She went

for to kiss it, but the holy man whippit it away in a trice. They can't

abide a woman to touch 'en, or even look at 'em, saints can't.”

“What like was his hand, wife? Did you ask her?”

“What is my tongue for, else? Why, dear heart, all one as yourn; by the

same token a had a thumb and four fingers.”

“Look ye there now.”

“But a deal whiter nor yourn and mine.”

“Ay, ay.”

“And main skinny.”

“Alas.”

“What could ye expect? Why, a live upon air, and prayer, and candles.”

“Ah, well,” continued Joan; “poor thing, I whiles think 'tis best for

her to know the worst. And now she hath gotten a voice from heaven, Or

almost as good, and behoves her pray for his soul. One thing, she is not

so poor now as she was; and never fell riches to a better hand; and she

is only come into her own for that matter, so she can pay the priest to

say masses for him, and that is a great comfort.”

In the midst of their gossip, Margaret, in whose ears it was all

buzzing, though she seemed lost in thought, got softly up, and crept

away with her eyes on the ground, and her brows bent.

“She hath forgotten I am with her,” said Reicht Heynes ruefully.

She had her gossip out with Joan, and then went home.

She found Margaret seated cutting out a pelisse of grey cloth, and a

cape to match. Little Gerard was standing at her side, inside her left

arm, eyeing the work, and making it more difficult by wriggling about,

and fingering the arm with which she held the cloth steady, to all which

she submitted with imperturbable patience and complacency, Fancy a male

workman so entangled, impeded, worried!

“Ot's that, mammy?”

“A pelisse, my pet.”

“Ot's a p'lisse?”

“A great frock. And this is the cape to't.”

“Ot's it for?”

“To keep his body from the cold; and the cape is for his shoulders, or

to go over his head like the country folk. 'Tis for a hermit.”

“Ot's a 'ermit?”

“A holy man that lives in a cave all by himself.”

“In de dark?”

“Ay, whiles.”

“Oh.”

In the morning Reicht was sent to the hermit with the pelisse, and a

pound of thick candles.

As she was going out of the door Margaret said to her, “Said you whose

son Gerard was?”

“Nay, not I.”

“Think, girl! How could he call him Gerard, son of Eli, if you had not

told him?”

Reicht persisted she had never mentioned him but as plain Gerard. But

Margaret told her flatly she did not believe her; at which Reicht was

affronted, and went out with a little toss of the head. However, she

determined to question the hermit again, and did not doubt he would be

more liberal in his communication when he saw his nice new pelisse and

the candles.

She had not been gone long when Giles came in with ill news.

The living of Gouda would be kept vacant no longer.

Margaret was greatly distressed at this.

“Oh, Giles,” said she, “ask for another month. They will give thee

another month, maybe.”

He returned in an hour to tell her he could not get a month.

“They have given me a week,” said he. “And what is a week?”

“Drowning bodies catch at strawen,” was her reply. “A week? a little

week?”

Reicht came back from her errand out of spirits. Her oracle had declined

all further communication. So at least its obstinate silence might

fairly be interpreted.

The next day Margaret put Reicht in charge of the shop, and disappeared

all day. So the next day, and so the next. Nor would she tell any one

where she had been. Perhaps she was ashamed. The fact is, she spent all

those days on one little spot of ground. When they thought her dreaming,

she was applying to every word that fell from Joan and Reicht the whole

powers of a far acuter mind than either of them possessed.

She went to work on a scale that never occurred to either of them. She

was determined to see the hermit, and question him face to face, not

through a wall. She found that by making a circuit she could get above

the cave, and look down without being seen by the solitary. But when she

came to do it, she found an impenetrable mass of brambles. After tearing

her clothes, and her hands and feet, so that she was soon covered with

blood, the resolute, patient girl took out her scissors and steadily

snipped and cut till she made a narrow path through the enemy. But so

slow was the work that she had to leave it half done. The next day she

had her scissors fresh ground, and brought a sharp knife as well, and

gently, silently, cut her way to the roof of the cave. There she made an

ambush of some of the cut brambles, so that the passers-by might not see

her, and couched with watchful eye till the hermit should come out. She

heard him move underneath her. But he never left his cell. She began to

think it was true that he only came out at night.

The next day she came early and brought a jerkin she was making for

little Gerard, and there she sat all day, working, and watching with

dogged patience.

At four o'clock the birds began to feed; and a great many of the smaller

kinds came fluttering round the cave, and one or two went in. But most

of them, taking a preliminary seat on the bushes, suddenly discovered

Margaret, and went off with an agitated flirt of their little wings. And

although they sailed about in the air, they would not enter the cave.

Presently, to encourage them, the hermit, all unconscious of the cause

of their tremors, put out a thin white hand with a few crumbs in it,

Margaret laid down her work softly, and gliding her body forward like a

snake, looked down at it from above; it was but a few feet from her. It

was as the woman described it, a thin, white hand.

Presently the other hand came out with a piece of bread, and the two

hands together broke it and scattered the crumbs.

But that other hand had hardly been out two seconds ere the violet eyes

that were watching above dilated; and the gentle bosom heaved, and the

whole frame quivered like a leaf in the wind.

What her swift eye had seen I leave the reader to guess. She suppressed

the scream that rose to her lips, but the effort cost her dear. Soon the

left hand of the hermit began to swim indistinctly before her gloating

eyes; and with a deep sigh her head drooped, and she lay like a broken

lily.

She was in a deep swoon, to which perhaps her long fast to-day and the

agitation and sleeplessness of many preceding days contributed.

And there lay beauty, intelligence, and constancy, pale and silent, And

little that hermit guessed who was so near him. The little birds hopped

on her now, and one nearly entangled his little feet in her rich auburn

hair.

She came back to her troubles. The sun was set. She was very cold, She

cried a little, but I think it was partly from the remains of physical

weakness. And then she went home, praying God and the saints to

enlighten her and teach her what to do for the best.

When she got home she was pale and hysterical, and would say nothing in

answer to all their questions but her favourite word, “We are wading in

deep waters.”

The night seemed to have done wonders for her.

She came to Catherine, who was sitting sighing by the fireside, and

kissed her, and said--

“Mother, what would you like best in the world?”

“Eh, dear,” replied Catherine despondently, “I know nought that would

make me smile now; I have parted from too many that were dear to me.

Gerard lost again as soon as found; Kate in heaven; and Sybrandt down

for life.”

“Poor mother! Mother dear, Gouda manse is to be furnished, and cleaned,

and made ready all in a hurry, See, here be ten gold angels. Make them

go far, good mother; for I have ta'en over many already from my boy for

a set of useless loons that were aye going to find him for me.”

Catherine and Reicht stared at her a moment in silence, and then out

burst a flood of questions, to none of which would she give a reply.

“Nay,” said she, “I have lain on my bed and thought, and thought, and

thought whiles you were all sleeping; and methinks I have got the clue

to all, I love you, dear mother; but I'll trust no woman's tongue. If I

fail this time, I'll have none to blame but Margaret Brandt.”

A resolute woman is a very resolute thing. And there was a deep, dogged

determination in Margaret's voice and brow that at once convinced

Catherine it would be idle to put any more questions at that time,

She and Reicht lost themselves in conjectures; and Catherine whispered

Reicht, “Bide quiet; then 'twill leak out;” a shrewd piece of advice,

founded on general observation.

Within an hour Catherine was on the road to Gouda in a cart, with two

stout girls to help her, and quite a siege artillery of mops, and pails,

and brushes, She came back with heightened colour, and something of the

old sparkle in her eye, and kissed Margaret with a silent warmth that

spoke volumes, and at five in the morning was off again to Gouda.

That night as Reicht was in her first sleep a hand gently pressed

her shoulder, and she awoke, and was going to scream, “Whisht,” said

Margaret, and put her finger to her lips.

She then whispered, “Rise softly, don thy habits, and come with me!”

When she came down, Margaret begged her to loose Dragon and bring him

along. Now Dragon was a great mastiff, who had guarded Margaret Van Eyck

and Reicht, two lone women, for some years, and was devotedly attached

to the latter.

Margaret and Reicht went out, with Dragon walking majestically behind

them. They came back long after midnight, and retired to rest.

Catherine never knew.

Margaret read her friends: she saw the sturdy, faithful Frisian could

hold her tongue, and Catherine could not. Yet I am not sure she would

have trusted even Reicht had her nerve equalled her spirit; but with

all her daring and resolution, she was a tender, timid woman, a little

afraid of the dark, very afraid of being alone in it, and desperately

afraid of wolves. Now Dragon could kill a wolf in a brace of shakes; but

then Dragon would not go with her, but only with Reicht; so altogether

she made one confidante.

The next night they made another moonlight reconnaissance, and as I

think, with some result. For not the next night (it rained that night

and extinguished their courage), but the next after they took with them

a companion, the last in the world Reicht Heynes would have thought of;

yet she gave her warm approval as soon as she was told he was to go with

them.

Imagine how these stealthy assailants trembled and panted when the

moment of action came; imagine, if you can, the tumult in Margaret's

breast, the thrilling hopes, chasing, and chased by sickening fears;

the strange and perhaps unparalleled mixture of tender familiarity and

distant awe with which a lovely and high-spirited, but tender, adoring

woman, wife in the eye of the Law, and no wife in the eye of the

Church, trembling, blushing, paling, glowing, shivering, stole at night,

noiseless as the dew, upon the hermit of Gouda.

And the stars above seemed never so bright and calm.

CHAPTER XCII

Yes, the hermit of Gouda was the vicar of Gouda, and knew it not, so

absolute was his seclusion.

My reader is aware that the moment the frenzy of his passion passed, he

was seized with remorse for having been betrayed into it. But perhaps

only those who have risen as high in religious spirit as he had, and

suddenly fallen, can realize the terror at himself that took possession

of him. He felt like one whom self-confidence had betrayed to the very

edge of a precipice.

“Ah, good Jerome,” he cried, “how much better you knew me than I knew

myself! How bitter yet wholesome was your admonition!”

Accustomed to search his own heart, he saw at once that the true cause

of his fury was Margaret. “I love her then better than God,” said he

despairingly; “better than the Church, From such a love what can spring

to me, or to her?” He shuddered at the thought. “Let the strong battle

temptation; 'tis for the weak to flee. And who is weaker than I have

shown myself? What is my penitence, my religion? A pack of cards built

by degrees into a fair-seeming structure; and lo! one breath of earthly

love, and it lies in the dust, I must begin again, and on a surer

foundation.” He resolved to leave Holland at once, and spend years of

his life in some distant convent before returning to it. By that time

the temptations of earthly passion would be doubly baffled; and older

and a better monk, he should be more master of his earthly affections,

and Margaret, seeing herself abandoned, would marry, and love another,

The very anguish this last thought cost him showed the self-searcher and

self-denier that he was on the path of religious duty.

But in leaving her for his immortal good and hers, he was not to

neglect her temporal weal. Indeed, the sweet thought, he could make her

comfortable for life, and rich in this world's goods, which she was not

bound to despise, sustained him in the bitter struggle it cost him to

turn his back on her without one kind word or look, “Oh, what will she

think of me?” he groaned. “Shall I not seem to her of all creatures the

most heartless, inhuman? but so best; ay, better she should hate me,

miserable that I am, Heaven is merciful, and giveth my broken heart this

comfort; I can make that villain restore her own, and she shall never

lose another true lover by poverty. Another? Ah me! ah me! God and the

saints to mine aid!”

How he fared on this errand has been related. But first, as you may

perhaps remember, he went at night to shrive the hermit of Gouda. He

found him dying, and never left him till he had closed his eyes and

buried him beneath the floor of the little oratory attached to his cell.

It was the peaceful end of a stormy life. The hermit had been a soldier,

and even now carried a steel corselet next his skin, saying he was now

Christ's soldier as he had been Satan's. When Clement had shriven him

and prayed by him, he, in his turn, sought counsel of one who was dying

in so pious a frame, The hermit advised him to be his successor in this

peaceful retreat. “His had been a hard fight against the world, the

flesh, and the devil, and he had never thoroughly baffled them till he

retired into the citadel of Solitude.”

These words and the hermit's pious and peaceful death, which speedily

followed, and set as it were the seal of immortal truth on them, made a

deep impression upon Clement. Nor in his case had they any prejudice to

combat; the solitary recluse was still profoundly revered in the Church,

whether immured as an anchorite or anchoress in some cave or cell

belonging to a monastery, or hidden in the more savage but laxer

seclusion of the independent hermitage. And Clement knew more about the

hermits of the Church than most divines at his time of life; he had read

much thereon at the monastery near Tergou, had devoured their lives

with wonder and delight in the manuscripts of the Vatican, and conversed

earnestly about them with the mendicant friars of several nations.

Before Printing these friars were the great circulators of those local

annals and biographies which accumulated in the convents of every land.

Then his teacher, Jerome, had been three years an anchorite on the

heights of Camaldoli, where for more than four centuries the Thebaid had

been revived; and Jerome, cold and curt on most religious themes, was

warm with enthusiasm on this one. He had pored over the annals of

St. John Baptist's abbey, round about which the hermit's caves were

scattered, and told him the names of many a noble, and many a famous

warrior who had ended his days there a hermit, and of many a bishop and

archbishop who had passed from the see to the hermitage, or from the

hermitage to the see. Among the former the Archbishop of Ravenna; among

the latter Pope Victor the Ninth. He told him too, with grim delight, of

their multifarious austerities, and how each hermit set himself to find

where he was weakest, and attacked himself without mercy or remission

till there, even there, he was strongest. And how seven times in the

twenty-four hours, in thunder, rain, or snow, by daylight, twilight,

moonlight, or torchlight, the solitaries flocked from distant points,

over rugged precipitous ways, to worship in the convent church; at

matins, at prime, tierce, sexte, nones, vespers, and compline. He

even, under eager questioning, described to him the persons of famous

anchorites he had sung the Psalter and prayed with there; the only

intercourse their vows allowed, except with special permission. Moncata,

Duke of Moncata and Cardova, and Hidalgo of Spain, who in the flower of

his youth had retired thither from the pomps, vanities, and pleasures of

the world; Father John Baptist of Novara, who had led armies to

battle, but was now a private soldier of Christ; Cornelius, Samuel,

and Sylvanus. This last, when the great Duchess de' Medici obtained the

Pope's leave, hitherto refused, to visit Camaldoli, went down and met

her at the first wooden cross, and there, surrounded as she was with

courtiers and flatterers, remonstrated with her, and persuaded her, and

warned her, not to profane that holy mountain, where no woman for so

many centuries had placed her foot; and she, awed by the place and the

man, retreated with all her captains, soldiers, courtiers, and pages

from that one hoary hermit. At Basle Clement found fresh materials,

especially with respect to German and English anchorites; and he had

even prepared a “Catena Eremitarum” from the year of our Lord 250, when

Paul of Thebes commenced his ninety years of solitude, down to the year

1470. He called them Angelorum amici et animalium, i.e.

FRIENDS OF ANGELS AND ANIMALS.

Thus, though in those days he never thought to be a recluse, the road

was paved, so to speak; and when the dying hermit of Gouda blessed the

citadel of Solitude, where he had fought the good fight and won it, and

invited him to take up the breast-plate of faith that now fell off his

own shrunken body, Clement said within himself: “Heaven itself led my

foot hither to this end.” It struck him, too, as no small coincidence

that his patron, St. Bavon, was a hermit, and an austere one, a

cuirassier of the solitary cell.

As soon as he was reconciled to Ghysbrecht Van Swieten, he went eagerly

to his abode, praying Heaven it might not have been already occupied in

these three days. The fear was not vain; these famous dens never wanted

a human tenant long. He found the rude stone door ajar; then he made

sure he was too late; he opened the door and went softly in. No; the

cell was vacant, and there were the hermit's great ivory crucifix, his

pens, ink, seeds, and, memento mori, a skull; his cilice of hair, and

another of bristles; his well-worn sheepskin pelisse and hood; his

hammer, chisel, and psaltery, etc. Men and women had passed that

way, but none had ventured to intrude, far less to steal. Faith and

simplicity had guarded that keyless door more securely than the houses

of the laity were defended by their gates like a modern gaol, and think

iron bars at every window, and the gentry by moat, bastion, chevaux de

frise, and portcullis.

As soon as Clement was fairly in the cell there was a loud flap, and a

flutter, and down came a great brown owl from a corner, and whirled out

of the window, driving the air cold on Clement's face, He started and

shuddered.

Was this seeming owl something diabolical? trying to deter him from his

soul's good? On second thoughts, might it not be some good spirit

the hermit had employed to keep the cell for him, perhaps the hermit

himself? Finally he concluded that it was just an owl, and that he would

try and make friends with it.

He kneeled down and inaugurated his new life with prayer.

Clement had not only an earthly passion to quell, the power of which

made him tremble for his eternal weal, but he had a penance to do for

having given way to ire, his besetting sin, and cursed his own brothers.

He looked round this roomy cell furnished with so many comforts, and

compared it with the pictures in his mind of the hideous place, eremus

in eremo, a desert in a desert, where holy Jerome, hermit, and the

Plutarch of hermits, had wrestled with sickness, temptation, and despair

four mortal years; and with the inaccessible and thorny niche, a hole

in a precipice, where the boy hermit Benedict buried himself, and lived

three years on the pittance the good monk Romanus could spare him from

his scanty commons, and subdivided that mouthful with his friend, a

raven; and the hollow tree of his patron St. Bavon; and the earthly

purgatory at Fribourg, where lived a nameless saint in a horrid cavern,

his eyes chilled with perpetual gloom, and his ears stunned with an

eternal waterfall; and the pillar on which St. Simeon Stylita existed

forty-five years; and the destina, or stone box, of St. Dunstan, where,

like Hilarion in his bulrush hive, sepulchro potius quam domu, he could

scarce sit, stand, or lie; and the living tombs, sealed with lead, of

Thais, and Christina, and other recluses; and the damp dungeon of St.

Alred. These and scores more of the dismal dens in which true hermits

had worn out their wasted bodies on the rock, and the rock under their

sleeping bodies, and their praying knees, all came into his mind, and he

said to himself, “This sweet retreat is for safety of the soul; but what

for penance Jesu aid me against faults to come; and for the fault I rue,

face of man I will not see for a twelvemonth and a day.” He had famous

precedents in his eye even for this last and unusual severity. In fact

the original hermit of this very cell was clearly under the same vow.

Hence the two apertures, through which he was spoken to, and replied.

Adopting, in other respects, the uniform rule of hermits and anchorites,

he divided his day into the seven offices, ignoring the petty

accidents of light and dark, creations both of Him to whom he prayed so

unceasingly. He learned the psalter by heart, and in all the intervals

of devotion, not occupied by broken slumbers, he worked hard with his

hands. No article of the hermit's rule was more strict or more ancient

than this. And here his self-imposed penance embarrassed him, for

what work could he do, without being seen, that should benefit his

neighbours? for the hermit was to labour for himself in those cases only

where his subsistence depended on it. Now Clement's modest needs were

amply supplied by the villagers.

On moonlight nights he would steal out like a thief, and dig some

poor man's garden on the outskirts of the village. He made baskets and

dropped them slily at humble doors.

And since he could do nothing for the bodies of those who passed by his

cell in daytime, he went out in the dead of the night with his hammer

and his chisel, and carved moral and religious sentences all down the

road upon the sandstone rocks. “Who knows?” said he, “often a chance

shaft strikes home.”

Oh, sore heart, comfort thou the poor and bereaved with holy words of

solace in their native tongue; for he said “well, 'tis 'clavis ad corda

plebis.'” Also he remembered the learned Colonna had told him of

the written mountains in the east, where kings had inscribed their

victories, “What,” said Clement, “are they so wise, those Eastern

monarchs, to engrave their war-like glory upon the rock, making a blood

bubble endure so long as earth; and shall I leave the rocks about me

silent on the King of Glory, at whose word they were, and at whose

breath they shall be dust? Nay, but these stones shall speak to weary

wayfarers of eternal peace, and of the Lamb, whose frail and afflicted

yet happy servant worketh them among.”

Now at this time the inspired words that have consoled the poor and the

afflicted for so many ages were not yet printed in Dutch, so that these

sentences of gold from the holy evangelists came like fresh oracles

from heaven, or like the dew on parched flowers; and the poor hermit's

written rocks softened a heart Or two, and sent the heavy laden singing

on their way(1).

These holy oracles that seemed to spring up around him like magic; his

prudent answers through his window to such as sought ghostly counsel;

and above all, his invisibility, soon gained him a prodigious

reputation, This was not diminished by the medical advice they now and

then extorted from him sore against his will, by tears and entreaties;

for if the patients got well they gave the holy hermit the credit, and

if not they laid all the blame on the devil. “I think he killed nobody,

for his remedies were womanish and weak.” Sage and wormwood, sion,

hyssop, borage, spikenard, dog's-tongue, our Lady's mantle, feverfew,

and Faith, and all in small quantities except the last.

Then his abstinence, sure sign of a saint. The eggs and milk they

brought him at first he refused with horror. Know ye not the hermit's

rule is bread, or herbs, and water? Eggs, they are birds in disguise;

for when the bird dieth, then the egg rotteth. As for milk, it is little

better than white blood. And when they brought him too much bread he

refused it. Then they used to press it on him. “Nay, holy father; give

the overplus to the poor.”

“You who go among the poor can do that better. Is bread a thing to fling

haphazard from an hermit's window?” And to those who persisted after

this: “To live on charity, yet play Sir Bountiful, is to lie with the

right hand. Giving another's to the poor, I should beguile them of their

thanks, and cheat thee the true giver. Thus do thieves, whose boast it

is they bleed the rich into the lap of the poor. Occasio avaritiae nomen

pauperum.”

When nothing else would convince the good souls, this piece of Latin

always brought them round. So would a line of Virgil's Aeneid.

This great reputation of sanctity was all external. Inside the cell was

a man who held the hermit of Gouda as cheap as dirt.

“Ah!” said he, “I cannot deceive myself; I cannot deceive God's animals.

See the little birds, how coy they be; I feed and feed them, and long

for their friendship, yet will they never come within, nor take my hand,

by lighting on't. For why? No Paul, no Benedict, no Hugh of Lincoln, no

Columba, no Guthlac bides in this cell. Hunted doe flieth not hither,

for here is no Fructuosus, nor Aventine, nor Albert of Suabia; nor e'en

a pretty squirrel cometh from the wood hard by for the acorns I have

hoarded; for here abideth no Columban. The very owl that was here hath

fled. They are not to be deceived; I have a Pope's word for that; Heaven

rest his soul.”

Clement had one advantage over her whose image in his heart he was bent

on destroying.

He had suffered and survived the pang of bereavement, and the mind

cannot quite repeat such anguish. Then he had built up a habit of

looking on her as dead. After that strange scene in the church and

churchyard of St. Laurens, that habit might be compared to a structure

riven by a thunderbolt. It was shattered, but stones enough stood to

found a similar habit on; to look on her as dead to him.

And by severe subdivision of his time and thoughts, by unceasing prayers

and manual labour, he did in about three months succeed in benumbing the

earthly half of his heart.

But lo! within a day or two of this first symptom of mental peace

returning slowly, there descended upon his mind a horrible despondency.

Words cannot utter it, for words never yet painted a likeness of

despair. Voices seemed to whisper in his ear, “Kill thyself! kill! kill!

kill!”

And he longed to obey the voices, for life was intolerable.

He wrestled with his dark enemy with prayers and tears; he prayed God

but to vary his temptation. “Oh let mine enemy have power to scourge me

with red-hot whips, to tear me leagues and leagues over rugged places

by the hair of my head, as he has served many a holy hermit, that yet

baffled him at last; to fly on me like a raging lion; to gnaw me with

a serpent's fangs; any pain, any terror, but this horrible gloom of the

soul that shuts me from all light of Thee and of the saints.”

And now a freezing thought crossed him. What if the triumphs of the

powers of darkness over Christian souls in desert places had been

suppressed, and only their defeats recorded, or at least in full; for

dark hints were scattered about antiquity that now first began to grin

at him with terrible meaning.

“THEY WANDERED IN THE DESERT AND PERISHED BY SERPENTS,” said an ancient

father of hermits that went into solitude, “and were seen no more.” And

another at a more recent epoch wrote: Vertuntur ad melancholiam: “they

turn to gloomy madness.” These two statements, were they not one? for

the ancient fathers never spoke with regret of the death of the body.

No, the hermits so lost were perished souls, and the serpents were

diabolical (2) thoughts, the natural brood of solitude.

St. Jerome went into the desert with three companions; one fled in the

first year, two died; how? The single one that lasted was a gigantic

soul with an iron body.

The cotemporary who related this made no comment, expressed no wonder,

What, then, if here was a glimpse of the true proportion in every age,

and many souls had always been lost in solitude for one gigantic mind

and iron body that survived this terrible ordeal.

The darkened recluse now cast his despairing eyes over antiquity to see

what weapons the Christian arsenal contained that might befriend him.

The greatest of all was prayer. Alas! it was a part of his malady to

be unable to pray with true fervour. The very system of mechanical

supplication he had for months carried out so severely by rule had

rather checked than fostered his power of originating true prayer.

He prayed louder than ever, but the heart hung back cold and gloomy, and

let the words go up alone.

“Poor wingless prayers,” he cried, “you will not get half-way to

heaven.”

A fiend of this complexion had been driven out of King Saul by music.

Clement took up the hermit's psaltery, and with much trouble mended the

strings and tuned it.

No, he could not play it. His soul was so out of tune. The sounds jarred

on it, and made him almost mad.

“Ah, wretched me!” he cried; “Saul had a saint to play to him. He was

not alone with the spirits of darkness; but here is no sweet bard of

Israel to play to me; I, lonely, with crushed heart, on which a black

fiend sitteth mountain high, must make the music to uplift that heart

to heaven; it may not be.” And he grovelled on the earth weeping and

tearing his hair.

VERTEBATUR AD MELANCHOLIAM.

(1) It requires nowadays a strong effort of the imagination

to realize the effect on poor people who had never seen them

before of such sentences as this

“Blessed are the poor” etc.

(2) The primitive writer was so interpreted by others

besides Clement; and in particular by Peter of Blois, a

divine of the twelfth century, whose comment is noteworthy,

as he himself was a forty-year hermit.

CHAPTER XCIII

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 Eleison.

Christe Eleison.

{ton Satanan suntripson upo tous pothas ymwn}(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.

Libera nos Domine.(6)

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

fixus 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 low

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

busybody 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 tuorem visita,

Imple superna gratia

Quae tu creasti pectora

Accende lumen sensibus,

Mentes tuorum visita,

Infirma nostri corporis,

Virtute firmans perpeti.

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

surrounding 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 antelope's 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, god-like 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 I 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 aetherius 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 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, and 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 tranquility 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(9) 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 gratia,” 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(10), 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.

(1) Beat down Satan under our feet.

(2) Up, hearts!

(3) O God our refuge and strength.

(4) O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,

have mercy upon me!

(5) O 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, O Lord, who for

our sins art justly displeased (and that torrent of prayer,

the following verse).

(9) Dr. Dickson, author of Fallacies of the Faculty, etc.

(10) It is related of a mediaeval 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.”

CHAPTER XCIV

HER attitude was one to excite pity rather than terror, in eyes not

blinded by a preconceived notion. Her bosom was fluttering like a bird,

and the red and white coming and going in her cheeks, and she had her

hand against the wall by the instinct of timid things, she trembled

so; and the marvellous mixed gaze of love, and pious awe, and pity, and

tender memories, those purple eyes cast on the emaciated and glaring

hermit, was an event in nature.

“Aha!” he cried. “Thou art come at last in flesh and blood; come to me

as thou camest to holy Anthony. But I am ware of thee. I thought thy

wiles were not exhausted. I am armed.” With this he snatched up his

small crucifix and held it out at her, astonished, and the candle in the

other hand, both crucifix and candle shaking violently. “Exorcizo te.”

“Ah, no!” cried she piteously; and put out two pretty deprecating palms.

“Alas! work me no ill! It is Margaret.”

“Liar!” shouted the hermit. “Margaret was fair, but not so supernatural

fair as thou. Thou didst shrink at that sacred name, thou subtle

hypocrite. In Nomine Dei exorcizo vos.”

“Ah, Jesu!” gasped Margaret, in extremity of terror, “curse me not! I

will go home. I thought I might come. For very manhood be-Latin me not!

Oh, Gerard, is it thus you and I meet after all, after all?”

And she cowered almost to her knees and sobbed with superstitious fear

and wounded affection.

Impregnated as he was with Satanophobia he might perhaps have doubted

still whether this distressed creature, all woman and nature, was

not all art and fiend. But her spontaneous appeal to that sacred name

dissolved his chimera; and let him see with his eyes, and hear with his

ears.

He uttered a cry of self-reproach, and tried to raise her but what with

fasts, what with the overpowering emotion of a long solitude so broken,

he could not. “What,” he gasped, shaking over her, “and is it thou? And

have I met thee with hard words? Alas!” And they were both choked with

emotion and could not speak for a while.

“I heed it not much,” said Margaret bravely, struggling with her tears;

“you took me for another: for a devil; oh! oh! oh! oh! oh!”

“Forgive me, sweet soul!” And as soon as he could speak more than a word

at a time, he said, “I have been much beset by the evil one since I came

here.”

Margaret looked round with a shudder. “Like enow. Then oh take my hand,

and let me lead thee from this foul place.”

He gazed at her with astonishment.

“What, desert my cell; and go into the world again? Is it for that thou

hast come to me?” said he sadly and reproachfully.

“Ay, Gerard, I am come to take thee to thy pretty vicarage: art vicar

of Gouda, thanks to Heaven and thy good brother Giles; and mother and

I have made it so neat for thee, Gerard. 'Tis well enow in winter I

promise thee. But bide a bit till the hawthorn bloom, and anon thy

walls put on their kirtle of brave roses, and sweet woodbine, Have we

forgotten thee, and the foolish things thou lovest? And, dear Gerard,

thy mother is waiting; and 'tis late for her to be out of her bed:

prithee, prithee, come! And the moment we are out of this foul hole I'll

show thee a treasure thou hast gotten, and knowest nought on't, or sure

hadst never fled from us so. Alas! what is to do? What have I ignorantly

said, to be regarded thus?”

For he had drawn himself all up into a heap, and was looking at her with

a strange gaze of fear and suspicion blended.

“Unhappy girl,” said he solemnly, yet deeply agitated, “would you have

me risk my soul and yours for a miserable vicarage and the flowers that

grow on it? But this is not thy doing: the bowelless fiend sends thee,

poor simple girl, to me with this bait. But oh, cunning fiend, I will

unmask thee even to this thine instrument, and she shall see thee, and

abhor thee as I do, Margaret, my lost love, why am I here? Because I

love thee.”

“Oh! no, Gerard, you love me not or you would not have hidden from me;

there was no need.”

“Let there be no deceit between us twain, that have loved so true; and

after this night, shall meet no more on earth.”

“Now God forbid!” said she.

“I love thee, and thou hast not forgotten me, or thou hadst married ere

this, and hadst not been the one to find me, buried here from sight of

man. I am a priest, a monk: what but folly or sin can come of you and

me living neighbours, and feeding a passion innocent once, but now (so

Heaven wills it) impious and unholy? No, though my heart break I must be

firm. 'Tis I that am the man, 'tis I that am the priest. You and I must

meet no more, till I am schooled by solitude, and thou art wedded to

another.”

“I consent to my doom but not to thine. I would ten times liever die;

yet I will marry, ay, wed misery itself sooner than let thee lie in

this foul dismal place, with yon sweet manse awaiting for thee.” Clement

groaned; at each word she spoke out stood clearer and clearer two

things--his duty, and the agony it must cost.

“My beloved,” said he, with a strange mixture of tenderness and dogged

resolution, “I bless thee for giving me one more sight of thy sweet

face, and may God forgive thee, and bless thee, for destroying in a

minute the holy peace it hath taken six months of solitude to build. No

matter. A year of penance will, Dei gratia, restore me to my calm. My

poor Margaret, I seem cruel: yet I am kind: 'tis best we part; ay, this

moment.”

“Part, Gerard? Never: we have seen what comes of parting. Part? Why, you

have not heard half my story; no, nor the tithe, 'Tis not for thy mere

comfort I take thee to Gouda manse. Hear me!”

“I may not. Thy very voice is a temptation with its music, memory's

delight.”

“But I say you shall hear me, Gerard, for forth this place I go not

unheard.”

“Then must we part by other means,” said Clement sadly.

“Alack! what other means? Wouldst put me to thine own door, being the

stronger?”

“Nay, Margaret, well thou knowest I would suffer many deaths rather than

put force on thee; thy sweet body is dearer to me than my own; but a

million times dearer to me are our immortal souls, both thine and mine.

I have withstood this direst temptation of all long enow. Now I must fly

it: farewell! farewell!”

He made to the door, and had actually opened it and got half out, when

she darted after and caught him by the arm.

“Nay, then another must speak for me. I thought to reward thee for

yielding to me; but unkind that thou art, I need his help I find; turn

then this way one moment.”

“Nay, nay.”

“But I say ay! And then turn thy back on us an thou canst.” She somewhat

relaxed her grasp, thinking he would never deny her so small a favour.

But at this he saw his opportunity and seized it.

“Fly, Clement, fly!” he almost shrieked; and his religious enthusiasm

giving him for a moment his old strength, he burst wildly away from her,

and after a few steps bounded over the little stream and ran beside it,

but finding he was not followed stopped, and looked back.

She was lying on her face, with her hands spread out.

Yes, without meaning it, he had thrown her down and hurt her.

When he saw that, he groaned and turned back a step; but suddenly, by

another impulse flung himself into the icy water instead.

“There, kill my body!” he cried, “but save my soul!”

Whilst he stood there, up to his throat in liquid ice, so to speak,

Margaret uttered one long, piteous moan, and rose to her knees.

He saw her as plain almost as in midday. Saw her pale face and her eyes

glistening; and then in the still night he heard these words:

“Oh, God! Thou that knowest all, Thou seest how I am used. Forgive me

then! For I will not live another day.” With this she suddenly started

to her feet, and flew like some wild creature, wounded to death,

close by his miserable hiding-place, shrieking:

“CRUEL!--CRUEL!--CRUEL!--CRUEL!”

What manifold anguish may burst from a human heart in a single syllable.

There were wounded love, and wounded pride, and despair, and coming

madness all in that piteous cry. Clement heard, and it froze his heart

with terror and remorse, worse than the icy water chilled the marrow of

his bones.

He felt he had driven her from him for ever, and in the midst of

his dismal triumph, the greatest he had won, there came an almost

incontrollable impulse to curse the Church, to curse religion itself,

for exacting such savage cruelty from mortal man. At last he crawled

half dead out of the water, and staggered to his den. “I am safe here,”

he groaned; “she will never come near me again; unmanly, ungrateful

wretch that I am.” And he flung his emaciated, frozen body down on the

floor, not without a secret hope that it might never rise thence alive.

But presently he saw by the hour-glass that it was past midnight.

On this, he rose slowly and took off his wet things, and moaning all

the time at the pain he had caused her he loved, put on the old hermit's

cilice of bristles, and over that his breastplate. He had never worn

either of these before, doubting himself worthy to don the arms of that

tried soldier. But now he must give himself every aid; the bristles

might distract his earthly remorse by bodily pain, and there might be

holy virtue in the breastplate. Then he kneeled down and prayed God

humbly to release him that very night from the burden of the flesh. Then

he lighted all his candles, and recited his psalter doggedly; each word

seemed to come like a lump of lead from a leaden heart, and to fall

leaden to the ground; and in this mechanical office every now and then

he moaned with all his soul. In the midst of which he suddenly observed

a little bundle in the corner he had not seen before in the feebler

light, and at one end of it something like gold spun into silk.

He went to see what it could be; and he had no sooner viewed it closer,

than he threw up his hands with rapture. “It is a seraph,” he whispered,

“a lovely seraph. Heaven hath witnessed my bitter trial, and approves

my cruelty; and this flower of the skies is sent to cheer me, fainting

under my burden.”

He fell on his knees, and gazed with ecstasy on its golden hair, and its

tender skin, and cheeks like a peach.

“Let me feast my sad eyes on thee ere thou leavest me for thine

ever-blessed abode, and my cell darkens again at thy parting, as it did

at hers.”

With all this, the hermit disturbed the lovely visitor. He opened wide

two eyes, the colour of heaven; and seeing a strange figure kneeling

over him, he cried piteously, “MUMMA! MUM-MA!” And the tears began to

run down his little cheeks.

Perhaps, after all, Clement, who for more than six months had not looked

on the human face divine, estimated childish beauty more justly than we

can; and in truth, this fair northern child, with its long golden hair,

was far more angelic than any of our imagined angels. But now the spell

was broken.

Yet not unhappily. Clement it may be remembered, was fond of children,

and true monastic life fosters this sentiment. The innocent distress on

the cherubic face, the tears that ran so smoothly from those transparent

violets, his eyes, and his pretty, dismal cry for his only friend, his

mother, went through the hermit's heart. He employed all his gentleness

and all his art to soothe him; and as the little soul was wonderfully

intelligent for his age, presently succeeded so far that he ceased to

cry out, and wonder took the place of fear; while, in silence, broken

only in little gulps, he scanned, with great tearful eyes, this strange

figure that looked so wild, but spoke so kindly, and wore armour, yet

did not kill little boys, but coaxed them. Clement was equally perplexed

to know how this little human flower came to lie sparkling and blooming

in his gloomy cave. But he remembered he had left the door wide open,

and he was driven to conclude that, owing to this negligence, some

unfortunate creature of high or low degree had seized this opportunity

to get rid of her child for ever.(1). At this his bowels yearned so over

the poor deserted cherub, that the tears of pure tenderness stood in

his eyes, and still, beneath the crime of the mother, he saw the divine

goodness, which had so directed her heartlessness as to comfort His

servant's breaking heart.

“Now bless thee, bless thee, bless thee, sweet innocent, I would not

change thee for e'en a cherub in heaven.”

“At's pooty,” replied the infant, ignoring contemptuously, after the

manner of infants, all remarks that did not interest him.

“What is pretty here, my love, besides thee?”

“Ookum-gars,(2) said the boy, pointing to the hermit's breastplate.

“Quot liberi, tot sententiunculae!” Hector's child screamed at his

father's glittering casque and nodding crest; and here was a mediaeval

babe charmed with a polished cuirass, and his griefs assuaged.

“There are prettier things here than that,” said Clement, “there are

little birds; lovest thou birds?”

“Nay. Ay. En um ittle, ery ittle? Not ike torks. Hate torks um bigger an

baby.”

He then confided, in very broken language, that the storks with their

great flapping wings scared him, and were a great trouble and worry to

him, darkening his existence more or less.

“Ay, but my birds are very little, and good, and oh, so pretty!”

“Den I ikes 'm,” said the child authoritatively, “I ont my mammy.”

“Alas, sweet dove! I doubt I shall have to fill her place as best I may.

Hast thou no daddy as well as mammy, sweet one?”

Now not only was this conversation from first to last, the relative

ages, situations, and all circumstances of the parties considered, as

strange a one as ever took place between two mortal creatures, but at

or within a second or two of the hermit's last question, to turn the

strange into the marvellous, came an unseen witness, to whom every

word that passed carried ten times the force it did to either of the

speakers.

Since, therefore, it is with her eyes you must now see, and hear with

her ears, I go back a step for her.

Margaret, when she ran past Gerard, was almost mad. She was in that

state of mind in which affectionate mothers have been known to kill

their children, sometimes along with themselves, sometimes alone, which

last is certainly maniacal, She ran to Reicht Heynes pale and trembling,

and clasped her round the neck, “Oh, Reicht! oh, Reicht!” and could say

no more.

Reicht kissed her, and began to whimper; and would you believe it, the

great mastiff uttered one long whine: even his glimmer of sense taught

him grief was afoot.

“Oh, Reicht!” moaned the despised beauty, as soon as she could utter a

word for choking, “see how he has served me!” and she showed her hands,

that were bleeding with falling on the stony ground. “He threw me down,

he was so eager to fly from me, He took me for a devil; he said I came

to tempt him. Am I the woman to tempt a man? you know me, Reicht.”

“Nay, in sooth, sweet Mistress Margaret, the last i' the world.”

“And he would not look at my child. I'll fling myself and him into the

Rotter this night.”

“Oh, fie! fie! eh, my sweet woman, speak not so. Is any man that

breathes worth your child's life?”

“My child! where is he? Why, Reicht, I have left him behind. Oh, shame!

is it possible I can love him to that degree as to forget my child? Ah!

I am rightly served for it.”

And she sat down, and faithful Reicht beside her, and they sobbed in one

another's arms.

After a while Margaret left off sobbing and said doggedly, “let us go

home.”

“Ay, but the bairn?”

“Oh! he is well where he is. My heart is turned against my very child,

He cares nought for him; wouldn't see him, nor hear speak of him; and I

took him there so proud, and made his hair so nice, I did, and put his

new frock and cowl on him. Nay, turn about: it's his child as well as

mine; let him keep it awhile: mayhap that will learn him to think more

of its mother and his own.”

“High words off an empty stomach,” said Reicht.

“Time will show. Come you home.”

They departed, and Time did show quicker than he levels abbeys, for at

the second step Margaret stopped, and could neither go one way nor the

other, but stood stock still.

“Reicht,” said she piteously, “what else have I on earth? I cannot.”

“Whoever said you could? Think you I paid attention? Words are woman's

breath. Come back for him without more ado; 'tis time we were in our

beds, much more he.”

Reicht led the way, and Margaret followed readily enough in that

direction; but as they drew near the cell, she stopped again.

“Reicht, go you and ask him, will he give me back my boy; for I could

not bear the sight of him.”

“Alas! mistress, this do seem a sorry ending after all that hath been

betwixt you twain. Bethink thee now, doth thine heart whisper no excuse

for him? dost verily hate him for whom thou hast waited so long? Oh,

weary world!”

“Hate him, Reicht? I would not harm a hair of his head for all that is

in nature; but look on him I cannot; I have taken a horror of him. Oh!

when I think of all I have suffered for him, and what I came here this

night to do for him, and brought my own darling to kiss him and call

him father. Ah, Luke, my poor chap, my wound showeth me thine. I have

thought too little of thy pangs, whose true affection I despised; and

now my own is despised, Reicht, if the poor lad was here now, he would

have a good chance.”

“Well, he is not far off,” said Reicht Heynes; but somehow she did not

say it with alacrity.

“Speak not to me of any man,” said Margaret bitterly; “I hate them all.”

“For the sake of one?”

“Flout me not, but prithee go forward, and get me what is my own, my

sole joy in the world. Thou knowest I am on thorns till I have him to my

bosom again.”

Reicht went forward; Margaret sat by the roadside and covered her face

with her apron, and rocked herself after the manner of her country, for

her soul was full of bitterness and grief. So severe, indeed, was the

internal conflict, that she did not hear Reicht running back to her, and

started violently when the young woman laid a hand upon her shoulder.

“Mistress Margaret!” said Reicht quietly, “take a fool's advice that

loves ye. Go softly to yon cave, wi' all the ears and eyes your mother

ever gave you.”

“Why? Reicht?” stammered Margaret.

“I thought the cave was afire, 'twas so light inside; and there were

voices.”

“Voices?”

“Ay, not one, but twain, and all unlike--a man's and a little child's

talking as pleasant as you and me. I am no great hand at a keyhole for

my part, 'tis paltry work; but if so be voices were a talking in yon

cave, and them that owned those voices were so near to me as those are

to thee, I'd go on all fours like a fox, and I'd crawl on my belly like

a serpent, ere I'd lose one word that passes atwixt those twain.”

“Whisht, Reicht! Bless thee! Bide thou here. Buss me! Pray for me!”

And almost ere the agitated words had left her lips, Margaret was flying

towards the hermitage as noiselessly as a lapwing.

Arrived near it, she crouched, and there was something truly serpentine

in the gliding, flexible, noiseless movements by which she reached the

very door, and there she found a chink, and listened. And often it cost

her a struggle not to burst in upon them; but warned by defeat, she was

cautious, and resolute, let well alone, And after a while, slowly and

noiselessly she reared her head, like a snake its crest, to where she

saw the broadest chink of all, and looked with all her eyes and soul, as

well as listened.

The little boy then being asked whether he had no daddy, at first shook

his head, and would say nothing; but being pressed he suddenly seemed to

remember something, and said he, “Dad-da ill man; run away and left poor

mum-ma.”

She who heard this winced. It was as new to her as to Clement. Some

interfering foolish woman had gone and said this to the boy, and now out

it came in Gerard's very face. His answer surprised her; he burst out,

“The villain! the monster! he must be born without bowels to desert

thee, sweet one, Ah! he little knows the joy he has turned his back on.

Well, my little dove, I must be father and mother to thee, since the one

runs away, and t'other abandons thee to my care. Now to-morrow I shall

ask the good people that bring me my food to fetch some nice eggs

and milk for thee as well; for bread is good enough for poor old

good-for-nothing me, but not for thee. And I shall teach thee to read.”

“I can yead, I can yead.”

“Ay, verily, so young? all the better; we will read good books together,

and I shall show thee the way to heaven. Heaven is a beautiful place, a

thousand times fairer and better than earth, and there be little cherubs

like thyself, in white, glad to welcome thee and love thee. Wouldst like

to go to heaven one day?”

“Ay, along wi'-my-mammy.”

“What, not without her then?”

“Nay. I ont my mammy. Where is my mammy?”

(Oh! what it cost poor Margaret not to burst in and clasp him to her

heart!)

“Well, fret not, sweetheart, mayhap she will come when thou art asleep.

Wilt thou be good now and sleep?”

“I not eepy. Ikes to talk.”

“Well, talk we then; tell me thy pretty name.”

“Baby.” And he opened his eyes with amazement at this great hulking

creature's ignorance.

“Hast none other?”

“Nay.”

“What shall I do to pleasure thee, baby? Shall I tell thee a story?”

“I ikes tories,” said the boy, clapping his hands.

“Or sing thee a song?”

“I ikes tongs,” and he became excited.

“Choose then, a song or a story.”

“Ting I a tong. Nay, tell I a tory. Nay, ting I a tong. Nay--And the

corners of his little mouth turned down and he had half a mind to weep

because he could not have both, and could not tell which to forego.

Suddenly his little face cleared: “Ting I a tory,” said he.

“Sing thee a story, baby? Well, after all, why not? And wilt thou sit o'

my knee and hear it?”

“Yea.”

“Then I must e'en doff this breastplate, 'Tis too hard for thy soft

cheek. So. And now I must doff this bristly cilice; they would prick thy

tender skin, perhaps make it bleed, as they have me, I see. So. And now

I put on my best pelisse, in honour of thy worshipful visit. See how

soft and warm it is; bless the good soul that sent it; and now I sit

me down; so. And I take thee on my left knee, and put my arm under thy

little head; so, And then the psaltery, and play a little tune; so, not

too loud.”

“I ikes dat.”

“I am right glad on't. Now list the story.”

He chanted a child's story in a sort of recitative, singing a little

moral refrain now and then. The boy listened with rapture.

“I ikes oo,” said he, “Ot is oo? is oo a man?”

“Ay, little heart, and a great sinner to boot.”

“I ikes great tingers. Ting one other tory.”

Story No. 2 was Chanted.

“I ubbs oo,” cried the child impetuously, “Ot caft(3) is oo?”

“I am a hermit, love.”

“I ubbs vermins. Ting other one.”