Your mechanical preacher flings his words out happy-go-lucky; but the
pulpit orator, like every other orator, feels his people's pulse as he
speaks, and vibrates with them, and they with him.
So Leonard soon discovered he had a great listener in Mrs. Gaunt: she
was always there whenever he preached, and her rapt attention never
flagged. Her grey eyes never left his face, and, being up-turned, the
full orbs came out in all their grandeur, and seemed an angel's come
down from Heaven to hear him: for, indeed, to a very dark man, as
Leonard was, the gentle radiance of a true Saxon beauty seems always
more or less angelic.
By degrees this face became a help to the orator. In preaching he
looked sometimes to it for sympathy, and lo, it was sure to be melting
with sympathy. Was he led on to higher or deeper thoughts than most of
his congregation could understand, he looked to this face to understand
him; and lo, it had quite understood him, and was beaming with
intelligence.
From a help and an encouragement it became a comfort and a delight to
him.
On leaving the pulpit and cooling, he remembered its owner was no
angel, but a woman of the world, and had put to him frivolous questions.
The illusion, however, was so beautiful that Leonard, being an
imaginative man, was unwilling to dispel it by coming into familiar
contact with Mrs. Gaunt. So he used to make his assistant visit her,
and receive her when she came to confess, which was very rarely; for
she was discouraged by her first reception.
Brother Leonard lived in a sort of dwarf monastery, consisting of two
cottages, an oratory, and a sepulchre. The two latter were old, but the
cottages had been built expressly for him and another seminary priest
who had been invited from France. Inside, these cottages were little
more than cells; only the bigger had a kitchen, which was a glorious
place compared with the parlour: for it was illuminated with bright
pewter plates, copper vessels, brass candlesticks, and a nice clean
woman, with a plain gown kilted over a quilted silk petticoat; Betty
Scarf, an old servant of Mrs. Gaunt's, who had married, and was now the
widow Gough.
She stood at the gate one day as Mrs. Gaunt drove by; and curtsied, all
beaming.
Mrs. Gaunt stopped the carriage, and made some kind and patronizing
inquires about her: and it ended in Betty asking her to come in and see
her place. Mrs. Gaunt looked a little shy at that, and did not move.
"Nay, they are both abroad till supper time," said Betty, reading her
in a moment by the light of sex. Then Mrs. Gaunt smiled, and got out
of her carriage. Betty took her in and showed her everything in doors
and out. Mrs. Gaunt looked mighty demure and dignified, but scanned
everything closely, only without seeming too curious.
The cold gloom of the parlour struck her. She shuddered, and said,
"This would give me the vapours. But, doubtless, angels come and
brighten it for _him._"
"Not always," said Betty. "I do see him with his head in his hand by
the hour, and hear him sigh ever so loud as I pass the door. Why, one
day he was fain to have me and my spinning wheel aside him. Says he,
'Let me hear thy busy wheel, and see thee ply it.' 'And welcome,' says
I. So I sat in his room, and span, and he sat a gloating of me as if he
had never seen a woman spin hemp afore (he is a very simple man): and
presently says he--but what signifies what he said?"
"Nay, Betty; if you please. I am much interested in him. He preaches so
divinely."
"Ay," said Betty, "that's his gift. But a poor trencher-man; and I
declare I'm ashamed to eat all the vittels that are eaten here, and me
but a woman."
"But what did he say to you that time?" asked Mrs. Gaunt, a little
impatiently.
Betty cudgelled her memory. "Well says he, 'My daughter,' (the poor
soul always calls me his daughter, and me old enough to be his mother
mostly;) says he, 'how comes it that you are never wearied, nor cast
down, and yet you but serve a sinner like yourself; but I do often
droop in my Master's service, and he is the lord of Heaven and Earth?'
Says I, 'I'll tell ye, sir: because ye don't eat enough o' vittels.'"
"What an answer!"
"Why 'tis the truth, dame. And says I, 'If I was to be always fasting,
like as you be, d'ye think I should have the heart to work from morn
till night?' Now, wasn't I right?"
"I don't know till I hear what answer he made," said Mrs. Gaunt, with
mean caution.
"Oh, he shook his head, and said he ate mortal food enow (poor simple
body!), but drank too little of grace divine. That was his word."
Mrs. Gaunt was a good deal struck and affected by this revelation,
and astonished at the slighting tone Betty took in speaking of so
remarkable a man. The saying that "No man is a hero to his valet" was
not yet current, or perhaps she would have been less surprised at that.
"Alas! poor man," said she, "and is it so? To hear him, I thought his
soul was borne up night and day by angels' pinions--"
The widow interrupted her. "Ay, you hear him preach, and it is like
God's trumpet mostly, and so much I say for him in all companies. But
I see him directly after; he totters into this very room, and sits him
down pale and panting, and one time like to swoon, and another all for
crying, and then he is ever so dull and sad for the whole afternoon."
"And nobody knows this but you? You have got my old petticoat still, I
see. I must look you up another."
"You are very good, dame, I am sure. 'Twill not come amiss; I've only
this for Sundays and all. No, my lady, not a soul but me and you; I'm
not one as tells tales out of doors: but I don't mind you, dame; you
are my old mistress, and a discreet woman. 'Twill go no further than
your ear."
Mrs. Gaunt told her she might rely on that. The widow then inquired
after Mrs. Gaunt's little girl, and admired her dress, and described
her own ailments, and poured out a continuous stream of topics bearing
no affinity to each other except that they were all of them not worth
mentioning. And all the while she thus discoursed, Mrs. Gaunt's
thoughtful eyes looked straight over the chatterbox's white cap, and
explored vacancy: and by-and-by she broke the current of twaddle with
the air of a camelopard marching across a running gutter.
"Betsy Gough," said she, "I am thinking."
Mrs. Gough was struck dumb by an announcement so singular.
"I have heard, and I have read, that great and pious and learned men
are often to seek in little simple things, such as plain bodies have
at their fingers' ends. So now, if you and I could only teach him
something for all he has taught us. And, to be sure, we ought to be
kind to him if we can; for oh, Betty, my woman, 'tis a poor vanity to
go and despise the great, and the learned, and the sainted, because
forsooth we find them out in some one little weakness, we that are all
made up of weaknesses and defects. So, now, I sit me down in this very
chair: so. And sit you there. Now let us, you and me, look at his room
quietly, all over, and see what is wanting."
"First and foremost methinks this window should be filled with
geraniums; and jessamine; and so forth. With all his learning perhaps
he has to be taught, the colour of flowers and golden green leaves,
with the sun shining through, how it soothes the eye and relieves the
spirits; yet every woman born knows that. Then do but see this bare
table! a purple cloth on that, I say."
"Which he will fling it out of the window, I say."
"Nay: for I'll embroider a cross in the middle with gold braid. Then a
rose-coloured blind would not be amiss; and there must be a good mirror
facing the window; but indeed, if I had my way, I'd paint these horrid
walls the first thing."
"How you run on, dame! Bless your heart, you'd turn his den into a
palace: he won't suffer that; he is all for self-mortification, poor
simple soul."
"Oh, not all at once, I did not mean," said Mrs. Gaunt; "but by little
and little, you know. We must begin with the flowers: God made them;
and so to be sure he will not spurn _them._"
Betty began to enter into the plot. "Ay, ay," said she: "the flowers
first; and so creep on. But nought will avail to make a man of him so
long as he eats but of eggs and garden-stuff, like the beasts of the
field, 'that to-day are, and to-morrow are cast into the oven.'"
Mrs. Gaunt smiled at this ambitious attempt of the widow to apply
Scripture. Then she said, rather timidly, "Could you make his eggs into
omelets? and so pound in a little meat with your small herbs; I dare
say he would be none the wiser, and he so bent on high and heavenly
things."
"You may take your oath of that."
"Well, then. And I shall send you some stock from the castle, and you
can cook his vegetables in good strong gravy, unbeknown."
The widow Gough chuckled aloud.
"But stay," said Mrs. Gaunt; "for us to play the woman so, and delude a
saint for his mere bodily weal--will it not be a sin, and a sacrilege
to boot?"
"Let that flea stick in the wall," said Betty, contemptuously. "Find
you the meat, and I'll find the deceit: for he is as poor as a rat into
the bargain. Nay, nay, God Almighty will never have the heart to burn
us two for such a trifle. Why, 'tis no more than cheating a froward
child taking's physic."
Mrs. Gaunt got into her carriage and went home, thinking all the way.
What she had heard filled her with feelings strangely but sweetly
composed of veneration and pity. In that Leonard was a great orator and
a high-minded priest, she revered him; in that he was solitary and sad,
she pitied him; in that he wanted common sense, she felt like a mother,
and must take him under her wing. All true women love to protect;
perhaps it is a part of the great maternal element; but to protect a
man, and yet look up to him, this is delicious.
Leonard, in truth, was one of those high-strung men who pay for their
periods of religious rapture by hours of melancholy. This oscillation
of the spirits in extraordinary men appears to be more or less a law of
nature; and this the widow Gough was not aware of.
The very next Sunday, while he was preaching, she and Mrs. Gaunt's
gardener were filling his bow window with flowerpots, the flowers in
full bloom and leaf. The said window was large, and had a broad sill
outside, and, inside, one of the old fashioned high window-seats that
follow the shape of the window. Mrs. Gaunt, who did nothing by halves,
sent up a cartload of flowerpots, and Betty and the gardener arranged
at least eighty of them, small and great, inside and outside the window.
When Leonard returned from preaching, Betty was at the door to watch.
He came past the window with his hands on his breast, and his eyes on
the ground, and never saw the flowers in his own window. Betty was
disgusted. However, she followed him stealthily as he went to his room,
and she heard a profound "Ah!" burst from him.
She bustled in and found him standing in a rapture, with the blood
mantling in his pale cheeks, and his dark eyes glowing.
"Now blessed be the heart that hath conceived this thing, and the hand
that hath done it," said he. "My poor room it is a bower of roses,
all beauty and fragrance." And he sat down inhaling them, and looking
at them; and a dreamy, tender complacency crept over his heart, and
softened his noble features exquisitely.
Widow Gough, red with gratified pride, stood watching him, and admiring
him; but, indeed, she often admired him, though she had got into a way
of decrying him.
But at last she lost patience at his want of curiosity; that being a
defect she was free from herself. "Ye don't ask me who sent them," said
she, reproachfully.
"Nay, nay," said he; "prithee do not tell me: let me divine."
"Divine then," said Betty, roughly. "Which I suppose you means 'guess.'"
"Nay, but let me be quiet awhile," said he, imploringly; "let me sit
down and fancy that I am a holy man, and some angel hath turned my cave
into a Paradise."
"No more an angel than I am," said the practical widow. "But, now I
think on't, y'are not to know who 'twas. Them as sent them they bade me
hold my tongue."
This was not true; but Betty, being herself given to unwise revelations
and superfluous secresy, chose suddenly to assume that this business
was to be clandestine.
The priest turned his eye inwards and meditated. "I see who it is,"
said he, with an air of absolute conviction. "It must be the lady who
comes always when I preach, and her face like none other; it beams with
divine intelligence. I will make her all the return we poor priests
can make to our benefactors. I will pray for her soul here among the
flowers God has made, and she has given his servant to glorify his
dwelling. My daughter, you may retire."
This last with surprising, gentle dignity: so Betty went off
rather abashed, and avenged herself by adulterating the holy man's
innutritions food with Mrs. Gaunt's good gravy; while he prayed
fervently for her eternal weal among the flowers she had given him.
Now Mrs. Gaunt, after eight years of married life, was too sensible
and dignified a woman to make a romantic mystery out of nothing. She
concealed the gravy, because there secresy was necessary; but she never
dreamed of hiding that she had sent her spiritual adviser a load of
flowers. She did not tell her neighbors, for she was not ostentatious;
but she told her husband; who grunted, but did not object.
But Betty's nonsense lent an air of romance and mystery that was well
adapted to captivate the imagination of a young, ardent, and solitary
spirit like Leonard.
He would have called on the lady he suspected, and thanked her for her
kindness. But this he feared would be unwelcome, since she chose to be
his unknown benefactress. It would be ill taste in him to tell her he
had found her out: it might offend her sensibility, and then she would
draw in.
He kept his gratitude therefore to himself, and did not cool it by
utterance. He often sat among the flowers, in a sweet reverie, enjoying
their color and fragrance: and sometimes he would shut his eyes, and
call up the angelical face with great celestial up-turned orbs, and
fancy it among her own flowers, and the queen of them all.
These day-dreams did not at that time interfere with his religious
duties. They only took the place of those occasional hours, when,
partly by the reaction consequent on great religious fervour, partly
through exhaustion of the body weakened by fasts, partly by the natural
delicacy of his fibre, and the tenderness of his disposition, his soul
used to be sad.
By-and-by these languid hours, sad no longer, became sweet and dear to
him. He had something so interesting to think of, to dream about. He
had a Madonna that cared for him in secret.
She was human; but good, beautiful, and wise. She came to his sermons,
and understood every word.
"And she knows me better than I know myself," said he: "since I had
these flowers from her hand, I am another man."
One day he came into his room and found two watering pots there. One
was large and had a rose to it, the other small and with a plain spout.
"Ah!" said he; and colored with delight. He called Betty, and asked her
who had brought them.
"How should I know?" said she, roughly. "I dare say they dropped from
Heaven. See, there is a cross painted on 'em in gold letters."
"And so there is!" said Leonard, and crossed himself.
"That means nobody is to use them but you, I trow," said Betty, rather
crossly.
The priest's cheek coloured high. "I will use them this instant," said
he. "I will revive my drooping children, as they have revived me." And
he caught up a watering pot with ardour.
"What, with the sun hot upon 'em?" screamed Betty. "Well, saving your
presence, you are a simple man."
"Why, good Betty, 'tis the sun that makes them faint," objected the
priest, timidly, and with the utmost humility of manner, though Betty's
tone would have irritated a smaller mind.
"Well, well," said she, softening; "but ye see it never rains with a
hot sun, and the flowers they know that, and look to be watered after
Nature, or else they take it amiss. You, and all your sort, sir, you
think to be stronger than nature; you do fast and pray all day, and
won't look a woman in the face like other men; and now you wants to
water the very flowers at noon."
"Betty," said Leonard, smiling, "I yield to thy superior wisdom, and I
will water them at morn and eve. In truth we have all much to learn:
let us try and teach one another as kindly as we can."
"I wish you'd teach me to be as humble as you be," blurted out Betty,
with something very like a sob: "and more respectful to my betters,"
added she, angrily.
Watering the flowers she had given him became a solace and a delight to
the solitary priest: he always watered them with his own hands and felt
quite paternal over them.
One evening Mrs. Gaunt rode by with Griffith and saw him watering
them. His tall figure, graceful, though inclined to stoop, bent over
them with feminine delicacy, and the simple act, which would have been
nothing in vulgar hands, seemed to Mrs. Gaunt so earnest, tender, and
delicate in him, that her eyes filled, and she murmured, "Poor Brother
Leonard."
"Why, what's wrong with him now?" asked Griffith, a little peevishly.
"That was him watering his flowers."
"Oh, is that all?" said Griffith, carelessly.
Leonard said to himself, "I go too little abroad among my people." He
made a little round, and it ended in Hernshaw Castle.
Mrs. Gaunt was out.
He looked disappointed; so the servant suggested that perhaps she was
in the Dame's Haunt: he pointed to the grove.
Leonard followed his direction, and soon found himself, for the first
time, in that sombre, solemn retreat.
It was a hot summer day, and the grove was delicious. It was also a
place well suited to the imaginative and religious mind of the Italian.
He walked slowly to and fro, in religious meditation. Indeed he had
nearly thought out his next sermon, when his meditative eye happened to
fall on a terrestrial object that startled and thrilled him. Yet it was
only a lady's glove. It lay at the foot of a rude wooden seat beneath a
gigantic pine.
He stooped and picked it up. He opened the little fingers, and called
up in fancy the white and tapering hand that glove could lit. He laid
the glove softly on his own palm, and eyed it with dreamy tenderness.
"So this is the hand that hath solaced my loneliness," said he: "a hand
fair as that angelical face, and sweet as the kind heart that doeth
good by stealth."
Then, forgetting for a moment, as lofty spirits will, the difference
between meum and tuum, he put the little glove in his bosom, and paced
thoughtfully home through the woods, that were separated from the grove
only by one meadow: and so he missed the owner of the glove; for she
had returned home while he was meditating in her favourite haunt.
Leonard, amongst his other accomplishments, could draw and paint with
no mean skill. In one of those hours that used to be of melancholy,
but now were hours of dreamy complacency, he took out his pencils and
endeavoured to sketch the inspired face that he had learned to preach
to, and now to dwell on with gratitude.
Clearly as he saw it before him, he could not reproduce it to his own
satisfaction.
After many failures he got very near the mark: yet still something was
wanting.
Then, as a last resource, he actually took his sketch to church with
him, and in preaching made certain pauses, and, with a very few
touches, perfected the likeness; then, on his return home, threw
himself on his knees and prayed forgiveness of God with many sighs and
tears, and hid the sacrilegious drawing out of his own sight.
Two days after, he was at work colouring it; and the hours flew by like
minutes, as he laid the mellow, melting tints on with infinite care and
delicacy. Labor ipse voluptas.
Mrs. Gaunt heard Leonard had called on her in person. She was pleased
at that, and it encouraged her to carry out her whole design.
Accordingly, one afternoon when she knew Leonard would be at vespers,
she sent on a loaded pony-cart, and followed it on horseback.
Then it was all hurry scurry with Betty and her, to get their dark
deeds done before their victim's return.
These good creatures set the mirror opposite the flowery window, and so
made the room a very bower. They fixed a magnificent crucifix of ivory
and gold over the mantelpiece, and they took away his hassock of rashes
and substituted a prie-dieu of rich crimson velvet. All that remained
was to put their blue cover, with its golden cross, on the table. To do
this, however, they had to remove the priest's papers and things: they
were covered with a baize cloth. Mrs. Gaunt felt them under it.
"But perhaps he will be angry if we move his papers," said she.
"Not he," said Betty. "He has no secrets from God or man."
"Well, _I_ won't take it on me," said Mrs. Gaunt, merrily. "I leave
that to you." And she turned her back and settled the mirror,
officiously, leaving all the other responsibilities to Betty.
The sturdy widow laughed at her scruples, and whipped off the clot
without ceremony. But soon her laugh stopped mighty short, and she
uttered an exclamation.
"What is the matter?" said Mrs. Gaunt, turning her head sharply round.
"A wench's glove, as I'm a living sinner," groaned Betty.
A poor little glove lay on the table; and both women eyed it like
basilisks a moment. Then Betty pounced on it and examined it with the
fierce keenness of her sex in such conjunctures, searching for a name
or a clue.
Owing to this rapidity, Mrs. Gaunt, who stood at some distance, had not
time to observe the button on the glove, or she would have recognized
her own property.
"He have had a hussy with him unbeknown," said Betty, "and she have
left her glove. 'Tis easy to get in by the window and out again. Only
let me catch her. I'll tear her eyes out, and give him my mind. I'll
have no young hussies creeping in an' out where I be."
Thus spoke the simple woman, venting her coarse domestic jealousy.
The gentlewoman said nothing, but a strange feeling traversed her heart
for the first time in her life.
It was a little chill, it was a little ache, it was a little sense of
sickness; none of these violent, yet all distinct. And all about what?
After this curious, novel spasm at the heart, she began to be ashamed
of herself for having had such a feeling.
Betty held her out the glove: and then she recognized it, and turned as
red as fire.
"You know whose 'tis?" said Betty, keenly.
Mrs. Gaunt was on her guard in a moment. "Why, Betty," said she, "for
shame! 'tis some penitent hath left her glove after confession. Would
you belie a good man for that? Oh, lie!"
"Humph!" said Betty, doubtfully. "Then why keep it under cover? Now you
can read, dame; let us see if there isn't a letter or so writ by the
hand as owns this very glove."
Mrs. Gaunt declined, with cold dignity, to pry into Brother Leonard's
manuscripts.
Her eye, however, darted sidelong at them, and told another tale; and,
if she had been there alone, perhaps the daughter of Eve would have
predominated.
Betty, inflamed by the glove, rummaged the papers in search of female
handwriting. She could tell that from a man's, though she could not
read either.
But there is a handwriting that the most ignorant can read at sight;
and so Betty's researches were not in vain: hidden under several
sheets of paper, she found a picture. She gave but one glance at it,
and screamed out--"There, didn't I tell you? Here she is! the brazen,
red-haired--Lawk a daisy! why, 'tis yourself."