Read Ebook: The Master-Christian by Corelli Marie

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Ebook has 3435 lines and 220185 words, and 69 pages

Something like a faint grin widened the mouths of Henri and Babette at this statement made with so much distressed fervour by their angry mother,--but the Cardinal did not smile. His face had grown very pale and grave, almost stern.

"The children are quite right, my daughter," he said gently,--"I am no saint! I have performed no miracles. I am a poor sinner,--striving to do well, but alas!--for ever striving in vain. The days of noble living are past,--and we are all too much fallen in the ways of error to deserve that our Lord should bless the too often half-hearted and grudging labour of his so-called servants. Come here, ma mignonne!" he continued, calling Babette, who approached him with a curious air of half-timid boldness--"Thou art but a very little girl," he said, laying his thin white hand softly on her tumbled brown curls--"Nevertheless, I should be a very foolish old man if I despised thee, or thy thoughts, or thy desire to know the truth for truth's sake. Therefore to-morrow thou shalt bring me this afflicted friend of thine, and though I have no divine gifts, I will do even as the Master commanded,--I will lay my hands on him in blessing and pray that he may be healed. More than this is not in my power, my child!--if a miracle is to be worked, it is our dear Lord only who can work it."

Gently he murmured his formal benediction,--then, turning away, he entered his own room and shut the door. Babette, grown strangely serious, turned to her brother and held out her hand, moved by one of those erratic impulses which often take sudden possession of self-willed children.

"Come into the Cathedral!" she whispered imperatively--"Come and say an Ave."

Not a word did the usually glib Henri vouchsafe in answer,--but clutching his sister's fingers in his own dirty, horny palm, he trotted meekly beside her out of the house and across the Square into the silence and darkness of Notre Dame. Their mother watched their little plump figures disappear with a feeling of mingled amazement and gratitude,--miracles were surely beginning, she thought, if a few words from the Cardinal could impress Babette and Henri with an idea of the necessity of prayer!

They were not long gone, however;--they came walking back together, still demurely hand in hand, and settled themselves quietly in a corner to study their tasks for the next day. Babette's doll, once attired as a fashionable Parisienne, and now degenerated into a one-eyed laundress with a rather soiled cap and apron, stuck out its composite arms in vain from the bench where it sat all askew, drooping its head forlornly over a dustpan,--and Henri's drum, wherewith he was wont to wake alarming echoes out of the dreamy and historical streets of Rouen, lay on its side neglected and ingloriously silent. And, as before said, peace reigned in the Patoux household,--even the entrance of Papa Patoux himself, fresh from his celery beds, and smelling of the earth earthy, created no particular diversion. He was a very little, very cheery, round man, was Papa Patoux; he had no ideas at all in his bullet head save that he judged everything to be very well managed in the Universe, and that he, considered simply as Patoux, was lucky in his life and labours,--also that it was an easy thing to grow celery, provided God's blessing was on the soil. For the rest, he took small care; he knew that the world wagged in different ways in different climates,--he read his half-penny journal daily, and professed to be interested in the political situation just for the fun of the thing, but in reality he thought the French Senate a pack of fools, and wondered what they meant by always talking so much about nothing. He believed in "La Patrie" to a certain extent,--but he would have very much objected if "La Patrie" had interfered with his celery. Roughly sneaking, he understood that France was a nation, and that he was a Frenchman; and that if any enemies should presume to come into the country, it would be necessary to take up a musket and fight them out again, and defend wife, children, and celery-beds till the last breath was out of his body. Further than this simple and primitive idea of patriotism he did not go. He never bothered himself about dissentient shades of opinion, or quarrels among opposing parties. When he had to send his children to the Government school, the first thing he asked was whether they would be taught their religion there. He was told no,--that the Government objected to religious teaching, as it merely created discussion and was of no assistance whatever in the material business of life. Patoux scratched his head over this for a considerable time and ruminated deeply,--finally he smiled, a dull fat smile.

"Good!" said he--"I understand now why the Government makes such an ass of itself now and then! You cannot expect mere men to do their duty wisely without God on their side. But Pere Laurent will teach my children their prayers and catechism,--and I dare say Heaven will arrange the rest."

And he forthwith dismissed the matter from his mind. His children attended the Government school daily,--and every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons Pere Laurent, a kindly, simple-hearted old priest, took them, with several other little creatures "educated by the State", and taught them all he knew about the great France-exiled Creator of the Universe, and of His ceaseless love to sinful and blasphemous mankind.

So things went on;--and though Henri and Babette were being crammed by the national system of instruction, with learning which was destined to be of very slight use to them in their after careers, and which made them little cynics before their time, they were still sustained within bounds by the saving sense of something better than themselves,--that Something Better which silently declares itself in the beauty of the skies, the blossoming of the flowers, and the loveliness of all things wherein man has no part,--and neither of them was yet transformed into that most fearsome product of modern days, the child-Atheist, for whom there is no greater God than Self.

On this particular night when Papa Patoux returned to the bosom of his family, he, though a dull-witted man generally, did not fail to note the dove-like spirit of calm that reigned over his entire household. His wife's fat face was agreeably placid,--the children were in an orderly mood, and as he sat down to the neatly spread supper-table, he felt more convinced than ever that things were exceedingly well managed for him in this best of all possible worlds. Pausing in the act of conveying a large spoonful of steaming soup to his mouth he enquired--

"And Monseigneur, the Cardinal Bonpre,--has he also been served?"

Madame Patoux opened her round eyes wide at him.

"But certainly! Dost thou think, my little cabbage, thou wouldst get thy food before Monseigneur? That would be strange indeed!"

Papa Patoux swallowed his ladleful of soup in abashed silence.

"It was a beautiful day in the fields," he presently observed--"There was a good smell in the earth, as if violets were growing,--and late in the autumn though it is, there was a skylark yet singing. It was a very blue heaven, too, as blue as the robe of the Virgin, with clouds as white as little angels clinging to it."

Madame nodded. Some people might have thought Papa Patoux inclined to be poetical,--she did not. Henri and Babette listened.

"The robe of Our Lady is always blue," said Babette.

"And the angels' clothes are always white," added Henri.

Madame Patoux said nothing, but passed a second helping of soup all round. Papa Patoux smiled blandly on his offspring.

"Just so," he averred--"Blue and white are the colours of the sky, my little ones,--and Our Lady and the angels live in the sky!"

"I wonder where?" muttered Henri with his mouth half full. "The sky is nothing but miles and miles of air, and in the air there are millions and millions of planets turning round and round, larger than our world,--ever so much larger,--and nobody knows which is the largest of them all!"

"It is as thou sayest, my son," said Patoux confidently--"Nobody knows which is the largest of them all, but whichever it may be, that largest of them all belongs to Our Lady and the angels."

Henri looked at Babette, but Babette was munching watercress busily, and did not return his enquiring glances. Papa Patoux, quite satisfied with his own reasoning, continued his supper in an amiable state of mind.

"What didst thou serve to Monseigneur, my little one?" he asked his wife with a coaxing and caressing air, as though she were some delicate and dainty sylph of the woodlands, instead of being the lady of massive proportions which she undoubtedly was,--"Something of delicacy and fine flavour, doubtless?"

Madame Patoux shook her head despondingly.

"He would have nothing of that kind," she replied--"Soup maigre, and afterwards nothing but bread, dried figs, and apples to finish. Ah, Heaven! What a supper for a Cardinal-Archbishop! It is enough to make one weep!"

Patoux considered the matter solemnly.

"He is perhaps very poor?" he half queried.

"Poor, he may be," responded Madame,--"But if he is, it is surely his own fault,--whoever heard of a poor Cardinal-Archbishop! Such men can all be rich if they choose."

"Can they?" asked Henri with sudden vivacious eagerness. "How?"

But his question was not answered, for just at that moment a loud knock came at the door of the inn, and a tall broadly built personage in close canonical attire appeared in the narrow little passage of entry, attended by another smaller and very much more insignificant-looking individual.

Patoux hastily scrambled out of his chair.

"The Archbishop!" he whispered to his wife--"He himself! Our own Archbishop!"

Madame Patoux jumped up, and seizing her children, held one in each hand as she curtsied up and down.

"Benedicite!" said the new-comer, lightly signing the cross in air with a sociable smile--"Do not disturb yourselves, my children! You have with you in this house the eminent Cardinal Bonpre?"

"Ah, yes, Monseigneur!" replied Madame Patoux--"Only just now he has finished his little supper. Shall I show Monseigneur to his room?"

"If you please," returned the Archbishop, still smiling benevolently--"And permit my secretary to wait with you here till I return."

With this, and an introductory wave of his hand in the direction of the attenuated and sallow-faced personage who had accompanied him, he graciously permitted Madame Patoux to humbly precede him by a few steps, and then followed her with a soft, even tread, and a sound as of rustling silk in his garments, from which a faint odour of some delicate perfume seemed wafted as he moved.

Left to entertain the Archbishop's secretary, Jean Patoux was for a minute or two somewhat embarrassed. Henri and Babette stared at the stranger with undisguised curiosity, and were apparently not favourably impressed by his appearance.

"He has white eyelashes!" whispered Henri.

"And yellow teeth," responded Babette.

Meanwhile Patoux, having scratched his bullet-head sufficiently over the matter, offered his visitor a chair.

"Sit down, sir," he said curtly.

The secretary smiled pallidly and took the proffered accommodation. Patoux again meditated. He was not skilled in the art of polite conversation, and he found himself singularly at a loss.

"It would be an objection no doubt, and an irreverance perhaps to smoke a pipe before you, Monsieur--Monsieur--"

"Cazeau," finished the secretary with another pallid smile--"Claude Cazeau, a poor scribe,--at your service! And I beg of you, Monsieur Jean Patoux, to smoke at your distinguished convenience!"

There was a faint tone of satire in his voice which struck Papa Patoux as exceedingly disagreeable, though he could not quite imagine why he found it so. He slowly reached for his pipe from the projecting shelf above the chimney, and as slowly proceeded to fill it with tobacco from a tin cannister close by.

"I do not think I have ever seen you in the town, Monsieur Cazeau," he said--"Nor at Mass in the Cathedral either?"

"No?" responded Cazeau easily, in a half-querying tone--"I do not much frequent the streets; and I only attend the first early mass on Sundays. My work for Monseigneur occupies my whole time."

"Ah!" and Patoux, having stuffed his pipe sufficiently, lit it, and proceeded to smoke peaceably--"There must be much to do. Many poor and sick who need money, and clothes, and help in every way,--and to try and do good, and give comfort to all the unhappy souls in Rouen is a hard task, even for an Archbishop."

Cazeau linked his thin hands together with an action of pious fervour and assented.

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