第82章

As for the blood, the Vulgate saith expressly it is the life of a man.' And in medicine or law, as in divinity, to be wiser than the All-wise is to be a fool.Moreover, simples are mighty.The little four-footed creature that kills the poisonous snake, if bitten herself, finds an herb powerful enough to quell that poison, though stronger and of swifter operation than any mortal malady;and we, taught by her wisdom, and our own traditions, still search and try the virtues of those plants the good God hath strewed this earth with, some to feed men's bodies, some to heal them.Only in desperate ills we mix heavenly with earthly virtue.We steep the hair or the bones of some dead saint in the medicine, and thus work marvellous cures.""Think you, father, it is along of the reliques? for Peter a Floris, a learned leech and no pagan, denies it stoutly,""What knows Peter a Floris? And what know I? I take not on me to say we can command the saints, and will they nill they, can draw corporal virtue from their blest remains.But I see that the patient drinking thus in faith is often bettered as by a charm.

Doubtless faith in the recipient is for much in all these cures.

But so 'twas ever.A sick woman, that all the Jewish leeches failed to cure, did but touch Christ's garment and was healed in a moment.Had she not touched that sacred piece of cloth she had never been healed.Had she without faith not touched it only, but worn it to her grave, I trow she had been none the better for't.

But we do ill to search these things too curiously.All we see around us calls for faith.Have then a little patience.We shall soon know all.Meantime, I, thy confessor for the nonce, do strictly forbid thee, on thy soul's health, to hearken learned lay folk on things religious.Arrogance is their bane; with it they shut heaven's open door in their own faces.Mind, I say, learned laics.Unlearned ones have often been my masters in humility, and may be thine.Thy wound is cared for; in three days 'twill be but a scar.And now God speed thee, and the saints make thee as good and as happy as thou art thoughtful and gracious." Gerard hoped there was no need to part yet, for he was to dine in the refectory.But Father Anselm told him, with a shade of regret just perceptible and no more, that he did not leave his cell this week, being himself in penitence; and with this he took Gerard's head delicately in both hands, and kissed him on the brow, and almost before the cell door had closed on him, was back to his pious offices.Gerard went away chilled to the heart by the isolation of the monastic life, and saddened too."Alas!" he thought, "here is a kind face I must never look to see again on earth; a kind voice gone from mine ear and my heart for ever.There is nothing but meeting and parting in this sorrowful world.Well-a-day!

well-a-day!" This pensive mood was interrupted by a young monk who came for him and took him to the refectory; there he found several monks seated at a table, and Denys standing like a poker, being examined as to the towns he should pass through: the friars then clubbed their knowledge, and marked out the route, noting all the religious houses on or near that road; and this they gave Gerard.

Then supper, and after it the old monk carried Gerard to his cell, and they had an eager chat, and the friar incidentally revealed the cause of his pantomime in the corridor."Ye had well-nigh fallen into Brother Jerome's clutches.Yon was his cell.""Is Father Jerome an ill man, then?"

"An ill man!" and the friar crossed himself; "a saint, an anchorite, the very pillar of this house! He had sent ye barefoot to Loretto.Nay, I forgot, y'are bound for Italy; the spiteful old saint upon earth, had sent ye to Canterbury or Compostella.But Jerome was born old and with a cowl; Anselm and I were boys once, and wicked beyond anything you can imagine" (Gerard wore a somewhat incredulous look): "this keeps us humble more or less, and makes us reasonably lenient to youth and hot blood."Then, at Gerard's earnest request, one more heavenly strain upon the psalterion, and so to bed, the troubled spirit calmed, and the sore heart soothed.

I have described in full this day, marked only by contrast, a day that came like oil on waves after so many passions and perils -because it must stand in this narrative as the representative of many such days which now succeeded to it.For our travellers on their weary way experienced that which most of my readers will find in the longer journey of life, viz., that stirring events are not evenly distributed over the whole road, but come by fits and starts, and as it were, in clusters.To some extent this may be because they draw one another by links more or less subtle.But there is more in it than that.It happens so.Life is an intermittent fever.Now all narrators, whether of history or fiction, are compelled to slur these barren portions of time or else line trunks.The practice, however, tends to give the unguarded reader a wrong arithmetical impression, which there is a particular reason for avoiding in these pages as far as possible.

I invite therefore your intelligence to my aid, and ask you to try and realize that, although there were no more vivid adventures for a long while, one day's march succeeded another; one monastery after another fed and lodged them gratis with a welcome always charitable, sometimes genial; and though they met no enemy but winter and rough weather, antagonists not always contemptible, yet they trudged over a much larger tract of territory than that, their passage through which I have described so minutely.And so the pair, Gerard bronzed in the face and travel-stained from head to foot, and Denys with his shoes in tatters, stiff and footsore both of them, drew near the Burgundian frontier.