“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.
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 imaginationto realize the effect on poor people who had never seen thembefore of such sentences as this“Blessed are the poor” etc.(2) The primitive writer was so interpreted by othersbesides Clement; and in particular by Peter of Blois, adivine of the twelfth century, whose comment is noteworthy,as he himself was a forty-year hermit.
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 gratiaQuae tu creasti pectoraAccende 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.