The Greatest Novels of Charles Reade. Charles Reade Reade

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