Old Creole Days: A Story of Creole Life
Page 5
CHAPTER V.
THE CAP FITS.
About two months after the conversation just given, and thereforesomewhere about the Christmas holidays of the year 1821, Pere Jeromedelighted the congregation of his little chapel with the announcementthat he had appointed to preach a sermon in French on the followingsabbath--not there, but in the cathedral.
He was much beloved. Notwithstanding that among the clergy there weretwo or three who shook their heads and raised their eyebrows, and saidhe would be at least as orthodox if he did not make quite so much of theBible and quite so little of the dogmas, yet "the common people heardhim gladly." When told, one day, of the unfavorable whispers, he smileda little and answered his informant,--whom he knew to be one of thewhisperers himself,--laying a hand kindly upon his shoulder:
"Father Murphy,"--or whatever the name was,--"your words comfort me."
"How is that?"
"Because--_'Voe quum benedixerint mihi homines!'_" [1]
[Footnote 1: "Woe unto me when all men speak well of me!"]
The appointed morning, when it came, was one of those exquisite days inwhich there is such a universal harmony, that worship rises from theheart like a spring.
"Truly," said Pere Jerome to the companion who was to assist him in themass, "this is a sabbath day which we do not have to make holy, but onlyto _keep_ so."
Maybe it was one of the secrets of Pere Jerome's success as a preacher,that he took more thought as to how he should feel, than as to what heshould say.
The cathedral of those days was called a very plain old pile, boastingneither beauty nor riches; but to Pere Jerome it was very lovely; andbefore its homely altar, not homely to him, in the performance of thosesolemn offices, symbols of heaven's mightiest truths, in the hearing ofthe organ's harmonies, and the yet more elegant interunion of humanvoices in the choir, in overlooking the worshipping throng which kneltunder the soft, chromatic lights, and in breathing the sacrificial odorsof the chancel, he found a deep and solemn joy; and yet I guess thefinest thought of his the while was one that came thrice and again:
"Be not deceived, Pere Jerome, because saintliness of feeling is easyhere; you are the same priest who overslept this morning, and over-ateyesterday, and will, in some way, easily go wrong to-morrow and the dayafter."
He took it with him when--the _Veni Creator_ sung--he went into thepulpit. Of the sermon he preached, tradition has preserved for us only afew brief sayings, but they are strong and sweet.
"My friends," he said,--this was near the beginning,--"the angry wordsof God's book are very merciful--they are meant to drive us home; butthe tender words, my friends, they are sometimes terrible! Notice these,the tenderest words of the tenderest prayer that ever came from the lipsof a blessed martyr--the dying words of the holy Saint Stephen, 'Lord,lay not this sin to their charge.' Is there nothing dreadful in that?Read it thus: 'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.' Not to thecharge of them who stoned him? To whose charge then? Go ask the holySaint Paul. Three years afterward, praying in the temple at Jerusalem,he answered that question: 'I stood by and consented.' He answered forhimself only; but the Day must come when all that wicked council thatsent Saint Stephen away to be stoned, and all that city of Jerusalem,must hold up the hand and say: 'We, also, Lord--we stood by.' Ah!friends, under the simpler meaning of that dying saint's prayer for thepardon of his murderers is hidden the terrible truth that we all have ashare in one another's sins."
Thus Pere Jerome touched his key-note. All that time has spared usbeside may be given in a few sentences.
"Ah!" he cried once, "if it were merely my own sins that I had to answerfor, I might hold up my head before the rest of mankind; but no, no, myfriends--we cannot look each other in the face, for each has helped theother to sin. Oh, where is there any room, in this world of commondisgrace, for pride? Even if we had no common hope, a common despairought to bind us together and forever silence the voice of scorn!"
And again, this:
"Even in the promise to Noe, not again to destroy the race with a flood,there is a whisper of solemn warning. The moral account of theantediluvians was closed off, and the balance brought down in the yearof the deluge; but the account of those who come after runs on and on,and the blessed bow of promise itself warns us that God will not stop ittill the Judgment Day! O God, I thank thee that that day must come atlast, when thou wilt destroy the world, and stop the interest on myaccount!"
It was about at this point that Pere Jerome noticed, more particularlythan he had done before, sitting among the worshippers near him, asmall, sad-faced woman, of pleasing features, but dark and faded, whogave him profound attention. With her was another in better dress,seemingly a girl still in her teens, though her face and neck werescrupulously concealed by a heavy veil, and her hands, which were small,by gloves.
"Quadroones," thought he, with a stir of deep pity.
Once, as he uttered some stirring word, he saw the mother and daughter(if such they were), while they still bent their gaze upon him, claspeach other's hand fervently in the daughter's lap. It was at thesewords:
"My friends, there are thousands of people in this city of New Orleansto whom society gives the ten commandments of God with all the _nots_rubbed out! Ah! good gentlemen! if God sends the poor weakling topurgatory for leaving the right path, where ought some of you to go whostrew it with thorns and briers!"
The movement of the pair was only seen because he watched for it. Heglanced that way again as he said:
"O God, be very gentle with those children who would be nearer heaventhis day had they never had a father and mother, but had got theirreligious training from such a sky and earth as we have in Louisianathis holy morning! Ah! my friends, nature is a big-print catechism!"
The mother and daughter leaned a little farther forward, and exchangedthe same spasmodic hand-pressure as before. The mother's eyes were fullof tears.
"I once knew a man," continued the little priest, glancing to a sideaisle where he had noticed Evariste and Jean sitting against each other,"who was carefully taught, from infancy to manhood, this single onlyprinciple of life: defiance. Not justice, not righteousness, not evengain; but defiance: defiance to God, defiance to man, defiance tonature, defiance to reason; defiance and defiance and defiance."
"He is going to tell it!" murmured Evariste to Jean.
"This man," continued Pere Jerome, "became a smuggler and at last apirate in the Gulf of Mexico. Lord, lay not that sin to his chargealone! But a strange thing followed. Being in command of men of a sortthat to control required to be kept at the austerest distance, he nowfound himself separated from the human world and thrown into the solemncompanionship with the sea, with the air, with the storm, the calm theheavens by day, the heavens by night. My friends, that was the firsttime in his life that he ever found himself in really good company.
"Now, this man had a great aptness for accounts. He had kept them--hadrendered them. There was beauty, to him, in a correct, balanced, andclosed account. An account unsatisfied was a deformity. The result isplain. That man, looking out night after night upon the grand and holyspectacle of the starry deep above and the watery deep below, was sureto find himself, sooner or later, mastered by the conviction that thegreat Author of this majestic creation keeps account of it; and onenight there came to him, like a spirit walking on the sea, the awful,silent question: 'My account with God--how does it stand?' Ah! friends,that is a question which the book of nature does not answer.
"Did I say the book of nature is a catechism? Yes. But, after it answersthe first question with 'God,' nothing but questions follow; and so, oneday, this man gave a ship full of merchandise for one little book whichanswered those questions. God help him to understand it! and God helpyou, monsieur, and you, madame, sitting here in your _smuggled clothes_,to beat upon the breast with me and cry, 'I, too, Lord--I, too, stood byand consented.'"
Pere Jerome had not intended these for his closing words; but justthere, straight away before his sight and almost a
t the farthest door, aman rose slowly from his seat and regarded him steadily with a kind,bronzed, sedate face, and the sermon, as if by a sign of command, wasended. While the Credo was being chanted he was still there; but when, amoment after its close, the eye of Pere Jerome returned in thatdirection, his place was empty.
As the little priest, his labor done and his vestments changed, wasturning into the Rue Royale and leaving the cathedral out of sight, hejust had time to understand that two women were purposely allowing himto overtake them, when the one nearer him spoke in the Creole _patois,_saying, with some timid haste:
"Good-morning, Pere--Pere Jerome; Pere Jerome, we thank the good God forthat sermon."
"Then, so do I," said the little man. They were the same two that he hadnoticed when he was preaching. The younger one bowed silently; she was abeautiful figure, but the slight effort of Pere Jerome's kind eyes tosee through the veil was vain. He would presently have passed on, butthe one who had spoken before said:
"I thought you lived in the Rue des Ursulines."
"Yes; but I am going this way to see a sick person."
The woman looked up at him with an expression of mingled confidence andtimidity.
"It must be a blessed thing to be so useful as to be needed by the goodGod," she said.
Pere Jerome smiled:
"God does not need me to look after his sick; but he allows me to do it,just as you let your little boy in frocks carry in chips." He might haveadded that he loved to do it, quite as much.
It was plain the woman had somewhat to ask, and was trying to getcourage to ask it.
"You have a little boy?" asked the priest.
"No, I have only my daughter;" she indicated the girl at her side. Thenshe began to say something else, stopped, and with much nervousnessasked:
"Pere Jerome, what was the name of that man?"
"His name?" said the priest. "You wish to know his name?"
"Yes, Monsieur" (or _Miche_, as she spoke it); "it was such a beautifulstory." The speaker's companion looked another way.
"His name," said Father Jerome,--"some say one name and some another.Some think it was Jean Lafitte, the famous; you have heard of him? Anddo you go to my church, Madame----?"
"No, Miche; not in the past; but from this time, yes. My name"--shechoked a little, and yet it evidently gave her pleasure to offer thismark of confidence--"is Madame Delphine--Delphine Carraze."