“I had meant to warn you against him, Heloise. You know already?”
“I know that he says he has found a deed proving that Argenteuil is a priory of St. Denis: and that he is only waiting till his case is complete before he turns us out. He is collecting every story that he hears. And I am afraid some of them are true.”
“But what would become of you?”
She looked across the little strait to the black piles of turf and faggots on the deserted island. “Some of the sisters will go to other houses. Sometimes I think that perhaps the rest of us, the novices, and some of the old women, that knew Godric, might have a little house, away from Paris. A little thatched house. And dig our own garden and grow our own lettuce. And I could have hens. It would be no grief to me to leave Argenteuil.”
“Heloise, do you remember in that room yonder Bernard of Clairvaux said that some day you would be an Abbess—that some day he would call you sister?”
Heloise nodded, her face expressionless.
“‘Let you once give,’” went on Gilles musingly, “‘you give for eternity.’”
She smiled again, the old defiant smile.
“And I said, ‘But what if there is nothing left to give?’”
“Then . . . there is nothing, Heloise?”
“Nothing. How should there be? I took the veil, not for God’s sake, but for Abelard’s. What should I expect from God? I have done nothing for love of Him. If there is any merit in keeping vows once you have made them, in not being an open scandal to your profession, that perhaps I have. But it is a heathen virtue, that, not a Christian.”
“That is not the reputation you have, Heloise. The common people, and they are the best judges, say you are a saint. They say that there is no beggar comes to the gate at Argenteuil but leaves it blessing you: that they bring you wailing children, and they are quiet in your arms: they are wounded, and your hands make whole.”
She dropped her head in her hands and was silent for a while. “It is only the happy who are hard, Gilles. I think perhaps it is better for the world if—if one has a broken heart. One is quick to recognise it, elsewhere. And one has time to think about other people, if there is nothing left to hope for any more. Besides—if you saw them. Gilles, you do not know, I never knew, that such things could be. St. Paul once said that he could wish himself accursed for his own people. So I think could I—if I were not accursed already.”
Gilles looked at the bowed head. So vast a reverence swept upon his heart, that for a little while he could not speak. At last he found his voice, but the words came haltingly, strange words from him.
“Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee, or thirsty, and gave thee drink?”
She started, her head like a stag’s.
“No. No. You must not say that. It is not for me. But, Gilles, we are only wasting time. You know what I am here for. The children are only an excuse. Have you any news?”
Gilles nodded.
“Thibault was here yesterday. Child—I seem to be quoting Scripture freely to-day—do you remember ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you’?”
“Well?”
“You know he went to the woods at the Arduzon, to live in solitude. ‘I said, I will go softly all my days in the bitterness of my soul.’ Well, do not ask me to explain it to you, for these things are beyond my understanding. But the thing that happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus, and to St. Augustine, and to Isaiah in the year that King Uzziah died, has happened to him. He has seen God.”
Heloise sat silent, her eyes burning on his face.
“He came back, content only to worship. But he changed the name of the oratory he had built of reeds and thatch for the Holy Trinity, to a new name, the oratory of the Paraclete, the Comforter. Two days after a couple of lads on their way from Troyes to the schools here lost their way in the woods, and came to the hut asking shelter for the night, thinking it was a charcoal burner’s, and found him there. They came on the next day to Paris, with their news. And—you must have seen it for yourself, riding through this morning—the schools are empty. They have flocked to him from Paris and Orleans and Laon and Tours—aye, and Rheims. They have built themselves huts of turf and reeds like his own. They say it is a second Thebaid. He flung the world away—and behold he draws all men after him.”
Her eyes had widened, her lips parted. Gilles turned away his eyes. It was a glory, but the glory of the woman hearing praise of her lover.
“Gilles, have you a letter?”
He nodded. Then silently, he felt for it under the rug and handed it to her. She began reading half aloud.
“We are justified . . . in that by the life and death of His Son He has so bound us to Himself that love so kindled will shrink from nothing for His sake.” Her voice fell flat and dead.
Suddenly she thrust the letter from her into Gilles’ hand.
“Tell me, Gilles. It will be quicker. I cannot bear to read it. Does he speak of me?”
He looked down at the letter, twisting it in his hands.
“Not yet,” he said, very low.
She got up quickly and crossed the room to the window, that he might not see her agony. And standing there, struggling to control herself, she heard behind her a small stifled sound. She turned round. He had his face to the wall, but she could see the old Silenus mask distorted with soundless weeping, the hands opening and closing in impotent despair. She was on her knees beside him now, pressing his hands to her lips, her chin, her cheek.
“Don’t, Gilles. Beloved, you must not. You must not. Dear Gilles, it was only for a moment. It is over now. It does not hurt, now.” Suddenly she stopped and gazed at him, something like bewilderment in her eyes, and almost a catch of laughter in her voice. “Gilles, did you hear what I said? I only said it to comfort you. But it has come true. I can bear it now, because—because of you.”
He was silent for a while, rubbing his eyes with his sleeve.
“Is that true, Heloise?”
“It is true. Though why it should be—why you must break your heart to comfort mine——”
He looked up, the old speculative gleam kindling in his eyes.
“‘Cuius dolore plaga nostra curata est: et lapsus nostros aliena ruina suscepit.’ I read it, fifty years ago, in an old missal at Bobbio. They say St. Columban wrote it. They never use it now. ‘By whose grief our wound was healed: by whose ruin our fall was stayed.’ I wonder. Is that what men have asked of God?”
THE END
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Helen Waddell
Helen Waddell was born in Japan in 1889, the youngest of ten children. The family returned to Ireland where she graduated brilliantly from Queen’s University Belfast. Thwarted from pursuing a promising academic career by duty to her ailing stepmother, at thirty-one she went to Oxford University to undertake a PhD, moving to Paris to continue her research into the humanism of the Latin Middle Ages, published in 1927 as The Wandering Scholars. While working for a London publishing company she wrote Peter Abelard which was one of the biggest selling books of the 1930s and Waddell was propelled into literary stardom. She died in London in 1965.
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Bello
hidden talent rediscovered
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First published 1933 by Constable and Company Ltd
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Peter Abelard Page 24
