CHAPTER XCV
ONE day as he lay there sighing, and groaning, prayerless, tuneless,hopeless, a thought flashed into his mind. What he had done for the poorand the wayfarer, he would do for himself. He would fill his den ofdespair with the name of God and the magic words of holy writ, and thepious, prayerful, consolations of the Church.
Then, like Christian at Apollyon's feet, he reached his hand suddenlyout and caught, not his sword, for he had none, but peaceful labour'shumbler weapon, his chisel, and worked with it as if his soul dependedon his arm.
They say that Michael Angelo in the next generation used to carvestatues, 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 marblechips fly like mad about him, and the mass sprout into form. Even soClement drew no lines to guide his hand. He went to his memory for thegracious words, and then dashed at his work and eagerly graved them inthe 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 atnight the cave glowed afar off like a blacksmith's forge, through thewindow and the gaping chinks of the rude stone door, and the rusticsbeholding crossed themselves and suspected deviltries, and, within, theholy talismans one after another came upon the walls, and the sparks andthe chips flew day and night, night and day, as the soldier of Solitudeand of the Church plied, with sighs and groans, his bloodless weapon,between working and fighting.
_Kyrie Eleeison_ _Christe Eleeison_
[Greek: Ton Satanan syntripson hypo tous podas hemon.][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._[6]
_Libera nos Domine Deus, qui miro ordine Angelorum ministeria, etc._ (the whole collect).[7]
_Quem quaerimus adjutorem nisi te Domine, qui pro peccatis nostris justeirascaris?_[8]
_Sancte Deus, Sancte fortis, Sancte et misericors Salvator, amarae mortine tradas nos._
And underneath the great crucifix, which was fastened to the wall, hegraved this from Augustine:--
_O anima Christiana, respice vulnera patientis, sanguinem morientis,pretium redemptionis.--Haec quanta sint cogitate, et in statera mentisvestrae appendite, ut totus vobis figatur in corde, qui pro vobis totusfirus est in cruce. Nam, si passio Christi ad memoriam revocetur, nihilest 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 ofthe dying One, the price paid for our redemption! These things, oh thinkhow great they be, and weigh them in the balance of thy mind: that Hemay be wholly nailed to thy heart, who for thee was all nailed unto thecross. For do but call to mind the sufferings of Christ, and there isnought on earth too hard to endure with composure._
Soothed a little, a very little, by the sweet and pious words he wasraising all round him, and weighed down with watching and working nightand day, Clement one morning sank prostrate with fatigue; and a deepsleep 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 lone stool near his feet, ruffling allhis feathers with a single pull, and smoothing them as suddenly, andcocking his bill this way and that with a vast display of cunning purelyimaginary, 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 onvertical wires, he was on the hermit's bare foot. On this eminence heswelled, and contracted again, with ebb and flow of feathers; butClement lost this, for he quite closed his eyes and scarce drew hisbreath in fear of frightening and losing his visitor. He was content tofeel the minute claw on his foot. He could but just feel it, and that byhelp of knowing it was there.
Presently a little flirt with two little wings, and the featheredbusy-body was on the breviary again.
Then Clement determined to try and feed this pretty little fidgetwithout frightening it away. But it was very difficult. He had a pieceof bread within reach, but how get at it? I think he was five minutescreeping his hand up to that bread, and when there he must not move hisarm.
He slily got a crumb between a finger and thumb and shot it as boys domarbles, 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 upone of the crumbs, but not quite understanding this mystery fled withit, for more security, to an eminence; to wit the hermit's knee.
And so the game proceeded till a much larger fragment than usual rolledalong.
Here was a prize. Cockrobin pounced on it, bore it aloft and fled soswiftly into the world with it, the cave resounded with the buffetedair.
"Now, bless thee, sweet bird," sighed the stricken solitary; "thy wingsare 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 ofcourage; and this was his day's work:--
_Veni Creator Spiritus Mentes tuorum visita Imple superna gratia Quae tu creasti pectora_
_Accende lumen sensibus Mentes tuorum visita Infirma nostri corporis Virtute firmans perpetim._
And so the days rolled on; and the weather got colder and Clement'sheart 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 ofpraise. Hosts of little birds followed their crimson leader, and flyingfrom snow, and a parish full of Cains, made friends one after anotherwith Abel; fast friends. And one keen frosty night as he sang thepraises of God to his tuneful psaltery, and his hollow cave rang forththe holy psalmody upon the night, as if that cave itself was Tubal'ssounding shell, or David's harp, he heard a clear whine, notunmelodious; it became louder and less in tune. He peeped through thechinks of his rude door, and there sat a great red wolf moaningmelodiously with his nose high in the air.
Clement was rejoiced. "My sins are going," he cried, "and the creaturesof God are owning me, one after another." And in a burst of enthusiasmhe struck up the laud:
"Praise Him all ye creatures of His! Let everything that hath breathpraise 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 celestialintercourse, which was the sign, and the bliss of the true hermit; forhe had dreams about the saints and angels, so vivid, they were more likevisions. He saw bright figures clad in woven snow. They bent on him eyeslovelier than those of the antelopes he had seen at Rome, and fannedhim with broad wings hued like the rainbow, and their gentle voices badehim speed upon his course.
He had not long enjoyed this felicity, when his dreams began to takeanother and a strange complexion. He wandered with Fra Colonna over therelics of antique nations, and the friar was lame and had a staff, andthis staff he waved over the mighty ruins, and were they Egyptian,Greek, or Roman, straightway the temples and palaces whose wrecks theywere, rose again like an exhalation, and were thronged with the famousdead. Songsters that might have eclipsed both
Apollo and his rival,poured forth their lays; women, godlike in form, and draped likeMinerva, swam round the marble courts in voluptuous but easy andgraceful dances. Here sculptors carved away amidst admiring pupils, andforms of supernatural beauty grew out of Parian marble in a quarter ofan hour; and grave philosophers conversed on high and subtle matters,with youth listening reverently; it was a long time ago. And stillbeneath all this wonderful panorama a sort of suspicion or expectationlurked in the dreamer's mind. "This is a prologue, a flourish, there issomething behind; something that means me no good, something mysterious,awful."
And one night that the wizard Colonna had transcended himself, hepointed with his stick, and there was a swallowing up of many greatancient cities, and the pair stood on a vast sandy plain with a hugecrimson sun sinking to rest. There were great palm-trees; and there werebulrush hives, scarce a man's height, dotted all about to the sandyhorizon, 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 ofthe Greek pupils of the Egyptian pupils of the Brachmans andGymnosophists."
And Clement thought that he burned to go and embrace the holy men andtell them his troubles, and seek their advice. But he was tied by thefeet somehow, and could not move, and the crimson sun sank; and it gotdusk, and the hives scarce visible. And Colonna's figure became shadowyand shapeless, but his eyes glowed ten times brighter: and this thingall eyes spoke and said: "Nay, let them be, a pack of fools! see howdismal it all is." Then with a sudden sprightliness, "But I hear one ofthem has a manuscript of Petronius, on papyrus; I go to buy it, farewellfor ever, for ever, for ever."
And it was pitch dark, and a light came at Clement's back like a gentlestroke; a glorious roseate light. It warmed as well as brightened. Itloosened his feet from the ground; he turned round, and there, her faceirradiated with sunshine, and her hair glittering like the gloriola of asaint, 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 bemine!"
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 nightlykeynote.
Awake he could pray, and praise, and worship God; he was master of histhoughts. But, if he closed his eyes in sleep, Margaret, or Satan in hershape, beset him, a seeming angel of light. He might dream of a thousanddifferent things, wide as the poles asunder, ere he woke the imperialfigure was sure to come and extinguish all the rest in a moment stellasexortus uti aetherius sol: for she came glowing with two beauties neverbefore 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 lastartifice. From Anthony to Nicholas of the Rock scarce a hermit that hadnot been thus beset; sometimes with gay voluptuous visions, sometimeswith lovely phantoms, warm, tangible, and womanly without, demonswithin, nor always baffled even by the saints. Witness that "angel formwith a devil's heart," that came hanging its lovely head, like a bruisedflower, to St. Macarius, with a feigned tale; and wept, and wept, andwept, 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 copiousrecords of the hermits' triumphs and the weapons by which they hadconquered.
Domandum est corpus; the body must be tamed; this had been theirwatchword for twelve hundred years. It was a tremendous war-cry; forthey called the earthly affections, as well as appetites, body; andcrushed the whole heart through the suffering and mortified flesh.
Clement then said to himself that the great enemy of man had retired butto spring with more effect, and had allowed him a few days of truepurity and joy only to put him off his guard against the softblandishments he was pouring over the soul, that had survived thebuffeting of his black wings. He applied himself to tame the body; heshortened his sleep, lengthened his prayers, and increased his severetemperance to abstinence. Hitherto, following the ordinary rule, he hadeaten only at sunset. Now he ate but once in forty-eight hours, drinkinga little water every day.
On this the visions became more distinct.
* * * * *
Then he flew to a famous antidote; to "the grand febrifuge" ofanchorites--cold water.
He found the deepest part of the stream that ran by his cell; it rosenot far off at a holy well; and, clearing the bottom of the largestones, 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 nextdiabolical 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 fireeternal."
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 verybones were like so many raging teeth, till the phantom he dreaded cameand 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 himselftill the blood ran, and so lay down smarting.
And when exhaustion began to blunt the smart down to a throb, thatmoment the present was away, and the past came smiling back. He sat withMargaret at the duke's feast, the minstrels played divinely, and thepurple fountains gushed. Youth and love reigned in each heart, andperfumed the very air.
Then the scene shifted and they stood at the altar together man andwife. And no interruption this time, and they wandered hand in hand, andtold each other their horrible dreams. As for him "he had dreamed shewas dead, and he was a monk; and really the dream had been so vivid andso full of particulars that only his eyesight could even now convincehim it was only a dream, and they were really one."
And this new keynote once struck, every tune ran upon it. Awake he wasClement the hermit, risen from unearthly visions of the night, asdangerous as they were sweet; asleep he was Gerard Eliassoen, the happyhusband of the loveliest and best, and truest girl in Holland: all thehappier that he had been for some time the sport of hideous dreams, inwhich he had lost her.
His constant fasts, coupled with other austerities, and the deep mentalanxiety of a man fighting with a supernatural foe, had now reduced himnearly to a skeleton; but still on those aching bones hung fleshunsubdued, 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 afeeling of complacency, because now Margaret would come and he shouldfeel 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 skinclimbed 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 amass 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 fatalspell. Yes, it was broken; another and another day passed, and her imagemolested him no more. But he caught himself sighing at his victory.
The birds got tamer and tamer, they perched upon his hand. Two of themlet him gild their little claws. Eating but once in two days he had moreto give them.
His tranquillity was not to last long.
A woman's voice came in from the outside, told him his own story in avery 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 deadto the world. And he sat wondering.
When the woman was gone, he determined, after an inward battle, to riskbeing seen, and he peeped a
fter her to see who it could be: but he tookso many precautions, and she ran so quickly back to her friend that theroad was clear.
"Satan!" said he, directly.
And that night back came his visions of earthly love and happiness sovividly, he could count every auburn hair in Margaret's head, and seethe pupils of her eyes.
Then he began to despair, and said, "I must leave this country; here Iam 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 wordsof their virtue." And unconsciously imitating St. Jerome, a victim ofearthly hallucinations, as overpowering, and coarser, he took hiswarmest covering out into the wood hard by, and there flung down under atree that torn and wrinkled leather bag of bones, which a little agomight have served a sculptor for Apollo.
Whether the fever of his imagination intermitted, as a master mind ofour day has shown that all things intermit,[G] or that this really brokesome 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-woolpelisse and cape, warm, soft, and ample.
He had a moment's misgiving on account of its delicious softness andwarmth; but that passed. It was the right skin,[H] and a mark thatHeaven 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 toit; at another, he said to himself, "'Tis but another lull; be on thyguard, 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 thousandtimes larger as well as brighter than earth, and to look with a thousandeyes instead of one.
"Oh, wonderful," he cried, "that there should be men who do crimes bynight; and others scarce less mad, who live for this little world, andnot for that great and glorious one, which nightly, to all eyes notblinded by custom, reveals its glowing glories. Thank God I am ahermit."
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 abreath of wind. What means this?"
He stood with his hand upon the rugged door. He looked through one ofthe great chinks, for it was much smaller in places than the aperture itpretended to close, and saw his little oil wick burning just where hehad 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 myhappy soul. Retro Sathanas!"
And he entered his cave rapidly, and began with somewhat nervousexpedition 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 wentout.
He stooped for it hurriedly and lighted it, listening intently. When itwas lighted he shaded it with his hand from behind, and threw the faintlight 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 figureof a woman.
Another step with his knees knocking together.
IT WAS MARGARET BRANDT.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Beat down Satan under our feet.
[2] Up, Hearts!
[3] Oh God our refuge and strength.
[4] Oh! Lamb of God, that takest away the Sins of the world, have mercyupon me!
[5] Oh! Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy upon us.
[6] From the assaults of demons--from the wrath to come--fromeverlasting damnation--
Deliver us O Lord!
[7] See the English collect, St. Michael and all Angels.
[8] Of whom may we seek succour, but of thee, Oh Lord, who for our sinsart justly displeased (and that torrent of prayer, the following verse).
[G] Dr. Dickson, author of _Fallacies of the Faculty_, etc.
[H] It is related of a mediaeval hermit, that being offered a garmentmade of cats' skins, he rejected it, saying, "I have heard of a lamb ofGod, but I never heard of a cat of God."
The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages Page 97
