CHAPTER XVII
‘HYLAS, THE MOCKING SHEPHERD’
She reached home eager to tell them all about her visit.
Her father and Jacques were playing at spillikins and her mother was spinning.
‘She is a marvellous personage,’ she cried out, ‘her sanctity is almost corporeal and subject to sense. And she has the most fragrant humility, she talked of herself as though there were no more froward and wicked creature on the earth than she!’
‘Maybe there is not!’ said Jacques, and Monsieur Troqueville chuckled delightedly. Madeleine flushed and her lips grew tight.
‘Do not be foolish, Jacques. The whole world acknowledges her to be an exceeding pious and holy woman,’ said Madame Troqueville, with a warning glance at Jacques, which seemed to say: ‘In the name of Heaven, forbear! This new vision of the child’s is tenfold less harmful and fantastical than the other.’
Madeleine watched Jacques grimacing triumphantly at her father as he deftly extricated spillikin after spillikin. He was entirely absorbed in the idiotic game. How could one be serious and holy with such a frivolous companion?
‘Pray tell us more of Mère Agnès, my sweet. What were her opening words?’ said Madame Troqueville, trying to win Madeleine back to good humour, but Madeleine’s only answer was a cold shrug.
For one thing, without her permission they were playing with her spillikins. She had a good mind to snatch them away from them! And how dare Jacques be so at home in her house? He said he was in love with her, did he? Yet her entry into the room did not for one moment distract his attention from spillikins.
‘Yes, tell us more of her Christian humility,’ said Jacques, as he drew away the penultimate spillikin. ‘I’ll fleece you of two crowns for that,’ he added in an aside to Monsieur Troqueville.
‘They are all alike in that,’ he went on, ‘humility is part of their inheritance from the early Christians, who, being Jews and slaves and such vermin, had needs be humble except they wished to be crucified by the Romans for impudence. And though their creeping homilies have never ousted the fine old Roman virtue pride, yet pious Christians do still affect humility, and ’tis a stinking pander to——’
‘Jacques, Jacques,’ expostulated Madame Troqueville, and Monsieur Troqueville, shaking his head, and blowing out his cheeks, said severely:—
‘Curb your tongue, my boy! You do but show your ignorance. Humility is a most excellent virtue, if it were not, then why was it preached by Our Lord? Resolve me in that!’ and he glared triumphantly at Jacques.
‘Why, uncle, when you consider the base origin of——’
‘Jacques, I beseech you, no more!’ interposed Madame Troqueville, very gently but very firmly, so Jacques finished his sentence in a comic grimace.
After a pause, he remarked, ‘Chapuzeau retailed to me the other day a naïveté he had heard in a monk’s Easter sermon. The monk had said that inasmuch as near all the most august events in the Scriptures had had a mountain for their setting, it followed that no one could lead a truly holy life in a valley, and from this premise he deduced——’
‘In that naïveté there is a spice of truth,’ Monsieur Troqueville cut in, in a serious, interested voice. ‘I mind me, when I was a young man, I went to the Pyrenees, where my spirit was much vexed by the sense of my own sinfulness.’
‘I’ faith, it must have been but hypochondria, there can have been no true cause for remorse,’ said Jacques innocently.
Monsieur Troqueville looked at him suspiciously, cleared his throat, and went on: ‘I mind me, I would pass whole nights in tears and prayer, until at last there was revealed to me a strange and excellent truth, to wit, that the spirit is immune against the sins of the flesh. To apprehend this truth is a certain balm to the conscience, and, as I said, ’twas on a mountain that it was revealed to me,’ and he looked round with solemn triumph.
Madame Troqueville and Madeleine exchanged glances of unutterable contempt and boredom, but Jacques wagged his head and said gravely that it was a mighty convenient truth.
‘Ay, is it not? Is it not?’ cried Monsieur Troqueville, his eyes almost starting out of his head with eagerness, triumph, and hope of further praise. ‘Many a time and oft have I drawn comfort from it.’
‘I have ever held you to be a Saint Augustin manqué, uncle. When you have leisure, you would do well to write your confessions—they would afford most excellent and edifying reading,’ and Jacques’s eyes as he said this were glittering slits of wickedness.
After supper the two, mumbling some excuse about an engagement to friends, put on their cloaks and went out, and Madeleine, wishing to be alone with her thoughts, went to her own room.
She recalled Mère Agnès’s words, and, as they had lain an hour or so dormant in her mind, they came out tinted with the colour of her desires. Why, what was her exhortation to see behind the ‘particulars’ of the Gospels the ‘generals’ of Eternity, but a vindication of Madeleine’s own method of sanctifying her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry by regarding it as a symbol of her love of Christ? Yes, Mère Agnès had implicitly advised the making of a Robert Pilou screen. Profane history told by means of sacred woodcuts becomes sacred history, was, in Mère Agnès’s words, to read history ‘with the apocalyptic eye of Saint John,’ it was to see ‘generals’ behind ‘particulars.’
But supposing ... supposing the ‘generals’ should come crashing through the ‘particulars,’ like a river in spate that bursts its dam? And supposing God were to relieve her of her labour? In the beginning of time, He—the Dürer of the skies—on cubes of wood, hewn from the seven trees of Paradise, had cut in pitiless relief the story of the human soul. The human soul, pursuing a desire that ever evades its grasp, while behind it, swift, ineluctable, speed ‘invisible things,’ their hands stretched out to seize it by the hair.
What if from the design cut on these cubes he were to engrave the pictures of her life, that, gummed with holy resin on the screen of the heavens, they might show forth to men in ‘particulars proportioned to their finite minds,’ the ‘generals’ cut by the finger of God?
Mère Agnès had said: ‘I was wont to struggle against my love for Him with an eagerness as great as that with which I do now pursue Him. And I think, dear child, ’twill fall out thus with you.’ ‘Who flees, she shall pursue; who spurns gifts, she shall offer them; who loves not, willy-nilly she shall love.’ Was the Sapphic Ode an assurance, not that one day Mademoiselle de Scudéry would love her, but that she herself would one day love Christ? What if she had read the omens wrong, what if they all pointed to the Heavenly Rape? How could she ever have dreamed that grace would be the caterer for her earthly desires—Grace, the gadfly, goading the elect willy-nilly along the grim Roman road of redemption that, undeviating and ruthless, cuts through forests, pierces mountains, and never so much as skirts the happy meadows? That she herself was one of the elect, she was but too sure.
‘Sortir du siècle’—where had she heard the expression? Oh, of course! It was in La Fréquente Communion, and was used for the embracing of the monastic life. The alternative offered to Gennadius had been to ‘sortir du siècle ou de subir le joug de la pénitence publique.’ Madeleine shuddered ... either, by dropping out of this witty, gallant century, to forgo the vitæ munus or else ... to suffer public humiliation ... could she bear another public humiliation such as the one at the Hôtel de Rambouillet? Her father had been humiliated before Ariane ... Jacques had been partly responsible.... Hylas, hélas! ... the Smithy of Vulcan ... was she going mad?
In the last few hours by some invisible cannon a breach had been made in her faith.