“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.