"Sit nomen benedictum ... Adjutorium Domini ... Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus,"
he sat down just inside the chancel rails, and talkingly questioned the children on their catechism. Most of them were too shy to distinguish themselves much, though the son of the village milkman, an ugly cross-eyed boy, acquitted himself manfully. Later the Archbishop rested in his chair, his chin on his breast, seeming to sleep, while priests prowled and hovered round him. The Mascaret curé darted about the church giving instructions, and presently the children broke shrilly into the popular hymn:
"Je suis chrétien, voilà ma gloire,
Mon espérance et mon soutien,
Mon chant d'amour et de victoire,
Je suis chrétien! Je suis chrétien!"
The village boys loved this hymn. It lent itself to much lusty shouting in the last two lines of the chorus, and they delighted in it, passing winks to each other as they hurled it from their lungs with something of the same ardour as had served for the "mujik de churie." But later when they filed in long lines to where the old Archbishop sat waiting for them, their mien changed. No one could be vicious or violent before that beautiful tired presence waiting with white trembling hands to bless them. They came quietly, one by one, and knelt on the velvet cushion at his feet, the boys bashful and cloddish in their best smocks, the girls wearing the elaborate and top-heavy mob cap of silk and muslins and ribbons that it is the Normandy peasant woman's pride to perch above her harsh features. Haidee, in a white hemstitched muslin frock with a flounce of delicate lace round its edge, walked among them like some woodland sylph escaped from a Corot picture. Her long legs clad in white silk stockings and sandals created something of a scandal amongst the peasant mothers, whose ideas of decency bid them cover up the legs of their girls with the longest and heaviest skirts they can afford. Her headgear, too, was considered characteristic of the madness with which God had afflicted the occupants of Villa Duval, for it was a tulle veil bound about her brow by a wreath of real daisies, gathered and twined by Val and Bran.
Each child carried a tiny slip of paper on which was written the new name which must be assumed at confirmation as in baptism. This paper was handed to a priest who stood on the left of the Archbishop and who, glancing swiftly at it, transposed it into Latin and murmured it into the great prelate's ear. Haidee, who had chosen Joan, was astonished to hear the Archbishop thus address her:
"Joanna! I mark thee with the sign of the Cross, and I confirm thee par le chrême du salut, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Then he gave her a little tap on the left cheek and held out his ring to her; she kissed it fervently and went away uplifted. In passing back a priest on the right stopped her and wiped away the holy chrism (composed of balm and oil) with a piece of cotton wool, which he let fall into a basket held by a choir boy whose blue eyes vaguely disturbed Haidee's saintly dream. A little farther on another priest intercepted her and wiped her forehead once more, none too gently she thought, with a rather dissipated-looking napkin. The cowboy look came over her face at that, and Val reflected that it was just as well there were no more priests to waylay her before she reached her seat, for that Wild-West scowl was often followed by acts which made up in vigour for what they lacked in dignity.
Val was not able to see the end of the ceremony, for just as the priests closed in on the Archbishop, one with a gilt bowl, another with soap and broidered towel, another to take his ring, Bran whispered to her in a panting whisper:
"Mammie! I 've got the gasps!"
There was nothing for it but retreat to the churchyard, for when Bran got "the gasps" the only cure for them was air and solitude. It was a nervous affliction which often seized him when he was deeply bored or, curiously enough, when he was intensely excited, making him gasp like a chicken with the pip, and Val would feel her heart come into her throat with every opening of his little beak. While he regained his breathing powers in the churchyard, she sat on a stone watching him, thinking how she would have liked the hands of the Archbishop on his precious head too. There was surely some special benediction in such delicate old hands; and though she asked no blessings for herself, she wanted them all for Garrett Westenra's son. And while she sat there musing, out of the sacristy door came the Archbishop himself. He, too, seemed afflicted with gasps, for his mouth opened and closed and his breath came in little pants. None of his priests were with him, only the village curé escorting him to the presbytery, and he seemed somewhat like a child escaped for a moment from his nurses. When he saw Bran's smiling face his own lit up and its weariness was for an instant wiped away.
"A little American Catholic," said the curé, but the old prelate had not waited for an introduction before making the sign of the Cross over Bran's bright head. Val knelt in the dust while the faltering feet passed by. She felt as though a star had fallen from heaven for her.