LOURDES
From the Ends of the Earth they come—Old and Young, the Lame and the Blind—to Ask for the Blessing.
Afternoon. There was not a vacant place left in the long line of waiting sick, so that at the last, when a little, white-faced blind boy with dreadful horny growths on his eyes, was handed over the heads of the crowd, he seemed to have come too late.
His mother’s voice rose anxiously, in reiterated piteous demands to the stretcher-carriers to make a place for him, any place, where he could receive the blessing, for it was the day of the greatest pilgrimage of the year, when twenty-five thousand people sang and prayed together for the cure of the sick, when the Host was carried in solemn procession to bless them, lying in long lines up and down the broad esplanade.
“Oh, for the love of God, find a place for him!” she implored, in so strained a voice of entreaty that the crowd, dense as it was, gave way a little and allowed her to press forward, back of the wheeled chairs of the cripples. The stretcher-carrier who had taken the child in his arms hesitated, looking about him for a vacant spot. He glanced at a wounded soldier, rigid on his litter, his face as white as it would be in his coffin; and then turned to a child stricken with a disease of the bones which paralyzed his legs and made of his hands only twisted, shapeless stumps, but which still permitted him to sit in one of the wheeled chairs. His little withered body did not half fill it, and it was there beside him that the attendant decided to put down the blind boy.
His mother gave a long sigh of intense feeling and between the closely packed bodies of the crowd strained forward to be near him.
“I’m here, darling, I’m here,” she said in a voice of concentrated tenderness.