The blind boy turned his hanging head a little, toward the sound of her voice and stretched back a thin, waxy-white hand. She managed to touch it for an instant, but then said, “Not now, darling. You mustn’t turn back toward Mother. You must join your hands and pray to be cured, pray for the blessing. You must repeat whatever the priest says.”
For at that moment the powerfully built, bearded priest, with the eyes of fire and the thrown-back head of born command, strode down the center of the great open place and stood looking intently about him at the lines of the white-faced sick, and the immense throngs of pilgrims back of them. He raised his hands suddenly in a vivid gesture, and cried in a trumpet-like voice, like a captain leading forward a charge, “Brothers, pray! Pray for our sick. With all your soul, with all the strength of your body and mind, pray God for our sick!”
He paused a moment. Every eye was on him.
The blind boy held his face lowered meekly as blind children often do, as sensitive children who know themselves unsightly always do. His thin, white neck was bent like that of a victim awaiting the blow, but he put his little pale fingers together and, turning for a moment, tried to show to his mother that they were in the attitude of prayer. She whispered, “Yes, yes, darling, that is right. But not toward me. Toward where the blessing is coming, so that you may be cured.”
“Lord save us! Lord God save us, for we perish!” prayed the priest in a loud clear voice of exaltation; and after him all the multitude cried it aloud, in a great murmur like the voice of a forest, or of the sea.
The blind boy’s lips moved with the rest, but his little face was clouded and anxious. He whispered to the crippled child beside him:
“Are you blind, too, or can you see?”
“I can see,” said the other, “but I have never walked.”
“Then you must show me where I must put my hands so that they will be toward the blessing,” begged the blind child.
The other took the thin, transparent fingers between his twisted stumps, and directed them toward the priest, thrillingly upright, aspiring visibly toward the sky. “There, you must keep them turned toward the priest now,” he said with an accent of certainty. “Later on it will be toward the procession as it moves along, and then at the last toward the church.”