Father Bruno’s Sermon.
“And speak’st thou thus,
Despairing of the sun that sets to thee,
And of the earthly love that wanes to thee,
And of the Heaven that lieth far from thee?
Peace, peace, fond fool! One draweth near thy door,
Whose footprints leave no print across the snow.
Thy Sun has risen with comfort in His face,
The smile of Heaven to warm thy frozen heart,
And bless with saintly hand. What! is it long
To wait and far to go? Thou shalt not go.
Behold, across the snow to thee He comes,
Thy Heaven descends, and is it long to wait?
Thou shalt not wait. ‘This night, this night,’ He saith,
‘I stand at the door and knock.’”
Jean Ingelow.
Earl Hubert went very pale when his wife told him of the conversation which she had had with Margaret. She was his darling, the child of his old age, and he loved her more dearly than he was himself aware. But the blessed hair, and the holy water, were swallowed by him in a figurative sense, with far more implicit faith than they had been, physically, by Margaret. He was quite easy in his mind after that event.
The Countess was a little less so. The saintly relic did not weigh quite so much with her, and the white, still, unchanged face of the girl weighed more. With the restless anxiety of alarm only half awake, she tried to bolster up her own hopes by appeals to every other person.
“Father Nicholas, do you think my daughter looks really ill?”
Father Nicholas, lost at the moment in the Aegean Sea, came slowly back from “the many-twinkling smile of ocean” to the consideration of the question referred to him.
“My Lady? Ah, yes! The damsel Margaret. To be sure. Well,—looking ill? I cannot say, Lady, that I have studied the noble damsel’s looks. Perhaps—is she a little paler than she used to be? Ah, my Lady, a course of the grand old Greek dramatists,—that would be the thing to set her up. She could not fail to be interested and charmed.”
The Countess next applied to Father Warner.
“The damsel does look pale, Lady. What wonder, when she has not confessed for over a fortnight? Get her well shriven, and you will see she will be another maiden.”
“She sighs, indeed, my Lady; and I do not think she sleeps well,” said Levina, who was the third authority. “It strikes me, under my Lady’s pleasure, that she would be the better for a change.”