“Well, I should. I should wonder more than a little, I can tell you. Whatever gives you that fancy, child?”
“I have it, Mother; why I cannot tell you.”
“I hope you are not a prophetess!”
“I don’t think I am,” said Derette with a smile.
“I think Ermine was a bit of one, poor soul! She seemed to have some notion what was coming to her. Eh, Derette! I’d give my best gown to know those poor things were out of Purgatory. Father Dolfin says we shouldn’t pray for them: but I do—I can’t help it. If I were a priest, I’d say mass for them every day I lived—ay, I would! I never could understand why we must not pray for heretics. Seems to me, the more wrong they’ve gone, the more they want praying for. Not that they went far wrong—I’ll not believe it. Derette, dost thou ever pray for the poor souls?”
“Ay, Mother: every one of them.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it. And as to them that ill-used them, let them look to themselves. Maybe they’ll not find themselves at last in such a comfortable place as they look for. The good Lord may think that cruelty to Christian blood (Note 3)—and they were Christian blood, no man can deny—isn’t so very much better than heresy after all. Hope he does.”
“I remember Gerard’s saying,” replied Derette, “that all the heresies in the world were only men’s perversions of God’s truths: and that if men would but keep close to Holy Scripture, there would be no heresies.”
“Well, it sounds like reason, doesn’t it?” answered Isel with a sigh.
“But I remember his saying also,” pursued Derette, “that where one man followed reason and Scripture, ten listened to other men’s voices, and ten more to their own fancies.”