Suddenly her mood changed. She clasped the child close to her breast, and showered kisses on the little wan face.
“My babe Maude, my bird Maude!” she said. “My dove that God sped down from Heaven unto me, thinking me not too ill ne wicked to have thee! The angels may love thee, my bird in bower! for thou art white and unwemmed. The robes of thy chrism (see Note 1) are not yet soiled; but, O sinner that I am! how am I to meet God? And I must meet Him—and soon.”
“Did not God die on the rood, Mother?”
The woman assented, the old listless tone returning to her voice.
“Wherefore, Mother?”
“God wot, child.”
“Sister Christian told me He had no need for Himself, but that He loved us; yet why that should cause Him to die I wis not.”
The mother made no answer. Her thoughts had drifted away, back through her weary past, to a little village church where a fresco painting stood on the wall, sketched in days long before, of a company of guests at a feast, clad in Saxon robes; and of One, behind whom knelt a woman weeping and kissing His feet, while her flowing hair almost hid them from sight. And back to her memory, along with the scene, came a line from a popular ballad (“The Ploughman’s Complaint”) which referred to it. She repeated it aloud—
“‘Christ suffered a sinful to kisse His fete.’
“Suffered her, for that she was a saint?” she asked of herself, in the dreamy languor which the intense cold had brought over her. “Nay, for she was ‘a sinful.’ Suffered her, then, for that she sinned? Were not that to impeach His holiness? Or was He so holy and high that no sin of hers could soil the feet she touched? What good did it her to touch them? Made it her holy?—fit to meet God in the Doom (Judgment), when she had thus met Him here in His lowliness? How wis I? And could it make me fit to meet Him? But I can never kiss His feet. Nor lack they the ournment (adornment) of any kiss of mine. Yet methinks it were she, not He, which lacked it then. And He let her kiss His feet. O Christ Jesu! if in very deed it were in love for us that Thou barest death on the bitter rood, hast Thou no love left to welcome the dying sinner? Thou who didst pity her at yonder feast, hast Thou no mercy for Eleanor Gerard too?”