"Roads!" shouted the curé. "What are roads in comparison to illness and starvation? They came to me," he went on, turning to Alice, "little children—mothers, ill, with little children and not a sou in the house, and none to be earned fishing. Old men crying for bread for those whom they loved. I grew to hate the very thought of the bells; they seemed to me a needless luxury among so much misery."
His voice rose until it rang clear in the room.
"I gave it to them," he cried out. "There in my little drawer lay the power to save those who were near death from sickness, from dirt, from privation!"
Alice's ringless white hands were clenched in her lap.
"And I saw, as I gave," continued the curé, "the end of pain and of hunger—little by little I gave, hoping somehow to replace it, until I dared give no more."
He paused, and drew forth from the breast of his soutane a small cotton sack that had once held his gun wads. "Here is what is left, gentlemen," said he, facing the Municipal Council; "I have counted it at last, four hundred and eighty francs, sixty-five centimes."
There were tears now in Alice's eyes; dark eyes that followed the curé's with a look of tenderness and pain. The mayor sat breathing irritably. As for the Municipal Council, it was evident to Tanrade and myself, that not one of these plain, red-eared citizens was eager to send a priest to jail—it was their custom occasionally to go to mass.
"Marianne's illness," continued the curé, "was an important item. You seemed to consider her case of typhoid as a malady that would cure itself if let alone. Marianne needed care, serious care, strong as she was. The girl, Yvonne, she saved from drowning last year, and her baby, she still shelters among her own children in her hut. They, too, had to be fed; for Marianne was helpless to care for them. There was the little boy, too, of the Gavons—left alone, with a case of measles well developed when I found him, on the draughty floor of a loft; the mother and father had been drunk together for three days at Bar la Rose. And there were others—the Mère Gailliard, who would have been sold out for her rent, and poor old Varnet, the fisherman; he had no home, no money, no friends; he is eighty-four years old. Most of the winter he slept in a hedge under a cast-off sail. I got him a better roof and something for his stomach, Monsieur le Maire."
He paused again, and drew out a folded paper from his pocket. "Here is a list of all I can remember I have given to, and the amounts as near as I can recall them," he declared simply. Again he turned to Alice. "It is to you, dear friend, I have come to confess," he continued; "as for you, gentlemen, my very life, the church I love, all that this village means to me, lies in your hands; I do not beg your mercy. I have sinned and I shall take the consequences—all I ask you to do is to judge fairly the error of my ways." Monsieur le Curé took his seat.
"It is for you, Madame de Bréville, to decide," said the mayor, after some moments conference with the Council, "since the amount in question was given by your hand."