Under the signature were added these words:
"I shall be dead within the hour. Nothing to change," and the name, in a large, shaky handwriting, which, by the emphasis of the downward stroke told, however, of an inflexible will.
The Abbé Jaud's first impulse was one of haughty refusal, but his second was to go and consult his bishop, who made clear to him that highest duty lay in presenting every obstacle to Free Masonry. He was obliged to obey. The doctor in his grave had the last word, his face twisted with sardonic laughter under the holy water sprinkled by the discomfited Abbé.
The infants born before their time who filled in the cemetery of Ecoulandres, "the corner reserved for those condemned to death," gained this much by the event, that the earth they lay in was blessed. In that respect, at least, one of the doctor's predictions was unfulfilled.
But the Abbé's real revenge, although he was perhaps unaware of it, was that the sight of the magnificent golden chalices and monstrances ornamented with precious stones, far from arousing rebellion in the hearts of the poor, as the doctor had intended, only increased the fervour of the faithful, and provoked the piety of the indifferent by wonder at the splendour in which the power of the Invisible revealed itself. Victory and defeat on both sides. Blows struck in the darkness of the Unknown. And so passes the life of man.
III
MALUS VICINUS
Saint-juirs is the name of a village in the canton of Sainte Hermine. Lying on the slope of a hill, it overlooks a fresh, grassy valley planted with poplars and watered by a brook which has no recorded name. A very modest Romanesque church laboriously hoists skyward a heavy stone belfry amid a clump of elm and nut trees. The ruins of an old castle degenerated from the dignity of a stronghold to the simple rank of a country residence testifies that here, possibly, some notable event may have taken place. But as the inhabitants have forgotten it, and have no care to search it out, they live in absolute indifference to a thing that is not their direct business. Their village appears to them like all other villages, their church, their houses, their fields, their beasts, like all other churches and houses and fields and beasts. They only vaguely take in the idea of other countries on the earth. The newspapers tell them of unknown lands and of strange doings; it all seems to belong to some other world. What does it matter to them, anyhow, since they have no intention of ever stirring, and since nothing will ever happen to them? For them the past is without interest, and the future does not mar the peace of their slumbers. The present means the crops, the flocks, and the weather. For the things of Heaven there is the curé, for the things of earth there are the mayor, the notary, the customs officer, and the tax collector: a simplification of life.
Markets and fairs purvey to the restless cravings of such as are curious about outside happenings, but no inhabitant of Saint-Juirs would entertain the absurd idea that any trace of an event worth relating was to be found in his own village. Love itself is without drama, owing to the lack of stiffness in rustic morals, which precludes excesses of imagination by reducing to the proportions of newspaper items the conjunctions natural to our kind. There are, doubtless, disputes in Saint-Juirs as elsewhere, in connection with property rights, for "thine" and "mine," which are the foundation of "social order," are likewise a permanent cause of disorder among men. Trespassing in a pasture, the use of a well, a right of way, the branch of a tree reaching beyond a line, a hedge encroaching upon a ditch, result in quarrels, lawsuits, and dissension in families, the importance of which is no less to the small townspeople than was the feud between Capulets and Montagues to Verona. Centuries pass, the man of the past and the man of to-day meet on common ground in displaying the same old violence, to which sometimes even the excuse of interests involved is wanting, as happened when Benvolio drew his sword upon a burgher of Verona who had taken the liberty to cough in the street, and thereby waked his dog asleep in the sunshine.