‘Yes, tell us more of her Christian humility,’ said Jacques, as he drew away the penultimate spillikin. ‘I’ll fleece you of two crowns for that,’ he added in an aside to Monsieur Troqueville.
‘They are all alike in that,’ he went on, ‘humility is part of their inheritance from the early Christians, who, being Jews and slaves and such vermin, had needs be humble except they wished to be crucified by the Romans for impudence. And though their creeping homilies have never ousted the fine old Roman virtue pride, yet pious Christians do still affect humility, and ’tis a stinking pander to——’
‘Jacques, Jacques,’ expostulated Madame Troqueville, and Monsieur Troqueville, shaking his head, and blowing out his cheeks, said severely:—
‘Curb your tongue, my boy! You do but show your ignorance. Humility is a most excellent virtue, if it were not, then why was it preached by Our Lord? Resolve me in that!’ and he glared triumphantly at Jacques.
‘Why, uncle, when you consider the base origin of——’
‘Jacques, I beseech you, no more!’ interposed Madame Troqueville, very gently but very firmly, so Jacques finished his sentence in a comic grimace.
After a pause, he remarked, ‘Chapuzeau retailed to me the other day a naïveté he had heard in a monk’s Easter sermon. The monk had said that inasmuch as near all the most august events in the Scriptures had had a mountain for their setting, it followed that no one could lead a truly holy life in a valley, and from this premise he deduced——’
‘In that naïveté there is a spice of truth,’ Monsieur Troqueville cut in, in a serious, interested voice. ‘I mind me, when I was a young man, I went to the Pyrenees, where my spirit was much vexed by the sense of my own sinfulness.’
‘I’ faith, it must have been but hypochondria, there can have been no true cause for remorse,’ said Jacques innocently.
Monsieur Troqueville looked at him suspiciously, cleared his throat, and went on: ‘I mind me, I would pass whole nights in tears and prayer, until at last there was revealed to me a strange and excellent truth, to wit, that the spirit is immune against the sins of the flesh. To apprehend this truth is a certain balm to the conscience, and, as I said, ’twas on a mountain that it was revealed to me,’ and he looked round with solemn triumph.