He was standing one morning by the window looking through an opening between high buildings to the river, with its hay barges gliding down the glistening water-way, and its little steamers with their spirals of smoke ascending, when everything in the world began in a moment to bear another moral interpretation. The lesson of life was work. Man could not exist without it. If he departed from that condition, no matter how much he fasted and meditated and prayed, he was useless and miserable and depraved.
Then the lock turned in the door of his cell and the Father and the Bishop entered. When they were gone he felt suffocated by their praises of his piety, and asked himself, “What am I doing here?” He was a hypocrite. Ten thousand other men whom the Church called saints had been hypocrites before him, and as they paced their cloisters they had asked themselves the same question. But the mighty hand of the Church was over him still, and with trembling fingers he turned the key again and pushed it under the door. Then he knew that he was a coward also, and that religion had deprived him of his will, of his manhood, and enervated his soul itself.
Brother Paul was moving about in the adjoining cell. The lay brother had become very weak; his step was slow, his feet dragged along the floor; his breath was audible and sometimes his cough was long and raucous. John had heard these sounds every day and had tried not to listen, but now he strained his ears to hear. A new thought had come to him: he would ask to be allowed to nurse Brother Paul; that should be his work, for work alone could save him.
Next morning he leaped up from sleep at the first syllable of “Benedicamus Domino,” and cried, “Father!” But when the door opened in answer to his call it was the Father Minister who entered. The Superior had gone to give a Retreat to a sisterhood in York, and would be absent until the end of Lent. John looked at the hard face of the deputy, the very mirror of its closed and frozen soul, and he could say nothing.
“Is it anything that I can do for you?” said the Father Minister.
“No—that is to say—no, no,” said John.
When he opened his window that day he could hear the Lenten services in the church. The prayers, the responses, the psalms, and the hymns woke to fresh life the memory of things long past, and for the first time he became oppressed with a great loneliness. The near neighbourhood of Brother Paul intensified that loneliness, and at length he asked for an indulgence and spoke to the Father Minister again.
“Brother Paul is ill; let me attend to him,” he said.
The Father Minister shook his head. “The brother gets all he wants. He does not wish for constant attendance.”
“But he is a dying man, and somebody should be with him always.”