One other story he told me which flashed a white light upon his soul. A certain atheist, one of his bitterest enemies, came to him one day in deep distress of mind. His wife, an unbeliever like himself, was dying, and, dying, was afraid. The man was rich, and thought he could buy his way and hers into the Kingdom of Heaven. But the Abbé refused his gold. "You cannot buy salvation nor ease of conscience," he said sternly. "Keep your money; God wants your heart, and not your purse." He attended the woman, gave her Christian burial, and asked exactly the legal fee. Not one penny more would he take, nor could all the atheist's prayers move him.
He told me that he would not bury a man or a woman living in what he called le concubinage civile, people married by the State only and not by Church and State. For these, he said, there could only be the burial of a dog, for they lived in sin, knowing their error as do the contractors of mixed marriages if they do not ask for and receive a dispensation. The rules governing these latter appear to be much the same as those which hold good in Ireland. No service in a Protestant church is permitted, and the Protestant must promise that all children born of the union shall be baptised and brought up in the Catholic faith. There is no written contract, and the promise may, of course, be broken, but if the Catholic is a party to it he is guilty of mortal sin.
You will see that as our classes ran their course—and circumstances decreed that I should take the final lessons alone—we got very far away from "s" for plural and "e" for feminine. Exercises corrected, many an interesting half-hour we passed in the little parlour, and many a tale of the trenches the Abbé gathered up for us, and many a "well-founded, authentic" prophecy of the speedy termination of the war. Ah, he was so sure he would be in his beloved M. this winter. Did not his friend the Editor of—he mentioned a leading Paris journal—tell him so?
But this is the war of the unforeseen. Perhaps that is why some of us dare to believe that when the end comes it will come suddenly, swiftly, like thunder pealing through the heavy stillness of a breathless, sullen night.
[CHAPTER XI]
REPATRIÉES
I
"Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, the children are coming!"