Let it not be supposed that F. Chevreuse was so ascetical as never to eat except when urged to do so. On the contrary, he took good care to keep up the health and strength necessary for the performance of his multiform duties as the only priest in a large parish, and he used a wise discrimination in allowing others to fast. “Some fasting is almost as bad as feasting,” he used to say. “Besides injuring the health, it clogs the soul. You look down upon eating when you have dined moderately; but, when you have fasted immoderately, the idea of dinner is elevated till it becomes a constellation. I do not wish to starve, till, when I kneel down and raise my eyes, I can think of nothing but roast beef. Asceticism is not an end, but a means.”
“Mother,” he said presently, laying down his spoon, “why is it that the oatmeal and milk I get at home are better than that I find anywhere else?”
“Children always think the food they get at home better than what they get abroad,” she replied tranquilly.
Why should she tell him that what he called milk was cream, and that the making of that “stirabout” was a fine-art, which had been taught Jane line upon line, and precept upon precept, till every grain dropped according to rule, and the motion of the pudding spoon was as exact as a sonnet? Instead of being pleased, he would have been disturbed to know that so much pains had been taken for him.
“I like no earthly comfort that has cost any one much trouble or pain,” he would say. Like most persons who have been spared the petty cares of life, he did not know that in this discordant world there is no earthly comfort to any one which is not a pain to some other.
Breakfast over, the priest went promptly about his business; and Mrs. Chevreuse, shutting the door between their rooms, brought her work-basket to the stand where the tray had been, and seated herself to mend a rent in a soutane.
It was a pleasant room, with its one window toward the church, and an opposite one looking over the city and the distant hills, and most enticingly comfortable, with deep chairs, convenient tables, and tiny stands always within reach, and an open fireplace which was seldom, save at mid-summer, without its little glimmer of fire at some time of day. And even then, if the day was chilly or overcast, the fact that it was mid-summer did not prevent the kindling of Mother Chevreuse’s beltane flame. From this room and the bedroom behind it could be heard on still nights the dashing of the Cocheco among its rocks.
Mrs. Chevreuse worked and thought. The sunbeams sparkled on the scissors, needles, bodkins, and whatever bright thing it could find in her work-basket, on her eyeglasses and thimble, on the smooth-worn gold of her wedding-ring, and the tiny needle weaving deftly to and fro in an almost invisible darn, of which the lady was not a little proud. Her mind wove, too; not those flimsy fancies of youth so like spider’s webs upon the grass, that glitter only when the morning dew is on them: the threads of her dream-tapestry ended in heaven, though begun on earth, and their severance could only change hope into fruition. And all the time, while hand and heart slipped to and fro, the lady was aware of everything that went on in the house. She heard Andrew come into the next room with the morning mail, heard the sound of voices while he received his orders for the day, heard him go clumping down-stairs, and out through the kitchen into the chapel. Presently the clumping resounded outside, and, glancing across the room, she saw the old man standing on the basement stairs, his head on a level with her window, looking at her across the space that intervened, and gesticulating, with a twinkling candlestick in each hand.
Mother Chevreuse, still holding her work, went and threw the sash up.
“I think, madame, begging your pardon, that I can clean these just as well as you can,” says Andrew, with a very positive nod and a little shake that set all the glass drops twinkling and tinkling.