Christians who wish a powerful protectress in heaven cannot do better than address themselves to Notre Dame de tous remèdes (Our Lady of All-Healing), near the City of the Beech.[[143]] She has in that place the richest chapel that the hand of man ever built. All inside it is filled with golden statues; the belfry, which is brother to that of Kreisker, has more windows in it than there are holes in a Quimper waffle, and there is near the church a fountain of masonry whose waters wash away all evil of soul and body.[[144]] Our Lady of All-Healing is one of the four great Pardons of the Virgin Mary in Lower Brittany. The others are at Auray, at Bois du fou (Fol-goat, or Madman’s Wood), and Callot.
It was to Our Lady of All-Healing that Mao stopped to pray. Mao was on his way from Loperek, a pretty parish between Kimerc’h and Logoma. He had neither kith nor kin, and his guardian had put in his hand a frappe-tête[[145]] with three silver crowns, telling him to seek his fortune where he would.
After saying at the foot of the great altar all the prayers his nurse and the rector had taught him, Mao left the church to go his way. But as he was about passing through the hedge he saw a crowd of folks gathered about a dead body lying on the grass at the door of the priest’s house; and he was told it was a poor bread-seeker who had given up his soul the night before, and whom the priest refused to bury.
“Was he, then, a pagan or a wretch who had denied his baptism?” asked Mao.
“He was a true sheep of God’s fold,” made answer all who were there; “and even when hunger pressed him sore he would have taken neither the three ears of corn nor the three apples which custom permits the wayfarer to pluck.”
“Why, then, does the rector deny him the holy water and the consecrated earth?” asked the youth.
“Because poor Stevan left nothing to pay for the prayers of the church,” replied the spectators.
“What!” cried Mao, “is there a priest in this country, so hard-hearted that he shuts the door on the poor while living and will not open to them when dead? If it is money is wanted, here are three crowns. ’Tis all I have in the world; but I give it with all my heart to open to a Christian the consecrated earth.”
The unworthy priest was called; he took the three crowns, rattled off the prayers for the dead in as little time as it takes a carrier’s horse to eat his truss of hay, dumped poor Stevan into a hole in the ground, and went off to see that the sucking pig which was a-cooking for his dinner was properly done on both sides.
As for Mao, he made a cross with two branches of yew, planted it on the grave of the poor seeker of bread, and after saying a De Profundis went on his way to Camfront.