“If the Lord Christ were here in my place, would not all the wild things come to Him?”
His simple faith could provide him with only one answer, and that was not flattering to his self-knowledge. He had not climbed to that state of complete purity; he was no St. Francis. Perhaps Original Sin was at the bottom of everything. And yet he had always mastered his own body.
Martin Valliant passed some hours in the woods before turning back across the heather of the Black Moor. A hawk, poised against the blue, took no more notice of him than if he had been a sheep, and for a while Martin stood watching the bird of prey. The hawk went boldly on with his hunting; he would have had no pity for a poor fool of a priest who was spending his powers in trying to contradict Nature.
A puzzled look came into Martin Valliant’s eyes as he neared the chapelry. A little tuft of smoke was drifting from the chimney of his cell, and he knew that he had lit no sticks under the oven that morning.
“They have sent a servant from Paradise.”
He quickened his steps, but saw no live thing moving about the place. He looked into the stable, and found it empty; but the garden hedge offered him his first surprise. Certainly the thing that he saw was nothing but a shirt spread on the hedge to dry, and looking as white and clean as one of the big clouds overhead.
His own cell offered further mysteries. The oven door stood open, and a couple of nicely browned loaves were waiting to be taken out. A meat pasty that smelled very fragrant had been left on the oven shelf. His cassock, neatly mended, hung over the back of Father Jude’s oak chair.
Martin could make nothing of these mysteries. The loaves and the pasty were real enough—so real that he remembered the cup of water and the crust of bread with which he had broken his fast soon after dawn.
He went and looked into the chapel and the guest-room, but there was no one there, nor could he see anything moving over the moor. The business puzzled him completely. It was possible that a servant had been sent from Paradise; but Paradise was three leagues away, and Martin would have expected to find a horse or a mule in the stable. Moreover it occurred to him that some one must have looked into the oven not so very long ago, lifted out the pasty, and put it on the shelf. The good creature might be hiding somewhere, but what need was there for such a game of hide-and-seek?
Martin returned to the cell, set the pasty on the table, took the loaves out of the oven, and his platter and cup from the shelf. Common sense suggested that the food was meant to be eaten. He pulled the stool up to the table, said grace, took the knife from the sheath at his girdle, and thrust the point of it through the pie-crust.