Gilbert the miller was plagued with rats. And the rats prospered, even though he had brought a dead buck rat to Denise, and besought her to curse the vermin.
Olivia, the goldsmith’s wife, brought a girl with a purple birth-mark on her cheek. She desired Denise to touch the stain that it might disappear. The birth-mark remained for all to see.
A woman in child-bed sent for Denise’s blessing. The child was still-born the very same night.
Well might Denise feel that the virtue had gone out of her, that the people were beginning to mock, and that her prayers were as so much chaff. The bitterness and the humiliation were not of her own seeking. They had set her upon a pinnacle, crowded about her open-mouthed, ready for the blessings she should bestow. Her white garments, and her burning aureole of hair had dazzled them, and the power of her beauty remained with her still. But the mystery was passing; she had profited none of the people; her prayers had burst like bubbles in the air. And since the human heart is ever a fickle thing, ready to scoff and sneer, and think itself cheated when its own fancies fall to the ground, the very children began to catch the spirit of their elders, and to throw surreptitious stones at Denise’s door. They invented a game, too, that they called the Silly Saint, in which one of the girls wore a halo of straw and attempted to work wonders which were never wonderful, till the audience rose and rolled her in the grass. No one chided them for such indecent blasphemy. Even Dom Silvius was ready to wash his hands of Denise.
There were more sinister whisperings in the air as the autumn drew on and merged into the winter. Bridget, the smith’s wife, whose boy had died on Denise’s knees, had set her tongue and her spite against the saint. The woman had been very bitter against Denise all through the summer, laughing maliciously over her failures, and nodding her head with the air of “I could have told you so.” When neighbours had still seemed credulous, she had put her tongue in her cheek, and mocked.
Bridget and some other women were spreading their linen on the grass one windy October day, and their talk turned upon Denise. As women will, they spoke of the things that had been noised abroad of late. There were some that said that Denise was no saint, that she was no better than they themselves were, far worse in fact because of her vows. It had been told that a strange knight had kept a vigil near her cell, and the women laughed, as only women of a kind can.
Bridget, the smith’s wife, was the bitterest of them all, because of her dead child, and the spite that she had nurtured against Denise. And as they spread their linen on the grass she began to tease the women, and to tantalise them with all manner of cryptic nods, and sneers, and insinuations. The end of it all was that much of the linen blew hither and thither because the women were so eager to listen to Bridget, and forgot to weigh the sheets and body gear down with stones.
Bridget was the fat hen with the worm in her beak, and they all crowded about her as though to thieve it. But all she did was to laugh and to smooth her frock with her two hands.
The women set up a great cackling, and then ran to and fro to catch the linen that was blowing in the wind.
“Blessed Martin,” said one, “when the Abbot hears of it!”