"You haven't done it right, dearest. I knew you wouldn't. Look here." And Fenwick crosses himself secundum artem, dipping his finger first to make it valid.
"But how came you to know?" His wife does not say this; she only thinks it. And how came he to know about the messe des paresseux? She repeats her question aloud.
"Because the lazy people don't come to Mass till ten," he replies. They are talking under their breath, as English folk do in foreign churches, heedless of the loud gabble and resonant results of too much snuff on the part of ecclesiastics off duty. Their own salvation has been cultivated under a list slipper, cocoanut matting, secretive pew-opener policy; and if they are new to it all, they are shocked to see the snuff taken over the heads and wooden sabots of the devout country-folk, whose ancestors knelt on the same hard stone centuries ago, and prayed for great harvests that never came, and to avert lean years that very often did. The Anglican cannot understand the real aboriginal Papist. Sally's mother was puzzled when she saw an old, old kneeling figure, toothless and parchment-skinned, on whose rosary a pinch of snuff ut supra descended, shake it off
the bead in evidence, and get on to the next Ave, even as one who has business before her—so many pounds of oakum to pick, so many bushels of peas to shell. It was a reality to her; and there was the Blessed Virgin herself, a visible certainty, who would see to the recognition of it at headquarters.
Fenwick passed up the aisle, dreamily happy in the smell of the incense, beside his bride of yesterday's making—she intensely happy too, but in another way, for was not her bridegroom of yesterday her husband of twenty years ago—cruelly wrenched away, but her husband for all that. Still, there was always that little rift within the lute that made the music—pray Heaven not to widen! Always that thought!—that he might recollect. How could he remember the messe des paresseux, and keep his mind a blank about how he came to know of it? It was the first discomfort that had crossed her married mind—put it away!
It was easy to put it all away and forget it in the hush and gloom of the great church, filled with the strange intonation from Heaven-knows-where—some side-chapel unseen—of a Psalm it would have puzzled David to be told was his, and a scented vapour Solomon would have known at once; for neither myrrh nor frankincense have changed one whit since his day. It was easy enough so long as both sat listening to Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax. Carried nem. con. by all sorts and conditions of Creeds. But when the little bobs and tokens and skirt-adjustments of the fat priest and his handsome abettor (a young fellow some girl might have been the wife of, with advantage to both) came to a pause, and the congregation were to be taken into confidence, how came Gerry to know beforehand what the fat one was going to say, with that stupendous voice of his?
"Hoc est corpus meum, et hic est calix sanguinis mei. We all kneel, I think." Thus the bridegroom under his breath. And his companion heard, almost with a shudder, the selfsame words from the priest, as the kneeling of the congregation subsided.
"Oh, Gerry—darling fellow! How can you know that, and not know...."
"How I came by it? It's very funny, but I can't, and that's the
truth. I don't feel as if I ever could know, what's more. But it all seems a matter of course."