"My Lord Paul, we cannot go into this lane. And before God, I have fear upon me! Never have the horses acted this way."
And indeed fear seized them all. They saw the hand of God in this strange obstinancy of their beasts. Even Kimberker cried the pursuit.
"Fear God!" he said. "For this is no common mishap!"
And when they turned the horses' heads again toward Vienna, the animals snorted and pranced and went very willingly.
And so, when Stanislaus came to the bridge, the highway was clear.
After a look about, he put on his shoes, gripped his staff afresh,
and took up again cheerily as ever his thirty miles a day to
Augsburg.
Day after day, tired and footsore, he told off the long miles, begging his food and lodging as he went; fearless and happy, praying like an angel of God as he walked along.
Many were kind to him for the brave, bright spirit that shone out in his face. Many remembered those words of our Lord, "Whatsoever you have done unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me," and willingly sheltered the boy and gave him to eat. Sometimes he turned into the fields beside the road and slept through the warm August night beneath the open sky. Whenever he came to a church in the morning, he heard Mass and received Holy Communion, for he started out each morning fasting. And on the fourteenth day he reached Augsburg.
What happened there, we shall see in another chapter, and how within three weeks this smiling boy turned his face southward and tramped another eight hundred miles on foot to Rome. But just that will show you something of the spirit of Stanislaus, the spirit of a hero. All that a knight might do out of love for his lady, he did out of love for God. He really loved God with a sort of fierce intensity. And he wanted to show his love in deeds, just as we want to show our love for a person by doing something, by giving something. God had given him everything, he would give God everything: that was the whole of his life. And with that generosity went a fine common sense. He was not rash or headlong, acting first and thinking afterward. He reckoned things out calmly and sensibly, and then went ahead with a pluck and determination that nothing in the world could stop.
God asked a fearfully hard thing of him; to leave his people, his home; to set out afoot on an enormous journey; to undergo no end of hardships and humiliations; to live in a strange land, among strange people. And he did it, did it smilingly, joyfully, with a simple, quiet bravery seldom if ever matched by any other boy in the world.
The one thing that staggers us is his reason for doing it, his great love for God. And that is because we have not got, what we could easily get, his secret. He prayed, he kept close in thought to God always. God and heaven and our Lady were as familiar to his mind as the sun and the earth and the air are to our mind's. The earth to him was only the antechamber of heaven. He looked upon life as one looks upon a little delay at a railway station before the train leaves; the only important thing is to catch the train.