Books: The Master Christian

M >> Marie Corelli >> The Master Christian

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He paused till the murmur of enthusiasm at mention of the name by
which he was known through France should have ceased. It rose on the
air in a sort of bee-like humming monotone, and then died away,
while many people stood on tip-toe and craned their necks eagerly
over each other's shoulders to catch a glimpse of the daring writer
whose works threatened to upset a greater power than any throne, the
Roman Church.

"I have tried," he resumed quietly, "as I say, to proclaim the
thoughts of many! The people of France, like the peoples of many
other nations, are losing God in a cloud of priest-craft. Look up to
this broad canopy of heaven,--look up to yonder driving clouds heavy
with rain, through which the great sun gleams like a golden shield,-
-that is the temple of the real God! That sparkling roof of air
through which the planets roll in their tremendous orbits, bends
over the wise and the foolish, the just and the unjust; the sun
shines as kindly on the face of the street outcast as on that of the
great lady who is often more soiled in soul than her miserable
sister. The rich man can provide for himself no finer quality of
light than is vouchsafed to the poor. The flowers in the field
spring up as graciously under the feet of the beggar as the king.
The Church of the true God is Equality!--the altar, the sacrament,
the final resting-place of the dead, Equality! Your revolutionary
cry was and is still,--Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity!--but when
you shout those words, you know not what you are calling for. Your
demand is instinctive,--the cry of a child for its parents. It is
not for temporal things that you clamouras the foolish imagine,--it
is for eternal things! Liberty of thought,--Equality in work--
Fraternity in faith! But your political leaders, ever at work for
themselves, misread these words for you, even as your priests
misread Christ's Gospel. They make out for you that you want Liberty
of action--Equality of riches, Fraternity in position. These things
are by Nature's law, impossible. They are not wanted,--and
reasonable consideration will prove to you that you do not want
them,--otherwise you would be asking for a disordered universe, a
chaos instead of a world! The strong must always prevail,--but by
strong, I do not mean the strong liar or the strong evil-doer. No!
For a lie contains in itself the germ of rottenness which shall
kill--and the evil-doer is not strong but weak, because cowardly.
There is no strength in fear; no power in disease! Hence I repeat
again, the strong must prevail--and by the strong, I mean the Good!
Evil is always weak,--it flourishes for a day, a month, a year, or
if you will, a thousand years, for a thousand years are but a moment
in the sight of Heaven; but for ever and ever justice is done,--for
ever and ever Right comes uppermost, and the Strong which is God,
than whom is none stronger, and who is all Goodness--prevails!
Liberty of thought should be the privilege of every human creature,
but we must never mistake it for Liberty of action. Liberty of
action is restrained by law in the world of nature, and must be
equally restrained in the world of men. But insist on Equality in
work! What do I mean by Equality in work? I mean this,--that every
man's work is entitled to consideration and respect, in every phase
of life. The road-mender works well and makes a smooth way for men
and horses;--he deserves my honour for his skill,--he has it,--he
shall have it,--for I know he can teach me many things of which I am
ignorant. The chief of the State works well,--organizes;--puts grave
matters in order and establishes necessary government--he also shall
have my respect,--he has it,--he deserves his carriage and pair as
fully as the road-mender deserves his dinner. We should not grudge
or envy either man the reward due to their separate positions. The
nightingale has a sweet voice,--the peacock screams--the one is
plain in colour, the other gorgeous,--and there is no actual
equality; yet the one bird does not grudge the other its position,
inasmuch as though there is no Equality there is Compensation. So it
is with men. There is always Compensation in every lot. So it should
be; so it must be. Equality in work means simply, respect for every
kind of work done, and contempt for none except for him who does no
work at all! And lastly the word 'Fraternity.' Glorious word,
meaning so much!--holding suggestions of peace, joy and purity in
its mere utterance! Not a Fraternity of possession--for then should
we become lower than the beasts, who have their own separate holes,
their separate mates, their separate young--but Fraternity of
Faith!--the one Faith that teaches us to cry 'Abba Father,'--that
makes us understand Christ as our Brother--and all of us the
children of one family,--one creation moving on in process of
evolvement to greater things! Let any priest tell me that I am not a
child of God, and I will retort that he, by such an utterance, has
proved himself a child of the devil. Ignorant, sinful, full of
miserable imperfections as I am, I am of God as the ant is, the
worm, the fly!--and if I have no more of God in me than such
insects, still I am thankful to have so much! What priest shall dare
to say how much or how little of God there was in the composition of
this man lying in the grave at our feet, who was my father?
Excommunication! Who can excommunicate the soul from its Creator?
Who can part the sunbeam from the sun? Excommunication! The human
being who, on what he calls Church authority, shall thrust his
brother away from any form of communion which he himself judges and
accepts as valuable, is one of those whom Christ declared to be 'in
danger of hell-fire.' For there is no man who can, if he be true to
himself, condemn his brother man, or say to him, 'Stand back! I am
holier than thou!' Therefore, for him whom we lay down to rest to-
day, let there be pardon and peace! Let us remember that for all his
sins he atoned, by full confession;--by publicly branding himself in
the sight of that society in whose estimation he had till then
seemed something superior,--by voluntarily resigning himself to the
wrath of the Church of which he was a professed servant. Cursed by
his Creed, he may now perchance be blessed by his Creator! For he
died, clean-souled and true--washed of hypocrisy,--with no secret
vice left unhidden for others to rake up and expose to criticism.
Whatsoever wrong he did, he openly admitted--whatever false things
he said, he retracted. I believe--and I am sure we all believe, that
his spirit thus purified, is acceptable to God. He has left no lies
behind him--no debts--no wrongs to be avenged. He told you all,
people of Paris, what he was before he left you,--and, looking down
into this dark grave, we know what he is. A senseless, sightless,
stiffening form of clay, from which the soul that animated it into
action has fled. Let the Church excommunicate this poor corpse of my
father,--let it muster its forces against his memory as it will, I
swear before you all, that memory shall live! Yes--for I, his son,
will guard it; I whom he so late acknowledged as his own flesh and
blood, will be a shield of defence for his name till I die! If
priests would attack him, they must attack him through me!--and I,
despite a thousand Churches, a thousand Creeds, a thousand
Sacraments, will firmly maintain that a man who frankly repents his
sins and is openly honest with the world before he leaves it, is a
better Christian than he, who for the sake of mere appearances and
conventionality, juggles with death and passes to his Maker's
presence in a black cloud of lies! Better to be crucified with
Christ, than live with the High Priests and Pharisees of the modern
Jerusalem of our social conditions! Truth may seem to perish on the
Cross of injustice--it may be buried in a sealed sepulchre, the
entrance to which may be closed up by a great stone of Mammon-bulk
and heaviness--but the moment must come when the Angel descends from
Heaven--when the stone is rolled away--and the eternal, living God
rises again and walks the world in the glory of a new dawn!"

He ended--and for a moment there was a deep silence. There had been
no funeral service, for no priest would attend the burial of the
heretic Abbe. So, after a brief pause, Cyrillon knelt down by the
grave,--and carried away by the solemnity of the scene, as well as
by their own emotional excitement, more than half the crowd knelt
with him, as, bending his head reverently over his clasped hands, he
prayed aloud--

"Oh God of Love, whose tenderness and care for Thy creation is
everywhere disclosed to us, from the smallest atom of dust, to the
stupendous majesty of Thy million worlds in the air,--give we
beseech Thee, to this perished clay which once was man, the beauty
which transforms vile things to virtuous, and endows our seeming
death with life! Let Thy eternal Law of Resurrection so work upon
this senseless body that it may pass through Earth to Heaven, and
there find finer grades of being, higher forms of development,
greater opportunities of perfection. And for the Soul, which is
Thine own breath of fire, O God, receive it, purified from sin, and
make it worthy of the final purpose for which Thou hast destined it
from the beginning! And grant unto us, left here to still work out
our own salvation on this the planet Thou hast chosen for our trial,
the power to comprehend Thy laws, and faithfully to obey them,--to
forgive as we would be forgiven,--to love as we would be loved,--and
to lift our thoughts from the appearance of this grave to the
Reality of Thy beneficence, which hath ordained Light out of
Darkness, and out of Death, Life, as proved most gloriously to us by
Christ our Brother, our Teacher and our Master! Amen!"

His prayer finished, the young man rose, and taking a wreath of ivy,
which he had travelled to Touraine himself to bring from the walls
of the simple cottage where his mother had lived and worked and
died, he dropped it gently on the coffin and signed to the grave-
diggers to fill in the earth. Then turning to the crowd, he said,

"My friends, I thank you all for the sympathy which has brought you
here to-day. 'It is finished.' The dead man is at rest! And now as
you go,--as you return to your own homes,--homes happy or unhappy as
the case may be, I will only ask you to remember that there is no
permanence or virtue in falsehood whether it be falsehood religious
or falsehood political,--and he who dies truthfully dealing with his
fellow-men, lives again with God, and is not, as Scripture says
'dead in his sins,' but born again to a new and more hopeful
existence!"

With the last words he gave the sign of dismissal. The people began
to disperse slowly and somewhat reluctantly, every member of the
crowd being curious to obtain a nearer view of the young orator who
not only spoke his thoughts fearlessly, but whose pen was as a
scythe mowing down a harvest of shams and hypocrisies, and whose
frank utterance from the heart was so honest as to be absolutely
convincing to the public. But he, after giving a few further
instructions to the men who were beginning to close in his father's
grave, walked away with one or two friends, and was soon lost to
sight in one of the many winding paths that led from the cemetery
out into the road, so that many who anxiously sought to study his
features more nearly, were disappointed. One person there was, who
had listened to his oration in wonder and open-mouthed admiration,--
this was Jean Patoux. He had taken the opportunity offered him in a
"cheap excursion" from Rouen to Paris, to visit a cousin of his who
was a small florist owning a shop in the Rue St. Honore,--and by
chance, he and this same cousin, while quietly walking together down
one of the boulevards, had got entangled in the press of people who
were pouring into Pere-la-Chaise on this occasion, and had followed
them out of curiosity, not at all knowing what they were going to
see. But the florist, known as Pierre Midon, soon realised the
situation and explained it all to his provincial relative.

"It is the Abbe Vergniaud they are burying," he said,--"He was a
wonderful preacher! All fashionable Paris used to go and hear him
till he made that pretty scandal of himself a month or so ago. He
was a popular and a social favourite; but one fine morning he
preached a sermon to his congregation all against the Church, and
for that matter against himself too, for he then and there confessed
before everybody that he was no true priest. And as he preached,--
what think you?--a young man fired a pistol shot at him for his
rascality, as everyone supposed, and when the gendarmes would have
taken the assassin, this same Abbe stopped them, and refused to
punish HIS OWN SON! What do you think of that for a marvel? And
something still more marvellous followed, for that very son who
tried to kill him was no other than Gys Grandit, the man we have
just heard speaking, though nobody knew it till a week afterwards.
Such a scene you never saw in a church!--Paris was wild with
excitement for a dozen hours, which is about as long as its fevers
last,--and the two of them, father and son, went straight away to a
famous Cardinal then staying in Paris,--and he, by the way, was in
the church when the Abbe publicly confessed himself--Cardinal
Bonpre--"

"Ah!" interrupted Patoux excitedly, "This interests me! For that
most eminent Cardinal stayed at my inn in Rouen before coming on
here!"

"So!" And Cousin Pierre looked rather surprised. "Without offence to
thee, Jean, it was a poor place for a Cardinal, was it not?"

"Poor, truly,--but sufficient for a man of his mind!" replied Patoux
tranquilly,--"For look you, he is trying to live as Christ lived,--
and Christ cared naught for luxury."

Pierre Midon laughed.

"By my faith! If priests were to live as Christ lived, Paris might
learn to respect them!" he said,--"But we know that they will not,--
and that few of them are better than the worst of us! But to finish
my story--this Abbe and the son whom he so suddenly and strangely
acknowledged, went to this Cardinal Bonpre for some reason--most
probably for pardon, though truly I cannot tell you what happened--
for almost immediately, the Abbe went out of Paris to the Chateau
D'Agramont some miles away, and his son went with him, and there the
two stayed together till the old man died. And as for Cardinal
Bonpre, he went at once to Rome with his niece, the famous painter,
Angela Sovrani,--I imagine he may have interceded with the Pope, or
tried to do so for the Abbe, but whatever happened, there they are
now, for all I know to the contrary. And we heard that the Church
was about to excommunicate, or had already excommunicated Vergniaud,
though I suppose Cardinal Bonpre had nothing to do with that?"

"Not he!" said Patoux firmly, "He would never excommunicate or do
any unkind thing to a living soul--that I am pretty sure of. He is
the very Cardinal who performed the miracle in my house that has
caused us no end of trouble,--and he is under the displeasure of the
Pope for it now, if all I hear be true."

"That is strange!" said Pierre with a laugh,--"To be under the
displeasure of the Pope for doing a good deed!"

"Truly, it seems so," agreed Patoux,--"But you must remember there
was no paying shrine concerned in it! Mark you that, my Pierre! Even
our Lady of Bon Secours, near to Rouen as she is, was not applied
to. The miracle took place in the poor habitation of an unknown
little inn-keeper,--that is myself,--and there was no solemnity at
all about it--no swinging of incense--no droning of prayers--no
lighting of candles--no anything, but just a good old man with a
crippled child on his knee, praying to the Christ whom he believed
was able to help him. And--and--"

He broke off suddenly and crossed himself. Pierre Midon stared at
the action.

"What ails thee, Jean?" he asked brusquely,--"Hast thou remembered a
dead sin, or a passing soul?"

"Neither," replied Patoux slowly, "But only just the thought of
another child--a waif and stray whom the good Cardinal found in the
streets of Rouen, outside our great Cathedral door. A gentle lad!--
my wife was greatly taken with him;--and he was present in my house
too, when the miracle of healing was performed."

"And for that, is there any need to cross thyself like a mumbling
old woman afraid of the devil?" enquired his cousin.

Patoux smiled a slow smile.

"Gently, Pierre--gently!" he said. "Thou art of Paris,--I of the
provinces. That makes all the difference in the way we look at life.
There are very few holy things in great cities,--but there are many
in the country. Every day when I am at home I go out of the town to
work in my field,--and I feel the clean breath of the wind, the
scent of the earth and the colours of the sky and the flowers,--and
I know quite well there is a God, or these blessings could not be.
For if there were only Chance and a Man to manage the universe, a
pretty muddle we should have of it! And when I see or think of a
holy thing, I sign the cross out of old childhood's habit,--so just
now, when I remembered the boy whom the Cardinal rescued from the
streets, I knew I was thinking of a holy thing; and that explains my
action."

"How dost thou prove a waif of the streets a holy thing?" enquired
Pierre curiously.

Patoux shrugged his shoulders, and gave a wide deprecatory wave of
both hands.

"Ah, that is more than I can tell you!" he said,--"It is a matter
beyond my skill. But the boy was a fair-faced boy,--I never saw him
myself--"

Midon laughed outright.

"Never saw him thyself!" he cried,--"And yet thou dost make the sign
of the cross at the thought of him! Diantre! Patoux, thou art
crazy!"

"Maybe--maybe," said Patoux mildly,--they were walking together out
of the cemetery by this time in the wake of the rapidly dispersing
crowd,--"But I have always taken my wife's word,--and I take it now.
And she has said over and over again to me that the boy had a rare
sweet nature. And then--the child whom the Cardinal healed,--Fabien
Doucet,--will always insist upon it that it was the touch of that
same boy which truly cured him and not the Cardinal at all!"

"Mere fancy!" said Pierre carelessly,--"And truly if it were not for
knowing thee to be honest, I should doubt the miracle altogether!"

"And thou wouldst be of the majority!" said Patoux equably--"For our
house has been a very bee-hive of buzz and trouble ever since a bit
of good was done in it--and Martine Doucet, the mother of the cured
child, has led the life of the damned, thanks to the kindness of her
neighbours and friends! And will you believe me, the Archbishop of
Rouen himself took the trouble to walk into the market-place and
assure her she was a wicked woman,--that she had taught her boy to
play the cripple in order to excite pity,--and I believe he thinks
she is concerned in the strange disappearance of his clerk, Claude
Cazeau. For this same Cazeau came to our house one night when
Martine was there, and told her he had instructions to take her to
Rome to see the Pope, and her child with her, for the purpose of
explaining the miracle in her own words, and giving the full life-
history of herself and the little one. And she was angry,--ah, she
can be very angry, poor Martine!--she has a shrill tongue and a wild
eye, and she said out flatly that she would not go, and furthermore
that she would not be caught in a priest's trap, or words to that
effect. And this clerk, Cazeau,--a miserable little white-livered
rascal, crawled away from my door in a rage with us all, and was
never seen again. The police have hunted high and low for trace of
him, but can find none. But I have my suspicions--"

"What are they?" enquired Midon,--"That he went out like Judas, and
hanged himself?"

"Truly he might have done that without loss or trouble to anyone!"
said Patoux tranquilly,--"But he thought too well of himself to be
quite so ready for a meeting with le bon Dieu! No!--I will tell you
what I think. There was a poor girl who used to roam about the
streets of our town, called Marguerite, she was once a sensible,
bright creature enough, the only daughter of old Valmond the
saddler, who died from a kick from his favourite horse one day, and
left his child all alone in the world. She was a worker in a great
silk-factory, and was happy and contented, so it seemed, till--well!
It is the old story--a man with a woman, and the man is most often
the devil in it. Anyway, this Marguerite went mad on her love-
affair,--and we called her 'La Folle,'--not harshly--for all the
town was kind to her. I mentioned her name once in the presence of
this man Cazeau, and he started as if an adder had bitten him. And
now--he has disappeared--and strange to say, so has she!"

"So has she!" echoed Midon, opening his eyes a little wider--"Then
what do you suppose?--"

"Just this," said Patoux, emphasizing his words by marking them out
with a fat thumb on the palm of the other hand--"That Cazeau was the
villain of the piece as they say in the theatres, and that she has
punished him for his villainy. She used to swear in her mad speech
that if ever she met the man who had spoilt her life for her, she
would kill him; and that is just what I believe she has done!"

"But would she kill herself also?" demanded Pierre--"And what has
become of one or both bodies?"

"Ah! There thou dost ask more than I can answer!" said Patoux. "But
what is very certain is, that both bodies, living or dead, have
disappeared. And as I said to my wife when she put these things into
my head,--for look you, my head is but a dull one, and if my wife
did not put things into it, it would be but an emptiness
altogether,--I said to my wife that if she were right in her
suspicions--and she generally is right--this Marguerite had taken
but a just vengeance. For you will not prove to me that there is any
man living who has the right to take the joy out of a woman's soul
and destroy it."

"It is done every day!" said Midon with a careless shrug,--"Women
give themselves too easily!"

"And men take too greedily!" said Patoux obstinately--"What virtue
there is in the matter is on the woman's side. For she mostly gives
herself for love's sake,--but the man cares naught save for his own
selfish pleasure. As a man myself, I am on the side of the woman who
revenges herself on her betrayer."

"For that matter so am I!" said Midon. "Women have a hard time of it
in this world, even under the best of circumstances,--and whatever
man makes it harder for them, should be horse-whipped within an inch
of his life, if I had my way. I have a wife--and a young daughter--
and my old mother sits at home with us, as cheery and bright a body
as you would find in all France,--and so I know the worth of women.
If any rascal were to insult my girl by so much as a look, he would
find himself in the ditch with a sore back before he had time to cry
'Dieu merci!'"

He laughed;--Patoux laughed with him, and then went on,--

"I told thee of the miracle in my house, and of the boy the Cardinal
found in the streets,--well!--these things have had their good
effect in my own family. My two children, Henri and Babette--ah!
What children! God be praised for them! As bright, as kind as the
sunlight,--and their love for me and their mother is a great thing--
a good thing, look you!--one cannot be sufficiently grateful for it.
For nowadays, children too often despise their parents, which is bad
luck to them in their after days; but ours, wild as they were a
while ago, are all obedience and sweetness. I used often to wonder
what would become of them as they grew up--for they were wilful and
angry-tempered, and ofttimes cruel in speech--but I have no fear
now. Henri works well at his lessons, and Babette too,--and there is
something better than the learning of lessons about them,--something
new and bright in their dispositions which makes us all happy. And
this has come about since the Cardinal stayed with us; and also
since the pretty boy was found outside the Cathedral!"

"That boy seems to have impressed thee more than the Cardinal
himself!" said Midon--"but now I remember well--on the day the Abbe
Vergniaud preached his last sermon, and was nearly shot dead by his
own son, there was a rumour that his life had been saved by some boy
who was an attendant on the Cardinal, and who interposed himself
between the Abbe and the flying bullet,--that must have been the one
you mean?"

"No doubt--no doubt!" said Patoux, nodding gravely--"There was
something about him that seemed a sort of shield against evil--or at
least, so said my wife,--and so say my children. Only the other day,
my boy Henri--he is big and full of mischief as boys will be--was
playing with two or three younger lads, and one of them like a
little sneak, stole up behind him and gave him a blow with a stick,
which broke in two with the force of the way the young rascal went
to work with it. Now, thought I, there will be need for me to step
out and stop this quarrel, for Henri will beat that miserable little
wretch into a jelly! But nothing of the sort! My boy turned round
with a bright laugh--picked up the two pieces of the stick and gave
them back to the little coward with a civil bow "Hit in front next
time!" he said. And the little wretch turned tail and began to boo-
hoo in fine fashion--crying as if he had been hurt instead of Henri.
But they are the best friends in the world now. I asked Henri about
it afterwards, and he turned as red as an apple in the cheeks. 'I
wanted to kill him, father,' he said,--'but I knew that the boy who
was with Cardinal Bonpre would not have done it--and so I did not!'
Now look you, for a rough little fellow such as Henri, that was a
great victory over his passions--and there is no doubt the
Cardinal's little foundling was the cause of his so managing
himself."