He was much beloved. Notwithstanding that among the clergy there were two or three who shook their heads and raised their eyebrows, and said he would be at least as orthodox if he did not make quite so much of the Bible and quite so little of the dogmas, yet "the common people heard him gladly." When told, one day, of the unfavorable whispers, he smiled a little and answered his informant,--whom he knew to be one of the whisperers himself,--laying a hand kindly upon his shoulder:
"Father Murphy,"--or whatever the name was,--"your words comfort me."
"How is that?"
"Because--"_Vae quum benedixerint mihi homines_!""*
[*"Woe unto me, when all men speak well of me!"]
The appointed morning, when it came, was one of those exquisite days in which there is such a universal harmony, that worship rises from the heart like a spring.
"Truly," said Pere Jerome to the companion who was to a.s.sist him in the ma.s.s, "this is a Sabbath day which we do not have to make holy, but only to _keep_ so."
May be it was one of the secrets of Pere Jerome"s success as a preacher, that he took more thought as to how he should feel, than as to what he should say.
The cathedral of those days was called a very plain old pile, boasting neither beauty nor riches; but to Pere Jerome it was very lovely; and before its homely altar, not homely to him, in the performance of those solemn offices, symbols of heaven"s mightiest truths, in the hearing of the organ"s harmonies, and the yet more eloquent interunion of human voices in the choir, in overlooking the worshipping throng which knelt under the soft, chromatic lights, and in breathing the sacrificial odors of the chancel, he found a deep and solemn joy; and yet I guess the finest thought of his soul the while was one that came thrice and again:
"Be not deceived, Pere Jerome, because saintliness of feeling is easy here; you are the same priest who overslept this morning, and overate yesterday, and will, in some way, easily go wrong to-morrow and the day after."
He took it with him when--the _Veni Creator_ sung--he went into the pulpit. Of the sermon he preached, tradition has preserved for us only a few brief sayings, but they are strong and sweet.
"My friends," he said,--this was near the beginning,--"the angry words of G.o.d"s book are very merciful--they are meant to drive us home; but the tender words, my friends, they are sometimes terrible! Notice these, the tenderest words of the tenderest prayer that ever came from the lips of a blessed martyr--the dying words of the holy Saint Stephen, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." Is there nothing dreadful in that?
Read it thus: "Lord, lay not this sin to _their_ charge." Not to the charge of them who stoned him? To whose charge then? Go ask the holy Saint Paul. Three years afterward, praying in the temple at Jerusalem, he answered that question: "I stood by and consented." He answered for himself only; but the Day must come when all that wicked council that sent Saint Stephen away to be stoned, and all that city of Jerusalem, must hold up the hand and say: "We, also, Lord--we stood by." Ah!
friends, under the simpler meaning of that dying saint"s prayer for the pardon of his murderers is hidden the terrible truth that we all have a share in one another"s sins."
Thus Pere Jerome touched his key-note. All that time has spared us beside may be given in a few sentences.
"Ah!" he cried once, "if it were merely my own sins that I had to answer for, I might hold up my head before the rest of mankind; but no, no, my friends--we cannot look each other in the face, for each has helped the other to sin. Oh, where is there any room, in this world of common disgrace, for pride? Even if we had no common hope, a common despair ought to bind us together and forever silence the voice of scorn!"
And again, this:
"Even in the promise to Noe, not again to destroy the race with a flood, there is a whisper of solemn warning. The moral account of the antediluvians was closed off and the balance brought down in the year of the deluge; but the account of those who come after runs on and on, and the blessed bow of promise itself warns us that G.o.d will not stop it till the Judgment Day! O G.o.d, I thank thee that that day must come at last, when thou wilt destroy the world, and stop the interest on my account!"
It was about at this point that Pere Jerome noticed, more particularly than he had done before, sitting among the worshippers near him, a small, sad-faced woman, of pleasing features, but dark and faded, who gave him profound attention. With her was another in better dress, seemingly a girl still in her teens, though her face and neck were scrupulously concealed by a heavy veil, and her hands, which were small, by gloves.
"Quadroones," thought he, with a stir of deep pity.
Once, as he uttered some stirring word, he saw the mother and daughter (if such they were), while they still bent their gaze upon him, clasp each other"s hand fervently in the daughter"s lap. It was at these words:
"My friends, there are thousands of people in this city of New Orleans to whom society gives the ten commandments of G.o.d with all the _nots_ rubbed out! Ah! good gentlemen! if G.o.d sends the poor weakling to purgatory for leaving the right path, where ought some of you to go who strew it with thorns and briers!"
The movement of the pair was only seen because he watched for it. He glanced that way again as he said:
"O G.o.d, be very gentle with those children who would be nearer heaven this day had they never had a father and mother, but had got their religious training from such a sky and earth as we have in Louisiana this holy morning! Ah! my friends, nature is a big-print catechism!"
The mother and daughter leaned a little farther forward, and exchanged the same spasmodic hand-pressure as before. The mother"s eyes were full of tears.
"I once knew a man," continued the little priest, glancing to a side aisle where he had noticed Evariste and Jean sitting against each other, "who was carefully taught, from infancy to manhood, this single only principle of life: defiance. Not justice, not righteousness, not even gain; but defiance: defiance to G.o.d, defiance to man, defiance to nature, defiance to reason; defiance and defiance and defiance."
"He is going to tell it!" murmured Evariste to Jean.
"This man," continued Pere Jerome, "became a smuggler and at last a pirate in the Gulf of Mexico. Lord, lay not that sin to his charge alone! But a strange thing followed. Being in command of men of a sort that to control required to be kept at the austerest distance, he now found himself separated from the human world and thrown into the solemn companionship with the sea, with the air, with the storm, the calm, the heavens by day, the heavens by night. My friends, that was the first time in his life that he ever found himself in really good company.
"Now, this man had a great aptness for accounts. He had kept them--had rendered them. There was beauty, to him, in a correct, balanced, and closed account. An account unsatisfied was a deformity. The result is plain. That man, looking out night after night upon the grand and holy spectacle of the starry deep above and the watery deep below, was sure to find himself, sooner or later, mastered by the conviction that the great Author of this majestic creation keeps account of it; and one night there came to him, like a spirit walking on the sea, the awful, silent question: "My account with G.o.d--how does it stand?" Ah! friends, that is a question which the book of nature does not answer.
"Did I say the book of nature is a catechism? Yes. But, after it answers the first question with "G.o.d," nothing but questions follow; and so, one day, this man gave a ship full of merchandise for one little book which answered those questions. G.o.d help him to understand it! and G.o.d help you, monsieur and you, madame, sitting here in your _smuggled clothes_, to beat upon the breast with me and cry, "I, too, Lord--I, too, stood by and consented.""
Pere Jerome had not intended these for his closing words; but just there, straight away before his sight and almost at the farthest door, a man rose slowly from his seat and regarded him steadily with a kind, bronzed, sedate face, and the sermon, as if by a sign of command, was ended. While the _Credo_ was being chanted he was still there; but when, a moment after its close, the eye of Pere Jerome returned in that direction, his place was empty.
As the little priest, his labor done and his vestments changed, was turning into the Rue Royale and leaving the cathedral out of sight, he just had time to understand that two women were purposely allowing him to overtake them, when the one nearer him spoke in the Creole patois, saying, with some timid haste:
"Good-morning, Pere--Pere Jerome; Pere Jerome, we thank the good G.o.d for that sermon."
"Then, so do I," said the little man. They were the same two that he had noticed when he was preaching. The younger one bowed silently; she was a beautiful figure, but the slight effort of Pere Jerome"s kind eyes to see through the veil was vain. He would presently have pa.s.sed on, but the one who had spoken before said:
"I thought you lived in the Rue des Ursulines."
"Yes; I am going this way to see a sick person."
The woman looked up at him with an expression of mingled confidence and timidity.
"It must be a blessed thing to be so useful as to be needed by the good G.o.d," she said.
Pere Jerome smiled:
"G.o.d does not need me to look after his sick; but he allows me to do it, just as you let your little boy in frocks carry in chips." He might have added that he loved to do it, quite as much.
It was plain the woman had somewhat to ask, and was trying to get courage to ask it.
"You have a little boy?" asked the priest.
"No, I have only my daughter;" she indicated the girl at her side. Then she began to say something else, stopped, and with much nervousness asked:
"Pere Jerome, what was the name of that man?"
"His name?" said the priest. "You wish to know his name?"
"Yes, Monsieur" (or _Miche_, as she spoke it); "it was such a beautiful story." The speaker"s companion looked another way.
"His name," said Father Jerome,--"some say one name and some another.
Some think it was Jean Lafitte, the famous; you have heard of him? And do you go to my church, Madame----?"
"No, Miche; not in the past; but from this time, yes. My name"--she choked a little, and yet it evidently gave her pleasure to offer this mark of confidence--"is Madame Delphine--Delphine Carraze."
CHAPTER VI.