The mischievous apes laughed—how they laughed!
“So, good Preacher,” said the dancer at last, rising to her feet, “thou dost know it is wrong to steal; but hast never felt hunger. Thou dost know it is wrong to love any but God, the Saints, and thy mother; but thou hast never known a mother, nor felt what it was to love. Blind eyes! Blind eyes! the very forest could teach thee these things an thou would’st learn. Farewell, good novice, back to thy Saints and thy nursery; for me the wide wide world; hunger and love—love—love!”
She seized her brother’s hand and together they danced away like two bright butterflies among the trees.
Hilarius stared after them until they disappeared, and then with dazed eyes and drooping head took his way back to the Monastery. The train of mules had just arrived; all was stir, bustle, and explanation; and in the thick of it he slipped in unseen, unquestioned; but he was hardly conscious of this mercy vouchsafed him, for in his heart reigned desolation and doubt, and in his ears rang the dancer’s parting cry, “Hunger and love—love—love!”
BROTHER BERNARD, the Precentor, dealt out gold, paint and vellum with generous hand to his favourite pupil, and wondered at his downcast look.
“Methinks this gold is dull, Brother,” said Hilarius one day, fretfully, to his old master.
“Nay, nay, boy; ’tis thine eyes at fault; naught ails the colours.”
Later, the Precentor came to look at the delicate border Hilarius was setting to the page of the Nativity of Our Lady.
“Now may God be good to us!” he cried with uplifted hands. “Since when did man paint the Blessed Mother with grey eyes and black hair—curly too, i’ faith?”
Hilarius crimsoned, he was weary of limning ever with blue and gold, he faltered.
It was the same in chapel. The insistent question pursued him through chant and psalm. Did he really _love_ the Saints—St Benedict, St Scholastica, St Bernard, St Hilary? The names left him untouched; but his lips quivered as he thought of the great love between the holy brother and sister of his Order. If he had had a sister would they have loved like that?
The Saints’ Days came and went, and he scourged himself with the repeated question, kneeling with burning cheeks, and eyes from which tears were not absent, in the Chapel of the Great Mother. “Light of Love,” the girl had called his mother; what more beautiful name could he find for the Queen of Saints herself? So he prayed in his simplicity:—“Great Light of Love, Mother of my mother, grant love, love, love, to thy poor sinful son!”