After such a night, again in his home with the day's work and play ended, kneeling beside his lonely little bed beneath the crucifix, the sorrow, the shame, the pain, the misery caused by all of life seemed to surge through his veins like a tempestuous sea overwhelming all before it. Quickly crossing himself, sighing while gently shaking his head, he would once again become the good Abbé Jacques Picot. He was, so to speak, a religious free-lance; a priest without benefice, whose relations with the authority of the Church were scarcely evident--a condition somewhat prevalent in France. Yet, unlike many of his brother clerics, he believed his parish to consist of humanity at large.
"Wherever a heart is broken, a soul is sick, or a body suffering," he is known to have said, "it is there I have a work to do. _Patria est ubicumque est bene._ So my task is wherever joy may be made."
Yet withal, at heart and in temperament he was a loyal Parisian.
Just how long the Abbé's meditations had been going on from the moment he had ceased to read until the concièrge, after knocking upon the door, slipped in and laid a letter upon his lap, it would be difficult to calculate. Whatever that may have been, for much longer did he read, reread, and study the missive before him. Finally he raised his good gray eyes, filled with a sort of an amazing despair, and cried aloud:
"Jacques, Jacques, thou art indeed sore beset. To be one man is of course to be none at all; to be two is the average lot of the more fortunate; but to be no less than five, by all the saints in paradise, is to be worse off than that angel whose right wing was born of heaven and the left of hell!"
"What is it, my brother?" one of the men within him seemed quietly to ask. In fact, the wee, small voice appeared so actual that the good Abbé was startled.
By way of reply, for the hundredth time he read the letter.... It was from a Doctor Felix Longstreet of Oldmeadow, Kentucky, United States of America, announcing an inheritance--that is, with conditions. To him it meant wealth.
"Shall you go?" now inquired the quiet man uneasily.
"It is a green, grassy old name for a town," was the rather irrelevant reply.
"Do you wish to go?" again came the inquiry from the same anxious source.