"It is, indeed, Lynette," says Guy, with mock gravity, when I make the remark to him. "The queerest place I have been in these thirty years."
As Guy is scarcely twenty-seven, it may be supposed I cannot help laughing.
But there is another queer thing. It does really seem as if villeins--at least some villeins--had genuine feelings, just like us nobles. I have always thought that it was because Marguerite had associated so much with nobles, that she seemed a little different--just as you might impart the rose-scent to a handkerchief, if you shut it in a drawer with rose-leaves. But I know she did not become my mother's nurse until after her husband was dead: so she must have had feelings before that, while she was no better off than any other villein. It is very incomprehensible. And I suppose, too, when one comes to think about it, we are all children of Adam and Eva. How did the difference come, to begin with?
It is very difficult to tell how things began. It is a great deal easier to see how they end. Who would suppose, if men had never found out, that the great river Danube, which rolls into the Black Sea, almost like a sea itself in volume, came from the meltings of the ice and snow upon the hills of Switzerland?
"Ha!" says Marguerite, when I repeat my thoughts to her, "the great God is so rich that He can bring the large things out of the small. We others, we can only bring the small out of the large."
"That sounds like spoiling things," said I.
"Men are very apt to spoil what they touch," she answered. "The good Lord never touches anything that He does not leave more beautiful. Has He not blessed childhood and manhood, by becoming Child and Man? Is not the earth fairer since He dwelt on it? and the little children dearer, since He took them in His arms and blessed them? Ah, He might have cared for me, and felt with me, just as much, if He had never been a Man: but it would not have been the same thing to me. And He knew it. When we love one very much, Damoiselle, we love what he has touched: and if he touch us, ourselves, it sends a delicious thrill through us. The good Lord knew that when He took on Him our nature, with all its sufferings and infirmities,--when He touched us every where--in sorrow, and weariness, and poverty, and hunger, and pain, and death. We can suffer nothing which He has not suffered first,--on which He has not laid His hand, and blessed it for His chosen. Thanks be to His Name! It is like honey sweetening everything. And the things that are bitter and acid want the most sweetening. So the good Lord chose poverty and pain. Ease and riches are sweet of themselves. I have heard Father Eudes read of one or two feasts where He was: He blessed joy as well as sorrow,--perhaps lest we should fancy that there was something holy in pain and poverty in themselves, and something wicked in being comfortable and happy. Some people do think so, after all. But I have heard Father Eudes read a great deal more of funerals than feasts, where the blessed Lord was. He seemed to go where people wanted comforting, much oftener than where they were comfortable. He knew that many more would sorrow than rejoice."
