“That miracle is attested. Yet—”
“Consider how holy Gonfal also perished as a martyr among the infidels of Inis Dahut, after his chaste resistance to the improper advances of their Queen! There, madame, was a very soul-stirring example for you, because you brunettes are not easy to resist.”
“Get along with you, you rogue! My eyes stay dark and keen enough to see that what hair I have is white in these days.”
“Then also, pious Miramon Lluagor, it is well known, converted many hundreds of the heathen about Vraidex, by the great miracle which he wrought when Koshchei the Deathless, and Toupan, the Duke of Chaos, and Moloch, Lord of the Land of Tears, and Nergal, the Chief of Satan’s Secret Police,—and several thousand other powers of evil whose names and infernal degrees at this instant evade me,—came swarming out of hell in the form of gigantic bees.”
“It is known that such favor was vouchsafed by Heaven to the faith and the prayers of Miramon. Ninzian, indeed, was present at the time, and told me about those awful insects. Each was about as large as a cow, but their language was much worse. Nevertheless—”
But Jurgen was nowhere near done. “Then Guivric,” he pointed out,—“Guivric of Perdigon, also, in whom the old leaven stayed longer than in the others, so that for a while he kept some little faults, they say, in the way of pride and selfishness,—Guivric got wholly rid of these blemishes after his notable trip into the East to discomfit single-handed the signal schisms of the pernicious and sinister Sylan. There was never a sweeter nor a more prodigally generous nor a more generally lovable saint upon earth than all found Guivric after his return from exorcising that heathen heresiarch into a mere pile of bones; and so the dear old Heitman stayed up to the glorious hour of his seraphic death.”
“That is true. I recall the change in Guivric, and it was most edifying.”
“Do you recall, also, madame, how the venerable Kerin went down to teach the truth about the Redeemer in the deepest fastnesses of error and delusion! and how he there confuted, one by one, the frivolous scientific objections of the overseers of hell,—with a patience, a painstakingness and a particularity surprising even in an apostle,—in an argument which lasted twenty years!”
“That also is true. In fact, it was his own wife who told me about it. Nevertheless—”
But Jurgen was still talking. “Lastly, madame, my beloved father Coth, as a matter of equally general knowledge, went as an evangelist among the brown-skinned and black-hearted unbelievers of Tollan. He introduced among them the amenities of civilization and true religion. He taught them to cover their savage nakedness. And, in just the manner of holy Gonfal, Coth likewise subdued the goad of carnal desire and the prick of his flesh—not once, but many times,—when Coth also was tempted by such an ill-regulated princess as but to think of crimsons the cheek of decency.”
The Countess said, meditatively: “You and your cheek—However, do you go on!”
Jurgen now shook a grizzled head, in rather shocked deprecation. “You ask the impossible. Upon the innumerable other pious exploits of Coth, I, as his wholly unworthy son, may not dwell without appearing vainglorious. That would be most unbecoming. For the modesty of my father was such, madame, that, I must tell you, not even to me, his own son, did he ever speak of these matters. The modesty of my father was such that—as was lately revealed to a devout person in a vision,—even now my father esteems himself unworthy of celestial bliss; even now his conscience troubles him as to the peccadillos of his earlier and unregenerate days; and even now he elects to remain among what, in a manner of speaking, might be termed the less comfortable conditions of eternal life.”
“He is privileged, no doubt, to follow his own choice: for his consecrated labors are attested. Nevertheless. . . .”
Then for a while Dame Niafer considered. These certainly were the facts as to the lords of the Silver Stallion, whom she herself could remember as having been, in the far-off days of her youth, comparatively imperfect persons: these acts of the apostles were facts recorded in the best-thought-of chronicles, these were the facts familiar even to children, facts which now a lengthy while ago, along with many other edifying facts about the saintly lords of the Silver Stallion, had each been fitted into its proper niche as a part of the great legend of Manueclass="underline" and as she appraised these facts, the old Countess validly perceived the strength of Jurgen’s argument. . . .
“Yes,” Niafer conceded, by and by, “yes, what you say is true. These consecrated persons had faults when they were first chosen by my husband to be his companions: but through their intimacy with him, and through the force of his example, they were purged of these faults, they were made just and perfect: and after the Redeemer’s passing, they fared stainlessly, and were his apostles, and carried that faith which his living had taught them into every direction and about all quarters of the earth. These are the facts recorded in each history book.”
“So, you perceive, Centurion dear! I can but repeat that, in the axiom favored by my honored father, every tree must be judged by its fruits. The exploits of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion I estimate as the first fruits of the cult of the Redeemer. Men of the somewhat lax principles to which these apostles in their younger days—I say it in the proper spirit, madame,—did now and then, we know, succumb, such men are not unmiraculously made just and perfect. I deduce we may declare this cult of Manuel the Redeemer to be a heavenly inspired and an in all ways admirable cult, since it produces miraculously, from the raw material of alloyed humanity, such apostles. This cult has already, in the holy lives and the high endings of the lords of the Silver Stallion, madame, passed the pragmatic test: it is a cult that works.”
“Besides,” said Niafer, with a not unfeminine ellipsis, and with a feminine preference for something quite tangible, “there is that last sight of my husband’s entry into glory, which as a child you had upon Upper Morven, and the fearful eucharist which you witnessed there. I could never understand why there was not even one angel present, when as many as seven came for Donander. Even so, you did witness very holy and supernatural occurrences with which Heaven would never have graced the passing of an ordinary person.”
“The imagination of a child—” began Jurgen. He stopped short. He added, “Very certainly, madame, your logic is acute, and your deduction is unassailable by me.”
“At all events—” Then it was Niafer who stopped abruptly.
But in a while she continued speaking, and in her withered face was much that puzzled and baffled look which Coth’s old face had worn toward the end.
“At all events, it was only a dream about those hussies. And at all events, it is near time for dinner,” said Dame Niafer. “And people must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all. I have not the imagination of a child. I am old. And when you get old it is better not to imagine things. It is better for an old person not to have any dreams. It is better for an old person not to think. Only one thing is good for an old person, and gives to that old person an end of loneliness and of bad dreams and of too much thinking.”
Niafer arose, not without difficulty; and the bent, limping, very aged Countess Dowager of Poictesme now went away from Jurgen, slowly and moodily.
Chapter LXX. All Ends Perplexedly