"I comprehend." The clear eyes flashed into Franky's, the withered brown mask was alight with sympathetic intelligence. "To Monsieur, an English officer and a member of the Protestant Church of England, that woman who leans her bursting heart upon the knees of the Mother of Consolation is Rachel." He quoted:
"'_Vox in Rama audita est, ploratus el ululatus: Rachel plorans filios suos: et noluit consolari, quia non sunt._'"
"That's it!" Franky nodded, admitting candidly: "Though I always was a duffer at Latin, and we weren't taught at School to pronounce it--quite in that way."
Said the clear-eyed old man, whose dark wrinkled throat displayed no edge of linen above the plain circular collar of the soutane, only a significant border of purple from which two widish lappets of the same colour depended beneath the peaked and mobile chin, and who might have been a prelate of sorts, had it not been understood of simple Franky that the State had abolished the Catholic religion and banished all priests, monks, and nuns from France.
"The Italianate Latin puzzles you.... It is--slightly different to the Latin they taught you at Eton? _Hein_? When I lived in England--not so long ago--I counted several brave Eton fellows among my acquaintances. And their mental attitude with regard to the language of Virgil, Horace, and Tacitus was precisely that of Monsieur."
He chuckled, and his oddly young eyes twinkled quite gaily as he pulled out a battered little silver snuff-box and helped himself, wrinkling his thin hooked nose with evident enjoyment. As he dusted the pungent brown grains from his lappets with a coarse blue-checked cotton handkerchief, an amethyst ring on the wrinkled hand flashed pink and violet in the light.
"To Monsieur who is doubtless familiar with the Scriptures in Tyndall's translation, I might suggest that the Latin of the Ancient Romans should be pronounced in the Roman style! But Monsieur will pardon this tone of the pedagogue. I will not 'bore you stiff' with a classical disquisition. Permit me to thank you for your amiable compliance with the request of an old man, and to wish you good-day."
He combined apology, farewell, and dismissal in a courtly little bow, and as though undoubting that the other would pass on, plunged again into the picture. But Franky lingered to say, awkwardly:
"Perhaps ... If you don't mind...."
"_Hein_? ..."
The keen eyes reverted to his embarrassed face instantly.
"What if I do not mind? ... There is something you desire to ask me?"
"Well, yes!" Franky admitted. "Don't quite pipe why, but I rather cotton to hearing your version.... Of the meaning of that picture, you know! ..."
"Yes--yes! I understand! ..." The vivid eyes flashed piercingly into Franky's, and leaped back to the great glorious canvas within the stately frame. "To you who were once a boy at Eton that woman who has no more tears to shed is Rachel of Rama.... To me, once Seminarist of the Institut Catholique, as to others of my holy faith and sacred calling--she is France--our beloved France, who leans upon the knees and against the bosom of the Catholic Church in her bereavement--mourning with anguish unutterable her children who are dead.... Dead to Faith, dead to the Spiritual Life--members separated from the Body of Christ by their own choice as by the act of Government. Lost!--unless the ray of Divine Grace find and touch them in their self-made darkness, and they repent, and turn themselves to Christ again!"
Franky said, with wholly lovable banality:
"Rather sweepin', but natural conclusion, from a religious point o' view. Still, when a whole nation gets up like one man and bally well chucks a Religion, there must be something jolly off-colour and thundering rotten about that Religion, don't you know?"
"A whole nation!"
The bright eyes held Franky's sternly. He lifted his right arm, and the withered hand still shut upon the battered snuff-box shot up two fingers in vigorous protest. "Pardon, Monsieur--you are very seriously mistaken. France was never more Catholic at heart than now. How strange!--when but twenty-one miles of salt water divide Calais from Dover--when the Entente Cordiale has established between your country and mine nominally close and intimate relations; that so complete an ignorance as to the French Nation, its Government, its mode of thought, its moral, religious, and social conditions, should be found prevailing in Great Britain to-day!"
"My dear sir, you're off the bull--completely off!" protested Franky--Franky whose second sister was married to a Frenchman, Franky who knew Paris as well as the inside of his week-end suit-case, by Jove!
A deprecating shrug and a supple outstretched hand cut short the speaker.
"Pardon, Monsieur l'Anglais--I know what you would say to me! There is much force in the argument.... It is _tres sensee_--and there is truth in it, and yet it is false--to be guilty of a paradox. The aristocracy of Great Britain, like her plutocracy, set high value upon much that comes from France. British gold is poured into my country in return for the newest and most fanciful modes in costume, millinery, and jewellery. And not only do your beautiful women adorn themselves with the inventions of our bold and original genius for ornament, but for your _menus_, your pleasures, the novels and plays that paint in intoxicating colours the joys of unchaste love and illicit passion, for the sensuous poetry that is garlanded with the flame-hued flowers of Evil, you are ready to praise and pay us lavishly, as though no nobler growth than this rank luxuriance sprang from the intellectual soil of France. Our vices--alas!--with the appalling diseases that spring from them, and the combinations of drugs that alleviate these--all find with you a ready market. And you attend our race-meetings at Longchamps and Auteuil, where English jockeys ride French and Irish horses--and you believe, you!--that you know the social life of France. No!--but you are ignorant--profoundly ignorant! May GOD be thanked that you misjudge us thus cruelly. For if my country were no better than Great Britain and other foreign nations believe her to be, it were time indeed for a rain of fire from Heaven!"
Hardly raising his voice above a clear whisper, the emotion and vehemence with which he spoke, and the swift and fiery gesticulations with which he illustrated utterance, made the sweat start out in beads upon his wrinkled forehead and cheeks. He wiped these off with the blue checked handkerchief, saying:
"Pardon! I grow warm when I speak of these things. I recognise that if in the judgment of other nations France is a courtesan drunk with lechery, or at the best _un esprit follet_, she has brought this judgment upon herself. Flippancy, the desire to _faire de l'esprit_ under any circumstances--the bold and brilliant gaiety that is her exclusive and most beautiful characteristic--these have caused her to be misunderstood. But whatever else she be, she is not Pagan nor Agnostic. To believe that is to wrong her cruelly, Monsieur!"
Franky, by now hopelessly at sea, endured the hailstorm of swift, vehement sentences with an expression of amiable vacuity, his stiffly pendent hands plainly yearning for the refuge of his trousers pockets, his mind rocking on the waves of the stranger's passionate eloquence like a toy yacht adrift on the bosom of the Atlantic. And the resonant Gallic voice went on:
*CHAPTER VIII*
*MONSEIGNEUR*
"The masters of France to-day are hostile to Christianity. They are Freemasons (Freemasonry in England is not Freemasonry as it is understood here); they are Freethinkers, Socialists, Internationalists, and Hedonists, the avowed enemies of the Catholic Faith. Hence, churches, seminaries, and schools have been closed by Government, communities of religious men and women have been uprooted and exiled. Priests have been banished, ecclesiastical and private property has been appropriated and confiscated, churches have been desecrated, the symbols of Christianity and religion everywhere torn down. In France upon Good Friday the standard of the Republic waves proudly, while the flag of every other Christian nation hangs at half-mast high. And yet--the great mass of the French people are--Catholic and nothing but Catholic! The light may be hidden, but the fire of devotion still burns in millions of faithful hearts gathered about the Church's altars, beating beside the hearths of innumerable homes in France. Blood--torrents of blood--would not quench that sacred fire. When the Day of Expiation comes, as it will come, most surely, the Catholicism of France will prove her salvation yet!"
With the final sentence, the hand that had been lifted in gesture dropped to the side of the speaker. The flashing glance took in Franky from the top of his sleek bewildered head to the tips of his beautiful patent-leathers. He said with a smile of irresistible amusement:
"Monsieur, I fear I have fatigued you. Let me thank you for your admirable patience. _Au revoir_, or if you prefer it--_Adieu_!"