The Christian Vagabond ... With illustrations by the author

Introduction

. IN the lives of some good and great men, and in the works which they have left behind them, I have, perhaps, found the disjecta membra of the " Christian Vagabond." In the " Bienfaiteur des Pauvres," in the Life of Montyon, in Dragonetti's " Traitc des Versus et des Recompenses" in Beccaria, and in the memoirs of scores of men who " blossom in the dust," I have unconsciously gathered, I have no doubt, the framework and the fleshly clothing of my Christian Giant. I have been urged by the commendation of readers scattered far and wide, who made his acquaintance in the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine, to put my record of his pilgrimages together ; and the love of a subject that has engaged the greater part of my working days, has tempted me to add a pencil-touch here and there to the beaming figure of my dreams.

CONTENTS. CHAPTER PACE i. the chapei. of ease of age ..... i ii. the chamber of christ ...... 17 111. dame Rebecca's story . . . . . . . 27 iv. a funeral in charity 39 v. by the old man's chimney-corner .... 53 vi. the wall-fruit . . . . . . . .71 yii. the vagabond's story 8l viii. my first footprint ....... 94 ix. gathering simples il8 x. the planting of the cresset i38 xl the beggar's paradise ...... i48 XII. THE BEGGARS ., j y j XIII. THE GUEST FROM GOD . . . . . . . 180 XIV. THE BEGINNING OF THE END 197 XV. NEAR HOME .... - 208 XVI. WHERE HE LIES 22

Chapter I

, THE CHAPEL OF EASE OF AGE. "What is age? But the holy place of life, the chapel of ease For all men's wearied miseries." — Massinger. O old was he, in that company of the aged, ithat Dame Rebecca implored Sister Ursula to put back the lapping frill of her nightcap> that she might strive, with her dim sight of ninety years, to make out his face and figure. He had had the antique force and frame : and still, although there was infinite weariness in his face, and lassitude in the movement of his stoutly set limbs, he appeared of a race and build whereof we see only rare examples in these later days of an enervating civilization.. Dame Rebecca was the oldest by nine years of the old dames who were gathered about the Vagabond ; and she had been for a year or two a curious sight to the visitors whom Sister Ursula brought to her bedside.

The constant wonder of the sisterhood was — would Dame Rebecca see a century out ? They could find no ailment in her. She had neither cough nor craze. Only the lamp gave a pale light — as a beacon seen from afar. The old lady seemed to speak and look from a mighty distance ; and the face was not capable of much change of expression. It was sweet and placid : lighted coldly — as with the flickering of a corpse-candle. The wrinkles had lost their depth by dint of stealing one upon the other, until the human mask was broken up like the ancient glaze on jars old fashioned mothers prize. The colour was solid yellow, white, at points, or nearly so ; but nowhere suggesting the movement of blood beneath. As she looked, supported in the bed by Sister Ursula, Dame Rebecca held forth her hand to the Vagabond.

It was of sallow-grey colour, and so thin, and frail, the Stranger took it in his ample palm with the uttermost gentleness. And then he bent forward and placed his lips quietly upon the wrinkled brow of the dame, saying : — " Peace be with you, my sister ; you have journeyed far." As the Vagabond withdrew his touch from hand and brow, Dame Rebecca's face beamed with a passing light ; and she sank back upon her pillow. The quiet singers of Sister Ursula played tenderly about the venerable head, smoothing every fold of the clothes — while from the poor mouth, broken out of all shape, came murmurs of something that seemed to be of the far away. And while the Vagabond looked steadfastly upon the old, old plaything of Time before him, marking all the wonders the years had wrought, without being able to lay an icy finger upon that human heart, he said, as to himself, unmindful wholly of the silent host of the Aged who had gathered about him : — " It is a good face.

Smoothe the brow : plump the cheeks, and pass a Spring's rosy finger over them : set the dew and crimsons of youth upon the lips ; remount the pearly portals of speech, and wake girl hood's music in the alabaster throat. Nay, but it must have been a good face. The barely covered skeleton proclaims it. Lady of Charity," the Vaga bond continued, laying his hand on the flannel sleeve of a pale figure that hardly reached his belt, at its full height, and without drawing his eyes for an in stant from the placid face of Dame Rebecca, " Lady of Charity, your sister hath a noble countenance, as she waits in the antechamber, to pass. She should have garnered, in the almost complete century she has spent under the stars, a profitable round of experi ences. That she has suffered, I know ; for sorrow has scalded every pore of the comely face.

It is rever ence-worthy by its burden." Stealing to the bed-side near Sister Ursula, the Lady of Charity lifted a finger, and inclined her ear. The eyes of the Vagabond passed from the sleeper to the watcher; from the Sorrow ending upon the bed to the living Beauty, strong and gentle— too humble to meet approbation in the eyes of men, and too earnest to be feeble. She was so light that her movements made no noise. The spirit was held to the earth by a thousand threads of sympathies, and not by a single fleshy tie. Not a woman to be wed, save for the sweet example of a perfect mother. And yet beautiful as woman is, at her best and highest— and, something more. No feature to commend, still less any to condemn. An expression that resented praise ; and, if aught so gentle could command, compelled worship ; a voice, gladdening to the ears, and glorifying to the heart, as the melodies on which a hermit sups in summer woods ; an eye, under the melting holiness of which Anger dropped his arm, and unclosed his hand ; and curses sweetened to kisses.

But the brush disgraces the Lady of Charity — for never pure, enraptured nun in voluntary prison lying comfortless, saw a brighter presence in her dreams. And still she stood, her flannel robe flowing from over the radiance of her head to confused graces of rippling lines about her feet. " She sleeps," Sister Ursula presently said, softly and dutifully, by the ear of the Lady of Charity. Sister Charity — chief sister under the roof which at that moment covered the Christian Vagabond — dropped her lily hand within her flannel folds, and smiled towards the Vagabond — raising her eyes no higher than his girdle. It was then that, for the first time that day, she spake. " She sleeps ! " No softer nor more plaintive note has the nightingale. Sweeter beseeching the sick child has not, than the Lady of Charity bore in her modulation of two simple words.

Sleep, seldom closer in its portraiture of death, fell upon the wasted image of God. Was it worth the trouble of waking again in the antechamber, now that all the limbs were composed, and that the spirit's wings were stirring the air ? " Death never had such a counterfeit before," the Vagabond said. " A baby's hand would stay the poor heart : but yet, patiently it beateth onward to the appointed number. Ninety-eight years passed ! I cannot tell why I should be so drawn to this bed — I who have seen every aspect of death, and have rested coin enough upon the closed eyes of sisters and brethren to tell a modest man's fortune. I am as one dreaming that I am dreaming; and, all at sea, my brain is on the stretch for some derelict fancy — some treasure-galleon once sighted, and now sunk." Fifty weird, old faces were turned towards the Christian Vagabond as he spoke to the air, by Dame Rebecca's bedside.

Some looked devoutly, some wonderingly, many vacantly, and others interlaced their hands in a neighbourly way ; and, albeit fright ened, could not forbear from chattering under their breath, as the habit of their life-stage is. " You know her story, Sister Charity ? " the Vaga bond asked, moderating and warming his voice and manner. The Lady of Charity moved from the bed lest her tongue should disturb the sleeper; and bowing as she passed the Stranger, bade him follow her. But first she did the honours of her house. It was a holy kingdom, wherein all the inmates — or nearly all — had passed the allotted span of life : and all things were adapted to the easy use of palsied men and women. There were contrivances by which the man who had only one valid limb could make it serve him to the utmost.

By happy art, the whisper was borne far off to the attentive sister. The old men knew not, under that roof, when the east wind blew. The windows laughed with flowers. Song-birds glad dened the covered galleries where Age sat echoing idly the strains and laughter of youth. There were suites of rooms of various temperatures, about which the guests of the Lady of Charity could travel, taking a season to their liking. No dull, soul-saddening round of sameness, in ward and uniform and food, and hours of sleeping and rising, oppressed the spirits of the guests. They were free to go and come. Only the divine witchery of the eye and lips of her whom they christened " The Lady," and whom the sisters called simply — albeit she was chief— Sister Charity, kept the house full, and drew supplicants to the gate.

Every morning when the hour of solitude was over — an hour which sisters and guests alike gave up to peace with God and prayer, each according to his own heart and the example he had been taught to follow — the gates were thrown open, and, through a grove of olives, the poor without paced to the chamber in which ' the Lady of Charity sat to receive them. But so many were infirm, that it was seldom the Lady kept her seat, for to the first aching crea ture who limped she gave her chair, and would not be refused. The many whom she could not shelter she sent away blessing her. Her holy handmaids bound their limbs, cloaked them against the winter, put comforts in their baskets, and were they very feeble or in grievous plight, would accompany them home. " The Lady " kissed her poor as she dismissed them, giving them good counsel, and sustaining them with hopeful words.

It was part of the duty of her sister hood to follow them, and mark their conduct in their daily lives. " The best come to me the first," the Lady said every day. " I wish I could take all." And when she had to chide — as chide she must and could at times — she put the force of her reproach in the deeper gentleness of her voice, and smote to the wrong-doer's heart with the genuine tears which a story of sin called into her eyes. " Leave me, to-day," she would sob to an old woman who had been found yesterday quarrelling with her neighbours, or besotted, or doing an unhand some action, "leave me : it is too painful to see you. But come back to me soon, and let me kiss you, and some day put you among my best, that I may smoothe your pillow, and wipe your feet, and hold your last cup to you, if I may be here when you are called."

The guilty would bow the head, and rain tears upon the Lady's hand, and implore forgiveness ; but she could not be comforted, and would not forgive, till she had seen the repentance. It was a plain chamber where the poor had daily audience of the Lady of Charity, vaulted from the four corners by two pairs of drooping wings, sculptured in white marble, the two years' handiwork of a guest who died over the last feather of the fourth wing. The Vagabond, following in the footsteps of " the Lady " and her two attendant sisters, made a mighty stir in the open galleries. Ancient men turned in their arm-chairs, or wheeled themselves forward, or paused in their gossip and shaded their weak eyes, to see the noble figure of the Stranger. And, in truth, the Christian Vagabond was a man to behold wonderingly.

He was, it has been already observed of him, of the ancient form and frame — as conceived by Michael Angelo, and wrought with his mighty wrist. Far, very far — so far, none could count his years — beyond his lusty prime, he still stood erect, and the muscles played along his bare arm as he grasped his staff some inches from its crown ; and the silent colonnades rang when it struck the marble pavement, beating time to his progress as the Swiss does in cathedral aisles. His head was massive as that of Jove, thatched about and bearded with crisp white hair ; with here and there an under-shadow of iron grey. His chest was bare, and bronzed as his face. Stout sandals braced his feet, and his body and limbs were loosely wrapped in blue coarse cloth that was old, but would not wear out ; cloth spun by strong fingers, and woven at a giant's loom.

A leather wallet completed his outer man. By him, as she glided, the Lady of Charity was the lily by the oak, as the flower to the wall — the plume to the helmet. His shadow, when he gallantly stooped towards her ear, to talk with her of her sacred domain, wholly covered her. Yet he was as gentle as his hostess. All his strength was given to good uses. His beaming eyes were perhaps a little dimmed by his extran ordinary age, but they were not chilled. He spoke with a strong chest. His words vibrated when he subdued his voice, and the rumblings of muffled strength sounded within him. Each was valiant as the other, and as full of force : the lily hand perdu in the sister's flannel, and the gnarled fist that gripped the ringing staff: the voice of nightingale, and the lungs that could gossip through the storm.

At a low door in the eastern gallery the Lady of Charity stood, and motioned the Christian Vagabond to pass within. At this moment a cripple, horrible to behold, so twisted and degraded from the proper human form was he, shuffled towards the Lady, and peered, as it seemed, out of a tumbled mass of clothes, into her face. She bent and kissed the forehead beaded with pain. " Creep gently, for she sleeps," the Lady said ; and the cripple shuffled, biting his lip, to the sick bed. It was the refectory of the Lady and her hand maids. " Here," the stranger said, his solemn words thrill ing in the empty room, " here, Lady of Charity, I am at home." "Be welcome," said the Lady. "After your wanderings through the world, and over the graves of many generations, we, who have prayed so often to the good God— between whose thumb and fore finger, you once said, the world is held, as though it were an orange — to keep you safe in His bosom ; are happy to see you at our board, and to give you rest under our rafters."

The Christian Vagabond bowed, and answered, " God, Sister Charity, lady of this good work — God is good to all of us — beyond our deserts." " We will strive still to be thankful more and more. Let us eat," the Lady of Charity answered. The sisters assembled, and two spread the feast. The board was of white deal. The platters were of wood. The cups were of horn. Upon each platter was a white napkin, folded severely square. Brown pitchers, full of water, were at the corners ofthe table. The dainties ! Let the fastidious take a lesson ! The serving sisters of the day appeared, bearing two brown dishes heaped with bread. The broken crust — the cast-aside morsels — of the Lady of Charity's guests, were the pieces de resistance of the feast. * Such bones and scraps as the fastidious would not give their dogs, were placed before the holy women and their guest.

The little mouths were sorely tried, at times, with very tough and ugly leavings ; but the Lady said they had never found a morsel that had resisted them. "Soften and flavour the crust to the poor with the salt tears of pity," the Christian Vagabond said, after one or two unsuccessful bites at a particularly stony corner of bread ; " and it is meat and wine to them." " And crusts and scraps make wholesome meals," Sister Charity observed, looking brightly round at the happy company. " God gives us health to eat the things our poor old guests have not the strength to break nor swallow ; so that when all our dear old people are served, we eat in peace and thankfulness the hard food they have rejected." "It is well, Sister Charity," the Stranger said ; "and it is, I bear witness, health-giving.

When I have feasted, as in the busy world they feast, I have suffered illness ; but I have sung to the lark, I have laughed with the summer wind, and smiled with the flowers, when I have broken my fast on road-side berries and a crust, and taken my stirrup-cup with my nose in the bubbles of the brook. . Nay, but fasting is healthier than dainty feasting. A little hunger will never make men ill. It gives zest to the body, and a spring to the mind." The sisters listened to the words of the grave Stranger who had come, his holy renown preceding him, within their gates ; and they were delighted when, in one of the pauses of his conversation with the Lady, she said, in her sweetest voice of be seeching, — " I have promised my sisters to beg that — now, at length, after so many years of praying for your safety and watching for your coming, you have passed our threshold, and examined our little account of honest work permitted us in the holy service of Him to whom we all belong, — I have promised you will in struct us with some passages of your travels."

The Christian Vagabond's face had an extraordinary earnestness and penetration in it while he listened to the Lady of Charity's request ; and when he was about to answer her, under the anxious eyes of the sisterhood, he laid his hand upon her sleeve so im pressively, that her arm could hardly bear the strong man's pressure. He recollected the Lady's weakness and his own force, and was at once gentle as an infant. " I am rough, good Lady of Charity ; the bluff winds and drenching skies, and sleep in the open air, have made me so. But of my travels we will talk, if they should prove interesting to you, presently. You will remember that I asked all you may tell of the story of Dame Rebecca." The Lady of Charity was beginning — " So much as I may and should tell to him who is called the Christian Vagabond, I " The cripple, whom the lady had kissed at the re fectory door, rolled, or scrambled, with a great clatter, into the room.

"The Lady must come ! The Lady must come ! " the creature cried shrilly. The Lady of Charity passed out, followed by the Christian Vagabond, to the Chamber where Dame Rebecca lay. Round about, among the disordered chairs, old women were kneeling. Sister Ursula was at the bed side, kneeling also, with the hand of Dame Rebecca clasped in hers. Sweet, far beyond human sweetness, was the white face of the Lady, as she threaded through the bowed groups in the antechamber, who were praying for one who had just passed through. The Christian Vagabond's footsteps were as light as those of the Lady of Charity. His grand head, shaded by sorrow, bent forward from the foot of the bed. " It was so like death some hours ago ; it is death now, and so more like the dream of memory I had than ever." The Christian Vagabond, kneeling with the rest, towered over the sobbing women ; and the prayer that worn companion of human sorrow spake, com forted them.

Chapter II. The Chamber Of Christ

T is the glory of the house. It has a southern aspect. The prayers of the household are upon it when the sleeper is within. White as the mountain top its linen is, and the air is balmy from sweet funeral jars of the flowers of the field. " Peace and Welcome" are in marble letters upon the door-step. " BY the Lord's Leave " overhead, in letters massed in solid gold. " Have a room in your house for Jesus Christ when He comes," St. Chrysostom said. "Be sure you receive the Stranger cordially, with joy, with liberal hand and heart. Say of the chamber, here is the little place I have reserved for my Divine Master. He will not despise it, poor though it be. Yea, Jesus is in the street, in the guise of a stranger who approaches. It is night: He prays a lodging. The most miserable shelter will be grateful warmth to Him.

Refuse Him not. Beware lest you should be cruel or inhuman." " Many, exercising hospitality, have received angels unawares," St. Paul speaks in the ear of him who is draping the couch in the cnamber of Christ. St. John the Almoner called his poor guests his lords, albeit he was Patriarch of Jerusalem. Was the Host evermore excellently cradled than when borne by St. Exupere, Bishop of Toulouse, in a basket — all the gold and silver of his cathedral having been sold to solace the poor ? The chamber abounds in the brightness of an ever anxious charit}'. The roses nod through the open lattice. It is at this window the birds are fed on winter mornings. The robin knows it. The swallow builds in its corners. The bees murmur with a deeper hum of content on the petals of its flowers. Nay, the discreet and tender moon slants her light so that it shall gently reach the sleeper, nor for an instant molest his slumbers.

Rose-crowns of virtue have shaded the brows of the maidens who have spun the flax for the linen ; and Christian heroes have thrown the shuttle to make the sheets for the chamber of Christ. The plumb and line by which the walls were kept straight directly prone to heaven were held in the sober hands of Truth — of Truth the Martyr. The rafters pressed the shoulders of good men ; and holy carpenters drew and fixed them together, while laughing children held the nails open in their pina fores. The days were happy when the building of the chamber of Christ was proceeding : happiest was that on which the eldest beggar of the town was raised upon the shoulders of rejoicing saints to crown the roof with a bunch of olive ! There was a mighty discussion over the building. There were those who willed a towering dome, that the guest, waking, might see, far as human hands could permit him, towards heaven : a crystal dome to be fashioned by Patience, Faith, and Learning, in one mass, out of the sands of the Red Sea.

" Let the window be broad and easy, that it may lie open on sweet-breathing nights and on fresh morn ings," was the counter-proposition, " and the guest's eyelids may open upon the very gates of heaven." " No palace-chamber, but a plain, good room, with radiant Welcome for rich furniture," was another opinion. " I'd build it with walls rough-hewn from the rock, and thatch it with the blossoming heather of the wild solitudes, in which holy men are wont to set their footsteps, pondering the goodness and the might of God." This from an archbishop. " Italy and Greece should yield the gems of their quarries to make the four walls. The chamber should be so spacious that, pacing its length, the stranger might say his Paternoster easily. The grandest artisans the world has seen should labour, and for long, on its furnishing ; and through the pierced wall farthest from the couch, Mozart should float to the waking ears of the guest."

A far outly ing village priest, in rusty black gown, gave this counsel. In the end, the good men who gave their advice on the original building of the chamber of Christ, parted friends, but not agreed. The chamber had never been built, it may be, had not the very humblest of the holy host remained behind, and, in silence deep as that which Death compels in any chamber where he enters, begun the work. Somehow the stones fitted which the lowly, willing hands brought to gether. The oaken beams were without flaw, and could be accommodated one to the other ; nay, the door shouldered afar and brought to close the chamber, fitted the way like the cabinet work of Paris. The labour came to an excellent end, albeit the wise and great doctors had departed on their separate ways, and were far off when the beggar was hoisted to the roof.

The chamber of Christ has been built in many nooks and corners of the world, with plumb and line in pocket, since the host of venerable doctors parted. St. Ambroise has sold his sacred vessels; St. Hugues, Bishop of Grenoble, has made away with his pastoral ring, for the work. The poor whom Charlemagne gathered to the chamber of Christ within his palace, he called his masters, so sacred a place was the poor guests' room to him. In the morning the guest has gone forth in the last suit of the host, who remained naked ; a lamb voluntarily shorn in the faith that the wind would be tempered to his case. Vainglorious builders also have been by the score, who have raised chambers of precious stones, from scaffold poles of substantial gold. Vanity has been of the building committee. The work has sometimes not prospered, with the treasures of Peru for concrete foundation.

Nor has the humble work of common sandstone, although the cement has been mixed ere now in an archbishop's mitre. The rain and wind have con spired against the builders who have lifted the trowel to the sound of trumpet, and have been artisans of Christ in vanity. That which humility has put together; the chamber struck with barbaric blows out of the rock ; the cavern torn in the earth with the nails of Piety, her whole heart in the pain and waste of the effort ; these have endured. The sleep of the guest has been per fect : although the chamber has been on a morass, and the lizard sole painter of the walls. Of these chambers, the Christian Vagabond had seen many, in many lands. Dressed by savage men, with poles and skins, who knew not that it was Christ's chamber they were putting together for the tall, grey Stranger, with the mild face, and the greasy staff, whose breast was tawny as theirs !

Nay, in the blue and white north it had been built of snow, and bell shaped, by puny men who could understand with the Guest only the language of the heart which God has made one for all human eyes ; — the one primeval, everlasting, silent utterance. " It was once a single broad leaf, in the torrid East, which dusky arms held over my head, when I had swooned and fallen in the long rank grasses of a fever land," the Christian Vagabond said, speaking to the Lady of Charity and her sisters, gathered in the re fectory, to eat again of the waste of the poor, when all their weary, aged guests were folded in rest for the night. " But I have feasted to-day, Sister," the Vagabond said, glancing at the beechen bowls in which a few scraps were left. " I have been with those who have lived on the refuse of a hospital, the leper's bitter crust ; and have drunk from the cup which the most loathsome of the afflicted had used.

We have, sisters, just eaten like St. Louis. Had we banqueted more richly there would have been one more hungry creature in the world to-night. My eyelids are heavy; for I have mastered some leagues this day ; and the stars last found me crawling into the chamber (a tent of rags — an over-windy one to an old man) with gipsy faces around me, bidding me sleep well. The east wind was blowing gustily over the common ; and I was not quite well pegged down. So that there is an ache courses from left shoulder to wrist, and " The sisters had risen. Each lit her taper. The Lady of Charity bowed to her guest, who rose to his full height, and bore his left arm firm across his chest, while he returned the salute of his hostess, then followed her to the outer corridor. It was no stately nor dull procession to the chamber of Christ.