The Wandering Jew — Complete
with renewed surprise, while he seized one of the hands which the young
priest held out towards him in order to tranquillize his fears.
"Gabriel, my brave boy, explain this to us!" added Dagobert; "who
has wounded you thus?" and in his turn, taking the other hand of the
missionary, he examined the scar upon it with the eye of a judge of
wounds, and then added, "In Spain, one of my comrades was found and
taken down alive from a cross, erected at the junction of several roads,
upon which the monks had crucified, and left him to die of hunger,
thirst, and agony. Ever afterwards he bore scars upon his hands, exactly
similar to this upon your hand."
"My father is right!" exclaimed Agricola. "It is evident that your
hands have been pierced through! My poor brother!" and Agricola became
grievously agitated.
"Do not think about it," said Gabriel, reddening with the embarrassment
of modesty. "Having gone as a missionary amongst the savages of the
Rocky Mountains, they crucified me, and they had begun to scalp me, when
Providence snatched me from their hands."
"Unfortunate youth," said Dagobert; "without arms then? You had not a
sufficient escort for your protection?"
"It is not for such as me to carry arms." said Gabriel, sweetly smiling;
"and we are never accompanied by any escort."
"Well, but your companions, those who were along with you, how came it
that they did not defend you?" impetuously asked Agricola.
"I was alone, my dear brother."
"Alone!"
"Yes, alone; without even a guide."
"You alone! unarmed! in a barbarous country!" exclaimed Dagobert,
scarcely crediting a step so unmilitary, and almost distrusting his own
sense of hearing.
"It was sublime!" said the young blacksmith and poet.
"The Christian faith," said Gabriel, with mild simplicity, "cannot be
implanted by force or violence. It is only by the power of persuasion
that the gospel can be spread amongst poor savages."
"But when persuasions fail!" said Agricola.
"Why, then, dear brother, one has but to die for the belief that is
in him, pitying those who have rejected it, and who have refused the
blessings it offers to mankind."
There was a period of profound silence after the reply of Gabriel, which
was uttered with simple and touching pathos.
Dagobert was in his own nature too courageous not to comprehend a
heroism thus calm and resigned; and the old soldier, as well as his
son, now contemplated Gabriel with the most earnest feelings of mingled
admiration and respect.
Gabriel, entirely free from the affection of false modesty, seemed quite
unconscious of the emotions which he had excited in the breasts of his
two friends; and he therefore said to Dagobert, "What ails you?"
"What ails me!" exclaimed the brave old soldier, with great emotion:
"After having been for thirty years in the wars, I had imagined myself
to be about as courageous as any man. And now I find I have a master!
And that master is yourself!"
"I!" said Gabriel; "what do you mean? What have I done?"
"Thunder, don't you know that the brave wounds there" (the veteran
took with transport both of Gabriel's hands), "that these wounds are
as glorious--are more glorious than our--than all ours, as warriors by
profession!"
"Yes! yes, my father speaks truth!" exclaimed Agricola; and he added,
with enthusiasm, "Oh, for such priests! How I love them! How I
venerate them! How I am elevated by their charity, their courage, their
resignation!"
"I entreat you not to extol me thus," said Gabriel with embarrassment.
"Not extol you!" replied Dagobert. "Hanged if I shouldn't. When I have
gone into the heat of action, did I rush into it alone? Was I not under
the eyes of my commanding officer? Were not my comrades there along
with me? In default of true courage, had I not the instinct of self
preservation to spur me on, without reckoning the excitement of the
shouts and tumult of battle, the smell of the gunpowder, the flourishes
of the trumpets, the thundering of the cannon, the ardor of my horse,
which bounded beneath me as if the devil were at his tail? Need I state
that I also knew that the emperor was present, with his eye upon every
one--the emperor, who, in recompense for a hole being made in my tough
hide, would give me a bit of lace or a ribbon, as plaster for the wound.
Thanks to all these causes, I passed for game. Fair enough! But are
you not a thousand times more game than I, my brave boy; going alone,
unarmed, to confront enemies a hundred times more ferocious than those
whom we attacked--we, who fought in whole squadrons, supported by
artillery, bomb-shells, and case-shot?"
"Excellent father!" cried Agricola, "how noble of you to render to
Gabriel this justice!"
"Oh, dear brother," said Gabriel, "his kindness to me makes him magnify
what was quite natural and simple!"
"Natural!" said the veteran soldier; "yes, natural for gallants who have
hearts of the true temper: but that temper is rare."
"Oh, yes, very rare," said Agricola; "for that kind of courage is the
most admirable of all. Most bravely did you seek almost certain death,
alone, bearing the cross in hand as your only weapon, to preach charity
and Christian brotherhood. They seized you, tortured you; and you await
death and partly endure it, without complaint, without remonstrance,
without hatred, without anger, without a wish for vengeance; forgiveness
issuing from your mouth, and a smile of pity beaming upon your lips;
and this in the depths of forests, where no one could witness your
magnanimity,--none could behold you--and without other desire, after you
were rescued than modestly to conceal blessed wounds under your black
robe! My father is right, by Jove! can you still contend that you are
not as brave as he?"
"And besides, too," resumed Dagobert, "the dear boy did all that for
a thankless paymaster; for it is true, Agricola, that his wounds will
never change his humble black robe of a priest into the rich robe of a
bishop!"
"I am not so disinterested as I may seem to be," said Gabriel to
Dagobert, smiling meekly. "If I am deemed worthy, a great recompense
awaits me on high."
"As to all that, my boy," said Dagobert, "I do not understand it; and I
will not argue about it. I maintain it, that my old cross of honor would
be at least as deservedly affixed to your cassock as upon my uniform."
"But these recompenses are never conferred upon humble priests like
Gabriel," said Agricola, "and if you did know, dear father, how
much virtue and valor is among those whom the highest orders in the
priesthood insolently call the inferior clergy,--the unseen merit and
the blind devotedness to be found amongst worthy, but obscure, country
curates, who are inhumanly treated and subjugated to a pitiless yoke by
the lordly lawnsleeves! Like us, those poor priests are worthy laborers
in their vocation; and for them, also, all generous hearts ought to
demand enfranchisement! Sons of common people, like ourselves, and
useful as we are, justice ought to be rendered both to them and to us.
Do I say right, Gabriel? You will not contradict it; for you have told
me, that your ambition would have been to obtain a small country curacy;
because you understand the good that you could work within it."
"My desire is still the same," said Gabriel sadly: "but unfortunately--"
and then, as if he wished to escape from a painful thought, and to
change the conversation, he, addressing himself to Dagobert, added:
"Believe me: be more just than to undervalue your own courage by
exalting mine. Your courage must be very great--very great; for, after
a battle, the spectacle of the carnage must be truly terrible to a
generous and feeling heart. We, at least, though we may be killed, do
not kill."
At these words of the missionary, the soldier drew himself up erect,
looked upon Gabriel with astonishment, and said, "This is most
surprising!"
"What is?" inquired Agricola.
"What Gabriel has just told us," replied Dagobert, "brings to my mind
what I experienced in warfare on the battlefield in proportion as I
advanced in years. Listen, my children: more than once, on the
night after a general engagement, I have been mounted as a
vidette,--alone,--by night,--amid the moonlight, on the field of battle
which remained in our possession, and upon which lay the bodies of
seven or eight thousand of the slain, amongst whom were mingled the
slaughtered remains of some of my old comrades: and then this sad scene,
when the profound silence has restored me to my senses from the thirst
for bloodshed and the delirious whirling of my sword (intoxicated
like the rest), I have said to myself, 'for what have these men been
killed?--FOR WHAT--FOR WHAT?' But this feeling, well understood as it
was, hindered me not, on the following morning, when the trumpets again
sounded the charge, from rushing once more to the slaughter. But the
same thought always recurred when my arm became weary with carnage; and
after wiping my sabre upon the mane of my horse, I have said to myself,
'I have killed!--killed!!--killed!!! and, FOR WHAT!!!'"
The missionary and the blacksmith exchanged looks on hearing the old
soldier give utterance to this singular retrospection of the past.
"Alas!" said Gabriel to him, "all generous hearts feel as you did during
the solemn moments, when the intoxication of glory has subsided, and
man is left alone to the influence of the good instincts planted in his
bosom."
"And that should prove, my brave boy," rejoined Dagobert, "that you are
greatly better than I; for those noble instincts, as you call them, have
never abandoned you. * * * * But how the deuce did you escape from the
claws of the infuriated savages who had already crucified you?"
At this question of Dagobert, Gabriel started and reddened so visibly,
that the soldier said to him: "If you ought not or cannot answer my
request, let us say no more about it."
"I have nothing to conceal, either from you or from my brother," replied
the missionary with altered voice. "Only; it will be difficult for me to
make you comprehend what I cannot comprehend myself."
"How is that?" asked Agricola with surprise.
"Surely," said Gabriel, reddening more deeply, "I must have been
deceived by a fallacy of my senses, during that abstracted moment in
which I awaited death with resignation. My enfeebled mind, in spite of
me, must have been cheated by an illusion; or that, which to the present
hour has remained inexplicable, would have been more slowly developed;
and I should have known with greater certainty that it was the strange
woman--"
Dagobert, while listening to the missionary, was perfectly amazed; for
he also had vainly tried to account for the unexpected succor which had
freed him and the two orphans from the prison at Leipsic.
"Of what woman do you speak?" asked Agricola.
"Of her who saved me," was the reply.
"A woman saved you from the hands of the savages?" said Dagobert.
"Yes," replied Gabriel, though absorbed in his reflections, "a woman,
young and beautiful!"
"And who was this woman?" asked Agricola.
"I know not. When I asked her, she replied, 'I am the sister of the
distressed!'"
"And whence came she? Whither went she?" asked Dagobert, singularly
interested.
"'I go wheresoever there is suffering,' she replied," answered
the missionary; "and she departed, going towards the north of
America--towards those desolate regions in which there is eternal snow,
where the nights are without end."
"As in Siberia," said Dagobert, who had become very thoughtful.
"But," resumed Agricola, addressing himself to Gabriel, who seemed also
to have become more and more absorbed, "in what manner or by what means
did this woman come to your assistance?"
The missionary was about to reply to the last question, when there was