Madame Delphine | Page 6

unmolested."
Père Jerome looked from the physician to the attorney and back again,
once or twice, with his dimpled smile.

"But he speaks English, they say," said Jean Thompson.
"He has, no doubt, learned it since he left us," said the priest.
"But this ship-master, too, says his men called him Lafitte."
"Lafitte? No. Do you not see? It is your brother-in-law, Jean Thompson!
It is your wife's brother! Not Lafitte, but" (softly) "Lemaitre! Lemaitre!
Capitaine Ursin Lemaitre!"
The two guests looked at each other with a growing drollery on either
face, and presently broke into a laugh.
"Ah!" said the doctor, as the three rose up, "you juz kip dad
cog-an'-bull fo' yo' negs summon."
Père Jerome's eyes lighted up--
"I goin' to do it!"
"I tell you," said Evariste, turning upon him with sudden gravity, "iv
dad is troo, I tell you w'ad is sure-sure! Ursin Lemaitre din kyare nut'n
fo' doze creed; he fall in love!"
Then, with a smile, turning to Jean Thompson, and back again to Père
Jerome:
"But anny'ow you tell it in dad summon dad 'e kyare fo' dad creed."
Père Jerome sat up late that night, writing a letter. The remarkable
effects upon a certain mind, effects which we shall presently find him
attributing solely to the influences of surrounding nature, may find for
some a more sufficient explanation in the fact that this letter was but
one of a series, and that in the rover of doubted identity and incredible
eccentricity Père Jerome had a regular correspondent.
CHAPTER V.
THE CAP FITS.

About two months after the conversation just given, and therefore
somewhere about the Christmas holidays of the year 1821, Père Jerome
delighted the congregation of his little chapel with the announcement
that he had appointed to preach a sermon in French on the following
Sabbath--not there, but in the cathedral.
He was much beloved. Notwithstanding that among the clergy there
were two or three who shook their heads and raised their eyebrows, and
said he would be at least as orthodox if he did not make quite so much
of the Bible and quite so little of the dogmas, yet "the common people
heard him gladly." When told, one day, of the unfavorable whispers, he
smiled a little and answered his informant,--whom he knew to be one
of the whisperers himself,--laying a hand kindly upon his shoulder:
"Father Murphy,"--or whatever the name was,--"your words comfort
me."
"How is that?"
"Because--'Væ quum benedixerint mihi homines!'"*
[*"Woe unto me, when all men speak well of me!"]
The appointed morning, when it came, was one of those exquisite days
in which there is such a universal harmony, that worship rises from the
heart like a spring.
"Truly," said Père Jerome to the companion who was to assist him in
the mass, "this is a Sabbath day which we do not have to make holy,
but only to keep so."
May be it was one of the secrets of Père Jerome's success as a preacher,
that he took more thought as to how he should feel, than as to what he
should say.
The cathedral of those days was called a very plain old pile, boasting
neither beauty nor riches; but to Père Jerome it was very lovely; and
before its homely altar, not homely to him, in the performance of those

solemn offices, symbols of heaven's mightiest truths, in the hearing of
the organ's harmonies, and the yet more eloquent interunion of human
voices in the choir, in overlooking the worshipping throng which knelt
under the soft, chromatic lights, and in breathing the sacrificial odors of
the chancel, he found a deep and solemn joy; and yet I guess the finest
thought of his soul the while was one that came thrice and again:
"Be not deceived, Père Jerome, because saintliness of feeling is easy
here; you are the same priest who overslept this morning, and overate
yesterday, and will, in some way, easily go wrong to-morrow and the
day after."
He took it with him when--the Veni Creator sung--he went into the
pulpit. Of the sermon he preached, tradition has preserved for us only a
few brief sayings, but they are strong and sweet.
"My friends," he said,--this was near the beginning,--"the angry words
of God's book are very merciful--they are meant to drive us home; but
the tender words, my friends, they are sometimes terrible! Notice these,
the tenderest words of the tenderest prayer that ever came from the lips
of a blessed martyr--the dying words of the holy Saint Stephen, 'Lord,
lay not this sin to their charge.' Is there nothing dreadful in that? Read it
thus: 'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.' Not to the charge of them
who stoned him? To whose charge then? Go ask the holy