Chance Visitors Like Myself
Might Give What They Chose As A Free-Will Offering, But Nothing Was
Demanded.
I may mention that when I was going away, Father Michael
refused twenty francs as excessive.
I explained the reasoning which led
me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
he would not accept it with his own hand. 'I have no right to refuse for
the monastery,' he explained, 'but I should prefer if you would give it
to one of the brothers.'
I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
other guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
solitude and prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted cassock,
through the bleak hills of Gevaudan. The other was a short, grizzling,
thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed with a knitted
spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his button-hole. This
last was a hard person to classify. He was an old soldier, who had seen
service and risen to the rank of commandant; and he retained some of the
brisk decisive manners of the camp.
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