The Pensioner of the Pied Brothers
IF EVER I become a trifle eccentric I shall take it very ill of my friends and relatives if they shut me up with anyone more demented than themselves. It has always seemed to me both extravagant and unkind to put a more or less amateur and occasional lunatic among hard-bitten professionals. Mild madmen are better with their families and their families better with them. As for madmen with no or reluctant families, why not attach them to religious communities as jesters were attached to royal households in the Middle Ages? This, I feel, would be an excellent plan. The community could concentrate on one official imbecile the forbearance they now exercise on each other; and the imbecile, unlike the average Religious, could lap himself around with forbearance as with a garment, and hug the warmth. This, at any rate, was how it worked with the only lunatic I ever met in such circumstances— John-Theodore de la Vigne of Cope in the county of Wessex, the Pensioner of the Pied Brothers.
John-Theodore, you must understand, was consigned at the age of sixteen by his highly respectable (some say inconspicuously noble) Walloon relatives to the guardianship of the Pied Brothers: and in particular to the Prior, for the time being, of the Priory of Cope. In thus establishing their half-witted nephew and cousin in virtuous and dignified surroundings, at a sufficient distance from the hereditary estate near Nivelles, the De la Vignes certainly thought they were doing their best for themselves, religion, and the object of their solicitude. And though success does not always attend performances on this gamut of interests, in the particular case I mention the upshot was extremely harmonious.
John-Theodore came to Cope in the wake of an old French Prior, and in charge of a young English lay-brother, at the age of sixteen. He was sixty when I first knew him and sixty-six when he died, and I never heard that he had a day’s unhappiness. Certainly I never saw it. To begin with, he was highly popular at the Priory. His status with the Fathers in general I have already defined in my allocution on forbearance, but a few unchastened spirits loved John-Theodore for his own sake. To the lay-brothers he was acceptable because the care of his little room and some slight assistance with the inaccessible buttons of his toilet were a change from scrubbing the refectory flags and polishing the church candle-sticks. While to the boys of the Priory School—for Cope was the House of Studies for the province—he provided a not only good-tempered but positively appreciative butt for jests too elementary or outworn to play off on each other. It would be hard to say which John-Theodore loved best, to be noticed or to be left alone. He was so radiantly happy in either case. In the nature of things he was more often alone, for a monastery school is, or should be, a place of fixed hours and settled functions, of never-ending class-bells and refectory bells and church-bells. The last two John-Theodore punctually regarded, always turning up at Mass and meat before any other enthusiast for either. But the boys’ long study hours he spent all alone out of doors the whole year round: dozing under the acacia on the lawn in summer; drifting down the avenue with the dead leaves in the autumn; stopping out, as late as he dared, in the mild winter dusk to listen to the distilled rime dripping through the elms; and standing amazed every spring before the winter-greens in the kitchen-garden, when the April rains suddenly shot them up into tropical yellow flowers. Sometimes he strayed off to his prayers in the little church alongside the avenue; especially if a strain of music from the choir put him in mind of the claims of heaven. And many a Pied Brother has paused at the organ with the stops out and his hands hovering hawk-like over a chord, to hear John-Theodore ushering himself with indistinguishable murmurs of devotion into his humble place at the end of the nave.
Yet I think it was with his fellow-Christians that John-Theodore drank in life at its fullest; and could he have thought it out, he would have been quite of St. Thomas's opinion that the presence of friends is a fit concomitant to the bliss of heaven. Devout strangers he particularly affected on account of the extra measure of compassion they bestowed on him. For the compassion of the devout was to John-Theodore what the confidence of the vulgar is to a politician, and he was not much more scrupulous as to how he obtained it.
Towards the end of his days he was more than a trifle blind; yet not so blind but that he could find his way down the sanctuary steps with the rest of the school when it filed into church from the sacristy door for Mass or Meditation. But if there was a high feast kept, and strangers were present, John-Theodore would hang behind the rest and fumble dismally for the first step with his foot, his half-sightless eyes raised appealingly to heaven; until ten to one, some humane outsider, with or without an indignant glance at the callous scholars (who never failed to enjoy the little drama as far as its sacred setting permitted), would hasten up the shallow flight of marble inside the altar rails and lead John-Theodore, radiant as a prima-donna, safely down the steps and into his place.
There was only one person in the world with whom John-Theodore was not on good terms, and that was Father Caffyn. I never knew the precise ins and outs of the feud myself, because the good Father had been happily transferred from Cope before my acquaintance with the place began. But there was a rumour that he had a very cutting way with him, and that women, cats, and idiots—the three chief objectives of his scorn—used to flee at the sound of his voice like rooks at the crack of a rifle. John-Theodore never exactly fled; but they say he used to tack, with something more purposeful than his usual erratic change of course, whenever Father Caffyn appeared in the avenue. Moreover, being an expert at ritual himself, he lay in wait for little slips whenever the good Father said Mass or gave Benediction. And who so happy as John-Theodore when he caught the unfortunate priest reading the wrong Epistle, or leaving some recent Papal interpolation out of the Litany? He would hasten to the Prior of the day, with a zest so undisguised as to be shorn of half its malice, and accuse his enemy of substituting Beatus vir for Memores estote on the Feast of St. Silverius—or some such piece of inconspicuous heedlessness. And if he could delate the culprit to the Provincial in person, his jubilation knew no bounds.
When John-Theodore came to die—which he did, as I said, at the age of sixty-six—the memory of Father Caffyn whom he had not set eyes on for at least eight years, was the staple amusement of his painless and leisurely decline. The Prior could not bring him a glass of milk or a bunch of grapes without the invalid pluming himself between every sip and berry on the anguish it would have caused his old traducer to see see him so pampered.
“Father Caffyn would never have fetched me grapes, eh Father?” “Father Caffyn would never have brought me milk!” he babbled over and over again; and the stray smiles that crossed his quiet face as he lay speechless for hours on his bed were probably referable to the same unholy satisfaction.
On the day he died he asked pardon of all he had ever offended with extraordinary meekness and dignity. But when he had done this, and received the Last Sacraments, he was allowed to slip back and enjoy his half-wittedness to the end. The retrospective marvel of his Communion (which he had never been encouraged to make before, save on high feasts and holidays) became yet another triumph of compassion extorted from the soft-hearted Prior by the piteousness of John-Theodore; and yet another signal frustration of the malice of his ancient foe.
“Father Caffyn would never have brought Him to me, eh Father?” he said with serene exultation, as the bell which had escorted the Blessed Sacrament to his bedside died away down corridor.
They will tell you, if you ever go to Cope—the Prior with a smile and the Community with a sigh—that this monstrous and entirely unfounded accusation was the last coherent speech of The Pensioner of the Pied Brothers.
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