The Education of a Saint

Quoth Antony : “ I saw the snares of the Enemy spread over the whole earth. And I sighed and said: ‘ Who can pass through these ? ’ and a voice came to me saying : ‘ Humility.’ ” — THE WORDS OF THE ELDERS.

I

SERAPION, who had just risen, stiff and chilled, from his knees, stood at the door of his cell looking down on the fields and the river below him. The north wind was hurrying through the valley, buffeting the palm trees, and driving a dim cloud of sand before it, furrowing the surface of the Nile into foam-edged wavelets, and veiling the mud villages in swirls of blue smoke. As the sun dipped behind the Libyan hills there followed a strange and swift transference of color from earth to sky. The face of the cliffs, that had kindled into red gold under the fires of sunset, faded suddenly to a dull, greenish gray; the violet clefts of the crags grew ashen; the tree trunks, glowing like columns of bronze, turned to lead, and the vernal flame of the young wheat paled, while the great dome above them flushed and deepened into rose.

Serapion felt an aching sense of inward bruise as he watched the daily miracle. His prayers had been longer than usual, for news of a great scandal had come from a neighboring laura only that day, and the Abba had bidden the monks to remember the sinner in their orisons. “Lead us not into temptation” had taken on an even more solemn significance in Serapion’s mind since he had heard the tale of a brother’s fall.

It was, indeed, a sad story that had come down the river, told with much superfluous detail and comment by the master of the pottery - raft while he exchanged his clay water-coolers for fresh vegetables from the monks’ garden. An infant had been left at the entrance of a young hermit’s cell, and its mother, a handsome, brazen girl from a neighboring village, had declared that she had laid her child at its father’s door. Marinus, the accused, had opposed no denial to her charge, and had shown a parent’s affection for the baby. The sin and scandal were the greater because Nilus, the culprit’s father, a most holy man, had brought the boy to the monastery when he was but nine years old, and dedicated him to the religious life. The saintly Nilus had died a year ago, and now his unworthy son had been cast out of the community he had dishonored, and had probably perished miserably in the desert with the unhappy, little result of his evil-doing.

Serapion, a big-hearted young colossus, who possessed more knowledge of fourfooted and feathered creatures than of matters of discipline, thought (though contritely) rather of the wretchedness of the offender than of the vileness of his offense, as he watched a mighty arch of cold, blue shade creep slowly up the eastern horizon, where it hung like a rainbow sharply defined against the rose-strewn vault. It broadened and gradually covered the whole face of the heavens, until only a wide, faint stain remained in the west, and the stars began to look out.

“Lead us not into temptation,” repeated Serapion, his eyes dazzled with ethereal splendors. To him, constantly fasting, always appropriating more than his share of the manual labor of the little brotherhood, temptation had presented itself far more frequently under the form of toothsome doorah-cakes, or piles of juicy sugar-cane, than under that of the engaging demon who had so sorely tormented St. Antony, and divers of his own brethren. True, there were mischievous girls in the village below, whose sidelong looks, half-shy, half-roguish, had provoked curious sensations about his midriff, and aroused an avid desire for more of such glances. But the consciousness that they were probably laughing at him and his coarse eremite’s robe generally proved an efficient antidote to the sweet venom, and a long day’s work, carrying baskets of Nile loam up the almost perpendicular side of the cliff to the convent garden, completed the cure.

It had occasionally occurred to Serapion, though not given to meditation on such questions, that the brothers most tried by fiendish enticements were those who rendered the least temporal service to the monastery, but he drew no conclusions from his observations. The image of the starving sinner brought with it no arraignment of the wisdom of his spiritual superiors, only a welling up of pity for a fellow man’s sufferings.

Meanwhile he loitered quite unconsciously, seeking and finding surcease of sorrowful thought in the peace of evening, until in the magic light of the afterglow the sky restored to earth the warmth and tint of which it had despoiled her. While the air about him was transmuted to molten gold, and the landscape below was yet suffused with a dusky radiance, which penetrated the deepest shadows, the densest masses of foliage, and saturated them with rich bituminous color, he reluctantly fastened the door of his cell, and wrapped himself in his sheepskin, submissive to the rule that sent the monk early to the couch which he must leave before sunrise.

But the forlorn figure of the guilty Marinus, the last of his waking thoughts, was still uppermost in his mind when a slight noise aroused him from his first sleep. Something was softly shaking the door, or rather gate, of coarsely woven palm-fibres which barred the entrance to his hermitage, once an ancient tomb. He was on his feet in an instant, reaching mechanically for the recluse’s only carnal weapon, a stout staff. There were thieves and to spare in the desert; not only desperate men driven from their homes by grinding taxes, but four-footed robbers to whom the scent of the scant hoard of dry bread in its ill-closed wooden coffer was as tempting as it had often proved to the anchorite himself on fast days. It was only last night that a marauding fox had deftly decapitated three of Brother Paulus’s fattest geese, when with regrettable curiosity they had thrust their inquisitive heads out of the basket-work crate in which they slept. But it was a taller shadow than even that of a wolf which was dimly projected into the tomb, intercepting the starlight: that of a slight man wrapped in a cloak. One long stride brought Serapion to him, and one quick movement caught the thin, cold hand that was pushing at the gate.

“Who are you?” Serapion panted a little. This was surely no evil spirit, and yet how icy chill it was!

“One who is dying of hunger,” was the faintly whispered answer. “Help in the name of our Master!” and the suppliant fell into an inert heap on the sand.

Hospitality was the law of the desert even without the invocation of the Divine Name. In busy silence Serapion half led, half carried his guest to his own sleepingmat, covered him with the sheepskin yet warm from his own body, lighted the tiny clay lamp, made a fire in the cooking-place, and set in it a bowl of lentil soup.

The starving man watched him mutely like a frightened animal, until Serapion began to crush a flat cake of hard bread between two stones; then he made a despairing effort, and half raising himself from the mat,—

“I need nothing, give it to this,” he muttered huskily, and plucked from the folds of his brown mantle a small bundle from which a weak murmuring proceeded like that of a newly dropped lamb.

Serapion started to his feet. “You are Marinus!” he shouted to the pale boy, who had sunk down again still holding the ragged bundle.

“I was,” answered Marinus without opening his eyes. “Now you will cast me out. I should have told you at once, but for the child. It is growing cold; the chill sand freezes my marrow, and the wind bites me to the bone. Oh, let me stay a moment in this sheltered place. For three days we have wandered, begging for bread, and receiving only stones and curses. The village dogs have hunted us, and I have that in my side — No, never touch me!” he shrieked shrilly as Serapion gently tried to loosen the bloodstained tunic.

“Surely you will let me bandage your wound?” Serapion urged softly; a strange tenderness had possessed him at the sight of this poor hounded creature; he felt a novel stirring of unknown impulses within him, an imperious need to succor and comfort.

“No, no,” protested Marinus, still feebly, but stridently insistent; “it would open again. Promise me you will not try to touch it.”

“As you will,” replied Serapion, unconsciously lowering his voice. “Now, how shall I feed this ? Like a lambkin ?”

“You dip your fingers in the soup and put them in his mouth. Take him, I can’t hold him up,”gasped Marinus, who seemed exhausted by his outburst. He watched Serapion jealously while he gently raised the child, and turned back the tattered wrappings from its face. It was warm in its nest of rags, and its tiny fingers closed about the young man’s thumb with the strength that is so often the dower of the undesired infant. That fumbling, soft clutch took hold of Serapion’s heart strings; with a smile of foolish delight he fed his new charge sparingly and delicately with thickened broth. Marinus wondered at his dexterity. “I have often helped the herds,” he explained, while the baby protested with some faint show of vigor, which delighted them both, at the abbreviation of its meal.

“He must have but very little at a time,” Serapion said apologetically, then, apparently as an afterthought, added, “Was he baptized ?”

“Of course; they would not let its soul perish as well as its dear little body,” was the answer accompanied by a sigh.

“And now you must eat something, too,” said Serapion, as he finished swaddling the still vocal bundle, and laid it again beside Marinus. “Here is plenty of broth still warm. Try to swallow a little,” and he carefully raised the boy’s tired head on his arm. Marinus made a brave effort to eat the soup, but after one or two mouthfuls he turned away with a groan.

“I cannot; I am but a poor, broken thing. Those sharp stones have pelted the life out of me. My body is one wound,” he moaned, falling back on the sheltering arm.

“Rest awhile first, then,” suggested Serapion patiently, smoothing the tumbled curls that had escaped the tonsure, and looking down on the pallid, delicate face with a yearning pity, which, to his horror, he found was as irresistible as it was culpable. For this was the worst of sinners, guilty of the vowed celibate’s unpardonable crime; an accursed thing that had been driven out to die like an unclean beast; and yet how seemingly innocent was the look in Marinus’s eyes, and how young, how childlike even, was the thin, while face! Thrust out this helpless creature! Serapion could no more have done so than he could have passed by a lost lamb or a wounded pigeon. No, he could do no otherwise! The boy must stay, though he, Serapion, should be anathema and banished in his turn. He had been too busy ever since Marinus’s entrance to reflect on his own misdeed in receiving one whom his superiors had judged and condemned. Serapion’s was a simple, soldier-like code; to him the word of the Abba was law, but to-night disobedience seemed equally holy.

As if his thought had been divined, Marinus opened his big, lustrous eyes and whispered, “You must not be good to me; you will suffer for it. I am a great sinner.”

With a slight, reassuring pressure of his arm Serapion answered simply: “I know all that; don’t, talk of it. I am a strong, tough fellow, and I can bear discipline. Beside, our Abba is indulgent; he is a disciple of Father Macarius.”

“It will not be for long,” continued Marinus in gasping whispers. “I am dying. I have coughed much lately, and those stones have killed me. Every time I breathe the blood surges up. When it is over promise me that you will wrap me in my cloak, and bury me in the clean, dry sand. You are a holy man, and it is a pious office.”

“ I hope to nurse and feed you instead,” returned Serapion. “Now try another spoonful of soup. Here it is close to your lips. You have only to swallow it, like the baby.”

“I cannot, I am stifling already; there is blood in my throat; it rises and falls with every breath. Promise.”

“I do,” said Serapion solemnly. He had seen the red stain on the lad’s lips.

“Ah-h-h!” sighed Marinus, turning his cheek cosily on Serapion’s shoulder. “Now am I at peace;” and the thick, double fringes closed over his eyes. Serapion’s heart smote him; it was barbarous to disturb the suffering lad; not to do so was far worse. If indeed, as seemed only too probable, death was near, Marinus must be spiritually furnished for the dark journey. Confession, penitence, the sac rament, should cleanse and comfort the polluted, erring spirit; Serapion was not only a pitying nurse, he was a monk as well, and the soul’s needs were pressing. He had hardly opened his lips before Marinus again anticipated his speech.

“Will you hear my confession? You are the only man who has been kind to me since my dear father joined the saints. Yes ? Listen, then, with your ear close to my mouth for I am losing strength. The lamp is burning dimly; fill it so that I can take heart, looking in your good eyes.”

The lamp replenished, and the delicate head once more tenderly supported, Marinus whispered hoarsely: “I was always wicked, even when my father first brought me to the Abba Elias’s laura. I had no vocation; I was not called to the devout life; my mother and my two brothers had been killed in a church riot, clubbed to death by the Donatists, and as I was quite alone my father could not leave me in the world he had renounced after they were gone. I was a naughty child, but every one was good to me at first; the old monks spoiled me, and my father was very patient with me, — strict but in one thing only: that I should always keep a little apart from the other novices, and be in truth an anchorite. This was no sacrifice,for they were rougher and stronger than I; but I was quick at learning, and my voice in our chapel was sweet to hear, they said. I was happy enough, and not too lonely, until my father died. Then there came to fill his place a monk from Scetis, who found our rule too slack, and was always at our Abba’s ear, clamoring for longer fasts and harsher discipline. Me, he judged more sinful than all the rest, for I wreathed our altar with garlands, and wove borders into the mats we plaited to be sold in Memphis. All things pleasant to look on were fiend’s lures for souls, Ammon said, when he tore up the rose-hedge in my little garden, and I submitted quietly, knowing well that l was given to the lust of the eye. But one day I rebelled. I had been down to the river with a heavy crateload of vegetables to sell to the boatmen, and had reached my cell, panting and overdone. At its door I found Ammon and something else which made me fly at him like a mad thing. For in my cell were two doves whose mother had been stoned by a careless harvest-slinger while they were still but helpless balls of down, and I had fed and cherished them so that they were always at my heels and knew no fear of any man. These poor, pretty creatures had flown to Ammon in all confidence, and he had killed them, because, as he explained afterwards (while he was stanching the blood from his nose), they were birds of love, sacred to heathen Aphrodite, and unseemly companions for Christian monks. When I saw them lying limp with twisted necks, I struck him on the face with all my strength, and cursed him in the name of the Father who feeds the fowls of the air and marks the sparrow’s fall.”

“Oh, Marinus, why did you not leave Ammon’s punishment to that just Father? ” queried Serapion in mild reproof.

“ I have repented of it,” said Marinus wearily. His voice had been growing fainter and hoarser, his breathing more difficult, and Serapion saw with impotent compassion that the fold of the mantle he often pressed to his lips was red.

“Rest now,” he urged; “you can tell me more to-morrow. Let us pray together.”

“No, no,” protested the penitent; “for me there is no to-morrow. Be patient with me. Wait.” He seemed to doze a few minutes, and then began to speak again in tones which were scarcely audible. “After that my life was — hell. The most fatiguing, the most disgusting tasks were mine, and — when through weakness I failed in them — the scourge. It was just. I had been angry with my brother, and had called him worse than fool. Some of the elder brethren pitied me, and would have tried to lighten my penance, or to say a kind and encouraging word when I passed them, but Ammon was always preaching reform, so that they who had been as fathers to me, and had known my own dear father, were cowed into silence. My only happy hours were spent in the ferryman’s hut; to it every week I brought my load of baskets to be sent down the river. He was a busy man, and often bade me wait for him; his daughter ”—Serapion moved uneasily, but Marinus opened his deep eyes and held him with the coercion of his steady gaze — “was kind to me. She was neat with her needle and cunning at the loom, and she showed me many patternings, which I wove into my mats. Also she was round and rosy like a ripe peach, sweet to see and to smell, through much bathing in the river and anointing with balsam, which, Heaven pardon me, I have always found delectable; and she had curiously wrought jewels of silver, anklets and necklaces, which tempted me sorely. Brother, have you never felt the spell of these twists and circlets of glittering metal ? No ? Ah! you are blessed indeed, but it was with me as if the serpent which deceived our first mother were coiled within those shining rings. She treated me like a child, mocking my downcast eyes, telling me that if I were not a monklet I would be a pretty fellow; that I ought to weave a flowered border for my ragged tunic; and much more that was unfitting for her to say and unseemly for me to hear, but the gayety and blithesomeness of her uplifted my sad spirits. One day in a frolic she slipped the armlets over her smooth wrists, and poured them into my lap! ‘There,if you’ll promise not to melt them with your eyes, little one, you can play with them until father returns,’ she laughed, while I, who seemed to see the mocking eyes of fiends looking up at me from the twinkling heap, let it fall with a crash, and fled.

“The next week I prayed that some one might go in my stead, but as I had only to proffer a request to have it denied, I found myself again at her door. My knock was unheard, covered by the sound of loud voices. Hers was shrill, and there was a sob in it. She was beseeching some one to take her away with him, begging him in the name of all he held sacred and dear not to leave her; and a man’s deeper tones were denying her, and urging her to be patient and reasonable. I laid my burden on the ground and turned to go, unwilling to interrupt their conference, and the desperate insistence in her changed voice had made me sick and faint, when suddenly the door flew open, and a tall, handsome soldier rushed out with her clinging to his arm. He thrust me roughly out of the way, and before they had reached the gate of the little yard he had flung her off, and then, running down the steep river bank, he leaped into the boat which was waiting for him, and was rowed out to the transport filled with recruits, which had stopped in midstream.

“She stood leaning against the wall like one stunned, until she heard the plash of the oars. Then she raised her head and screamed out curses on him. I clapped my hands to my ears to shut out the horrible words. When she stopped, breathless and shaking, I ventured, remembering my duty, to reprove her.

“ ‘ Hush, my sister, lest God strike you dumb. What can this man have done to you that you wish him such evils ? ’

“She raised her bent head, and her eyes burned into mine: ‘He has destroyed my whole life. May God’ —

“I laid my hand on her lips. ‘What can I do for you ? ’ I asked hurriedly more to stop her blasphemies than with any hope of aiding her, and yet moved to compassion by the sight of her blanched, drawn face.

“‘You can follow him and kill him; you can tear out his false heart, and throw it in his lying face,’ she panted with glowing eyes, and then added scornfully, ‘but that is a man’s work.’

“‘And I am a man of God,’ I made reproachful answer.

“She turned fiercely on me. ‘Then go back to your God, and leave me to despair. Man indeed! with that cheek and chin of cream! Wait until a beard blues your lip before you give yourself that name. Go, I say, boy of God, and trouble yourself no more about grown folks’ affairs.’

“I should have left her then, but I longed to comfort her. It wrung my heart to see the laughing tease, my old playmate, transformed into this sombre Fury.

“ ‘ You wanted to go with him ? Why ? Do you love him ? Tell me! I will intercede with your father if you will. My prayers at least ’ —

“A wave of angry scarlet rushed over her face.

“‘You overheard? Then you know; why do you ask ? To shame me ?'

“I shook my head. ‘I heard but that.’

“She laughed harshly.

“‘And it was not enough? And you call yourself a man. Look at me and learn!’ I obeyed her. I had always tried to avert my eyes from her, as our rule commands, but in some way I had felt rather than seen her warm dusky color and slender roundness.

“Now what shipwreck of grace and bloom met my eyes! A dreadful light broke in on me, and in the first instant of horrified surprise I drew back. Her eyes seared me: ‘Leave me, holy man, too good and pure even to breathe the same air with me!' she shrieked,picking up a stone; ‘Leave me, or I will break your shaven crown for you! ’

“I was not afraid of a stone, above all in a girl’s hand, but her shame turned me coward, and I hurried away as fast as my shaking knees would carry me from her, — from her hard look, and her bitter tongue. I had never come close to mortal sin before, and my own soul seemed stained by the impact. As I stumbled up the slope I met her father, who tried to stop me, but I avoided him, and never ceased running until I reached the cool peace of my own cell.

“Here I passed many miserable days. The knowledge of suffering and evil, my own poltroonery in fleeing weakly from the lost girl instead of showing her the way to repentance, lay heavy on my heart. What a wretched soldier of Christ I was! what a poor craven! brave enough to raise my hand against a brother monk, but terrified at the mere revelation of sin. The unhappy, abandoned girl haunted my waking thoughts, and filled my nights with troubled dreams. I longed to speak some word of comfort and of hope to her, or to beg one of our elder brothers to lift this strayed sheep out of the pit, but I dared not. Her secret was her own, and I feared to bring more misfortune on her by divulging it; and yet I felt that God would surely hold me accountable in some degree for her misdeed. If I had been an exemplar of godliness, if I had spent the few moments I used to pass with her in reproving her for her vanity instead of fostering it, she might not have become the light thing that she was. I had been given a glorious opportunity to redeem my past, to win a soul to heaven, and I had missed it. I had brought her flower seeds, and learned stitchery, when I should have given her good counsel and brotherly rebuke. Neither prayer nor discipline could exorcise these thoughts. Since I had fallen into disgrace I was much alone, and my heart was famishing for a comfortable word, a kindly look, when one morning I found this at the door of my cell.”

Marinus gently touched the roll of rags beside him, glancing down at it with a new softness in his eyes, and then looked into the sorrowful, perplexed face of Serapion.

“Do not doubt me, my brother,” he said gravely, trying to steady his weak, uneven voice. “ It is not at a moment like this that one lies.” With an effort which cost him much he drew a rough iron cross from the breast of his tunic, and after pressing it to his lips, added solemnly, “As my Redeemer lives, and as I hope soon to see his face, I am telling you the whole truth.”

Serapion bowed his head. There was conviction in those accents, veracity in those clear eyes.

“I believe you, my brother,” he said slowly, after a long silence, broken only by the ragged, painful breathing of the wounded boy. “I believe you, but have you no proofs, — no justification ?”

“None,” returned Marinus. “What need is there of them ? You believe me, and my Saviour and Master knows. Did He justify himself when He bore this for us?” And he devoutly kissed the cross again and slipped it under his tunic. “I took this castaway, so newly come into a sorrowful world, and gave it in secret what poor care I could, and, Serapion, the heaviness of spirit, the dryness in prayer, all vanished before the touch of those little fingers. I had something to care for, something to be fond of, something that needed me. The third day of this happiness there marched to my cell, in solemn procession, Abba Elias and Brother Ammon, her father, and all our elders. I saw them coming, and forecasting trouble, hid my small stock of provisions in my tunic, and took the child in my arms.

“I have neither voice nor time to tell you all that passed. By her parent’s testimony, by her own confession, I was proved to be the father of the waif I held to my breast. My care of it, my secrecy in regard to it, were additional proofs of my guilt, far more than were needed, Ammon said, to convict of wantonness a keeper of doves and a lover of roses. So they drove us out, and the village boys stoned me, and set their curs on me, and I dragged myself into the desert to die, and found you.”

Marinus shut his eyes and sighed softly, He was quite spent; a strange sound, something between a cough and a sob, had frequently interrupted his speech, and his face had grown perceptibly pinched and sunken during the last hour. Serapion eyed him with commingled apprehension and reverence. He could not bear to disturb him, and yet —

“Marinus, dear brother,” he said, raising the boy’s thin hand to his lips, “why did you not deny their charge? Why did you not tell what you knew ?”

Marinus opened his eyes, and fixed them in bewilderment on Serapion. “Don’t you understand?” he queried slowly; and then almost irritably, “Don’t you see, Serapion, that our merciful Lord sent me this one chance to redeem my mistakes and my cowardice ? In all my seventeen years I had done nothing for any one, and this was my opportunity to bear witness to my love of Him. Besides,” he added, with a sudden, sweet touch of archness, “I wanted to keep the baby, you know; it was something to play with.”

“But to be innocent, and to be tortured, martyred — I fear — as you have been,” protested Serapion. “It is too much!”

“Too much?” murmured Marinus almost inaudibly. “Think of what my dear Lord suffered for me, for me, who am unworthy to say after Him, even in my heart, ‘ Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.'”

After that he spoke no more. Serapion, bending over him, hearing a faint, hoarse rattle in his throat, and watching a gray pallor invade his face, was again reminded of the ghostly comfort which he now feared it was almost too late to administer. Twice he went as far as the door of his cell to seek help, and twice he returned to Marinus’s side, fearing to leave him alone in his weakness. Then, condemning his own indecision, he again left the boy, to be arrested a few steps from the threshold by the sound of a stifled sob; he turned once more, and found Marinus lifeless, wrapt in the crimson pall of his own lifeblood. Kindly death, like a gentle nurse, had carried him swiftly out of an unkind world.

The suddenness of it unnerved Scrapion. He had never seen the young die, and this quick cropping of life’s blossom, the instant submission which those who have not acquired the habit of living tender to the dread summons, was at once novel and terrible to him. It was a long time before he could apprehend the awful wonder of it. Finally, the yammering of the hungry baby aroused him to a sense of the reality of things. The child must be fed, and Marinus must be buried as he had promised, and then ? Sufficient unto the day — Day, indeed, was almost at hand, and with it new complications: if detected in harboring the dead youth and the child, Serapion might be prevented from keeping his word. Marinus, in the eyes of the community, was still a reprobate. Confession was sacred; Serapion could not repeat the sad story; he had no right to reveal Marinus’s secret.

“To feed the hungry, to bury the dead,” — these two corporal works of mercy at present filled the arc of Serapion’s existence. The first was an easy task, and the second not difficult for one who had made his home in a tomb. The first tenant of Serapion’s cell had been an ancient Egyptian of rank, and in the empty sarcophagus, which still remained in the rifled grave, Serapion laid the dead boy, covering him with palm branches (for had he not earned the martyr’s emblem?), and filling in the pit again with the fine, clean sand which formed the flooring of his cell. He was oppressed by an unwonted sense of loneliness and loss when his task was finished, but the luxury of reverie was denied him by the unremitting demands of his new charge on his attention. During the night Serapion’s pity for the parent bird in its ceaseless labors for its brood rapidly extended to other bipeds sharing the same responsibilities.

Every morning after nones the Superior visited each monk’s cell according to the rule of Father Macarius, the wisest lawgiver of the monastic world. What should be done with the baby during this visit ? How explain its presence without divulging Marinus’s secret, or in his own turn becoming the object of unjust suspicion ? Serapion was beginning to discover that one concealment, no matter how innocent, inevitably implies another, and another, and that the covered way necessarily becomes the dark way. He mastered an impulse to take the child to Abba Marcus and tell him the pitiful story, for the figure of Marinus rose before him with his finger on his lips. Ah! what was he, Serapion, that he should dare to violate the martyr’s holy silence, to reveal the divine humility which Marinus had laid as an oblation at the feet of the meek Saviour ? No, it was impossible. He would hide the child in Brother John’s cell, empty since his death, higher up on the mountain side, and well out of earshot. There it could remain during the day, and at night he would carry it back to his own bed. Prompt execution followed this plan, and Serapion had even time to reflect while he waited for the summons to morning prayer that the path of deceit was a fatally smooth one. For five days he trod it without stumbling. His many duties, for he was the porter and provider of the brotherhood, afforded him opportunities to visit his ward during the day; and early in the winter evening, long before there was any danger from wolf or hyena fierce or strong enough to burst through the door of the lonely cell, the child was safely transferred to his own under a fold of his cloak.

Serapion soon discovered that in assuming a parent’s cares he had also taken on himself a father’s perplexities. What was to become of this helpless creature cowering close to his side like a shivering bird in those long, chilly nights? A few hours of cold or hunger would pinch the life out of it like any other nestling. What if something should happen to him, Serapion ? This reflection straitened his breast; life and thought were growing complicated; this new tie,weak as it was, had tangled the simple warp of his existence. Doubts and questionings glided from secret chambers in his brain and confronted him menacingly. Was it right for Marinus to have kept silence ? By it he had won martyrdom, but by it also he had made innocent men his executioners. His fellow monks had unwittingly played the part of persecutors. Had he not built up his own justification on their involuntary injustice ? He had gladly offered himself up for love of his Redeemer, but had he not, in thus forcing his brothers to act as oppressors,failed in love to them ? And they were Christians, too, these guiltless offenders, not heretics or heathen, whom it was more venial to lead into sin, since they were doomed to an eternity of torture in any case,and, therefore, were fitting instruments for the pious uses of martyrs and confessors.

If believers could thus err quite innocently, why should not they, these heretics and idol-worshipers, — poor tools who knew not what they did,—be accounted blameless — Here Serapion fell on his knees, and sought sanctuary in prayer, aghast at the conclusion toward which he found himself helplessly driven. He realized that such queries were the bitter fruits of wrong-doing, of stepping outside the narrow, smooth path of obedience into the tangled thickets of self-will; perhaps they were even suggestions of the Fiend cloaked in the garb of mercy. Though Serapion was the child of an age which counted doubt as criminal, he could not quite stifle the consciousness that the questioning faculty was as real, as much a part of himself, as the capacity to believe. Prayer, however, numbed thought, even if it brought no response to doubt; it bestowed peace, if it yielded no solution; and the cœnobite sought it as instinctively as he had felt for his stick when suddenly awakened.

But it could not quite satisfy the unregenerate craving of the boy’s nature for intimate companionship, — for a closer, warmer relation than that of spiritual son and brother. The ties of the flesh, which were so rudely, often so barbarously severed by the anchorite, assumed a new aspect after that night of ministering care. Serapion knew that many of his elders had entered the religious life disregarding an aged mother’s tears or an infirm father’s pleading. More than once monks had been pointed out to him as exemplars of sanctity because they had abandoned devoted wives, and despoiled their helpless children, to flee from the world and bestow alms, but he was himself too close to the great heart of nature, too much the natural man, to revere such spiritual egotists without inward protest. “A broken and a contrite heart” was the purest of offerings, but surely not the broken hearts of others. A dimly apprehended idea of the solidarity of humanity oppressed him; untrained to think, quick to feel, he was only painfully conscious of an inner isolation, a sense of loneliness which the coming and going of Marinus had brought to him.

II

On the fifth morning of his guardianship he noticed, as he left his cell for morning prayers, an unusual commotion on the Nile bank. A new boat was moored at the village landing, and a crowd of gesticulating, blue-gowned figures were gathered about it. He had no time to watch the villagers, for he was already late, and service had begun when he entered the chapel, which had been built inside the largest of the tombs.

Serapion, abashed at his tardiness, remained near the door, keeping his eyes humbly lowered, and it was not until prayers were nearly over that he became aware of the presence of two newcomers, stranger-monks, who knelt near him. This in itself was no unwonted sight; the huge dehr, or fortified monastery, and the tiny laura, or assemblage of isolated cells, were alike hospitably open to all ecclesiastics who journeyed up and down the river-way of Egypt. But Serapion’s unquiet conscience had made a coward of him, and he scanned the newcomers apprehensively as they joined in the psalm which followed the invocation. The shorter and elder of the two possessed the type of the recluse of sacred legend: his mild, lamblike face was partly covered with a snowy fleece of hair and a beard which may have veiled an irresolute mouth and a weak chin. The brow, though deeply furrowed, was broad and noble; the eyes, deep-set beneath it, were far younger than the bowed shoulders and the white hair; in fine, a venerable figure that would seem most at home at the mouth of a cave, praying before a rude cross, or meditating, skull in hand, in the golden glow of evening, or taming some fierce desert beast into gentle service.

If the elder man suggested the poetry of hermit life, his companion personified its tragedy. Emaciated, shaggy, black with filth, naked save for a sordid tunic and a broad girdle, armlets and leg-pieces of iron, he was so repulsive to every sense that at first one might not have perceived the extraordinary force and character of every hard line in the leathern face; the strange conformation of the cranium, which, narrowing at the brow, rose to a great height above the eyes, and the muscular strength of the lean frame. A formidable human machine, constructed to believe and to act, not to think or to reason; a tempered, trenchant weapon was this brother, or perhaps saint, for his weighty, penitential armor and his phenomenal uncleanliness marked him as one who had aspirations, at least, to exceptional holiness.

Of such, of many such, was the kingdom in Egypt. They formed a redoubtable militia at the beck of unscrupulous and turbulent bishops. They terrorized church councils. They violated and despoiled pagan shrines. They plundered and banished the Jews. They stoned the civil authorities who tried to protect nonChristian citizens from their violence. They silenced philosophy by tearing Hypatia to pieces before the Christ she denied. They suppressed learning by destroying the Alexandrian library. They annihilated art by the destruction of pagan statues and temples. But their services to the new faith were not only of a destructive character. No figures appealed more strongly to the popular imagination. No body of men had done more to fashion the creed which they enforced, and no influence had been more potent than theirs to press doctrines dear to Egyptians on a reluctant Eastern church.

Serapion, as he looked shyly at the grim ascetic beside him, felt his involuntary movement of disgust yield to admiration and reverence. The self-torturing cœnobite incarnated the ideal that was swaying the souls of men, — an ideal of utter abnegation, of complete self-sacrifice.

But who were the strangers, and what was their errand ? Serapion’s mind wandered from one vague apprehension to another, until the short service ended and Abba Marcus left his seat to welcome the newcomers. Serapion could not even learn their names,for he was immediately impressed by the Economist to fill Brother Hilarion’s place, who was sick of a fever, and to assist in bread - making, which was an important duty in the lonely lauras, as bread formed the staple of the monk’s scanty dietary, and was truly his staff of life.

Serapion longed to question his fellow workers as they walked along the steep face of the cliff, but all labor was performed in silence, and his curiosity remained unsatisfied. A narrow shelf of rock, powdered with wind-blown sand, afforded a path which ran in front of the row of tombs; a few feet below, a wider ledge formed a natural terrace which, covered with fertile Nile mud and constantly irrigated, showed a flourishing crop of wheat, lupins and millet, and constituted, with a few sheep and buffalo, the chief resource of the community. To its very edge, an eternal menace, ever encroaching, undulating in glistening furrows as if in mockery of man’s labors, swept the cataract of tawny sand. Below the ledge it slid in sheer descent to the confines of the cultivated land in the valley beneath, recoiling sharply before the onset of the serried spears of the young corn. Bread wrested from this devouring sea — for the Egyptian attacked and vanquished the desert as the Dutchman resisted and subdued the ocean — was precious indeed, and the making of it a ceremony.

At the door of the bakehouse — a long, low hut made of mud bricks mixed with chopped straw, the ends of which stuck out in all directions, forming a surface which was as harsh to the eye as it was rough to the touch — Serapion and his companions laid aside their tunics, and proceeded to a meticulous handwashing, for cleanliness, generally contemned as pagan and unregenerate in the care of the body, was enjoined in the preparation of food. Inside the hut two rows of smooth, spotless boards flanked by bulging sacks of flour were laid on the earthen floor, and a clay water jar supported by a wooden tripod, and surrounded by bowls and flasks, filled one corner.

Each monk helped himself to a portion of the flour, and then, squatting on his heels, began to knead it. From time to time water was required; the breadmakers tapped on the board, and the one nearest the amphora brought it without speaking. Half an hour had passed in silent toil; the bronzed arms and shoulders of the workers were glistening, and the water-coolers were passed more frequently, when the stillness, which had been unbroken save by the buzzing of an occasional persevering fly and the thump of the dough on the boards, was torn by the brazen clangor of a gong. The breadmakers raised their heads. Once, twice, thrice, the jarring sound reached them; then every man sprang to the door of the hut, huddled on his tunic, and ran back over the narrow path to Abba Marcus’s cell, for this was a signal that called each monk from his task; a signal of urgent need. Many of the younger brothers, Serapion among them, had never heard it before, and the older ones shuddered as they remembered the last time it had beaten on their ears.

The Abba’s cell, the most spacious of the ancient tombs, was far too small to contain the flock that promptly answered their shepherd’s call. The pious hands that had covered the pagan cartouches and deeply incised hieroglyphics with a smooth coating of loam had also built a low wall, broken by a narrow door, across the entrance between the rock-hewn pillars. In the doorway sat the Abba on a couch of wickerwork; on his right was the strange old man, while at his left stood, bowed a little under the weight of his irons, the ascetic Serapion had reverently admired in the chapel.

The monks, as fast as they arrived, formed in line with soldierly precision before the Abba and his companions, and Serapion, to his chagrin, found himself in the front rank, opposite the gaunt stranger. A few moments after the last comer, who had been fishing in the Nile, and who arrived wrapped like a river-god in dripping nets, had taken his place, Father Marcus struck the ground sharply with his stick, and an old brother left the ranks, and called the roll. When all the names had been answered to, save those of Hilarion and Basil,—the latter was at the sick man’s bedside, — the Abba rose, and, turning his brilliant, jewelbright eyes from one face to another, addressed his flock: —

“Beloved sons, I have called you together to-day, not because danger threatens this, our most cherished community, nor because heresy has again invaded the sheepfold of the faith, but for the performance of a duty, which, if I know you well, you will hold as only less sacred,— that of helping your brothers. Saint Antonius, our revered Father, said well of the eremite life,‘He who sits still in the desert is safe from three enemies: from hearing, from speech, from sight; and has to fight, against only one, — his own heart;’ but I tell you that you must not be content with the conquest of your hearts for yourselves. To us, living apart from worldly cares, there comes all too seldom an opportunity to serve man. Such occasions are from God, and should be seized and held fast like angelic messengers until they have bestowed a blessing upon us. These our brethren are afflicted, and call upon us in their trouble, and shall we deny them our help ? It is a small grace they ask of you, only to answer truthfully, and without shame or fear, the questions of our brother, Abba Elias.” As he finished his allocution, Father Marcus turned with a graceful gesture of invitation to the old man on his right, and then resumed his seat.

Abba Elias was deeply moved; he rose slowly, and the hands that were clasped on his staff shook, while his voice, drowned in the cataract of his beard, was at first hardly audible. Indeed, if it had not been for the goading glances of his grim companion, toward whom he looked nervously during his short speech, it seemed hardly possible that his own strength would have sustained him.

“Dear brethren in Christ,” he quavered , “ you see before you two sorely tried sin— ” (here the eye of the iron-bound brother, coercive as a bridle, checked him, and he hastily substituted) “envoys and suppliants from a community still more heavily afflicted. For many days we, and all our children, have been grievously tormented in the spirit and the flesh with madness and fever. Our simples, our potions, our penances, and vigils have been unavailing. In vain has our saintly Brother Ammon here laid his sufferings and macerations at the foot of the Cross; in vain have I offered my wornout body for the well-being of those under my care. The sickness rages unabated. Three nights ago, having watched late before the altar, struggling with a carnal drowsiness to which, through ripeness of years and weakness of the flesh, I am too prone, I received a message. I, unworthy as I am, heard these words whispered softly in my ear: ‘Until you have taken the cross from the breast of Marinus, and brought it to your brethren to kiss, the wrath of the Lord shall not pass away from you.' Thrice were these strange words repeated, and then I fell in a swoon before the altar, where I lay until the time of morning prayer. Now this Marinus, as you have been told, was a foul offender, who had been driven forth from among us, and therefore I feared that this message might be the inspiration of some lying spirit, or the vain utterance of my own troubled heart, for I had loved the boy, and indulged him until our good Ammon opened my eyes to his iniquity. So I said naught all day, but tended the sick as well as I could, for I, too, was smitten; but the chilled blood of age could not riot through my veins in the fever that parched the younger men. That night the voice thundered in my ears, not once, but many times, bearing always the same mandate. With dawn I rose, bade farewell to my children, and went. out to find the lost one, Brother Ammon lending me his strength and his company. This is the fourth day of our journeying, and we have no tidings of Marinus. To you I appeal for help in my quest. Do any of you know aught of him ? A pale, pretty lad, and slender, with a child in his arms ?”

The old man looked pleadingly at the rows of wondering faces before him as he put the question to which head-shakings and negatives alone replied. Serapion’s heart had leaped into his throat, stifling breath and voice when he first heard the name “Abba Elias;” and the hammering of the blood in his ears drowned the words which followed. For the first time in his short life he breathed hard in the grip of the tempter. Memories of the simple joys he must instantly renounce crowded on him like loving children around a banished father. To be reviled of all men! To leave the poor baby to starve and be torn to pieces by wolves! To be thrust out of the beloved laura, and to perish alone accursed! And he was not blameless like Marinus; he had not the consciousness of martyrdom to exalt him. Did the infinite Truth, which was also the infinite Mercy, require it of him ? Never before had his humble life and its dear familiar setting seemed so sweet to him. The garden, the chapel, the sheepfold; the kindly offices of his brother monks; the frugal feasts on holydays, — must he resign all these? They stood for home, and kindred, and intimate family joys to the early orphaned Serapion. And those monks who were burning and raving in that other laura of Father Elias’s ? They, too, loved their spot of green earth, which they must soon leave forever if he kept silence. Was there no easier way to save them ? No, to heal the sick, Elias must himself take the cross from the breast of Marinus. And his own soul’s health, was that nothing? Serapion writhed in the clutch of an overmastering fear; then, terrified at his own base terrors, he bounded forward and threw himself on his face, with arms outstretched in the form of a cross before Abba Marcus.

There was a rustle, and a low hum of surprise. A long silence followed; finally Serapion, groveling, with his face in the pebbles, heard Father Marcus’s level voice saying quietly, “Speak, my child.”

Serapion raised himself, and, still kneeling, lightly clasped the Abba’s knees, murmuring, “Father, I have sinned and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”

Bending his white head, Father Marcus answered: —

“ And am I father to the sinless ? If you have sinned, the greater is your need of me. Confess your sin, that we may the sooner rejoice over your repentance.”

Serapion’s cheek, white under the dustsmudge, flamed before the gaze of many eyes; it was not fear alone that impeded speech, but modesty, the infans pudor which the anchorite life had fostered and prolonged; he had never spoken before his superiors except in reply. All initiative was spared him, however, for Elias, leaving his place, laid an unsteady hand on his shoulder, and questioned eagerly; —

“You have seen him ? You can tell us where he is? Be kind, and let me know quickly!”

Serapion, his eyes fixed on Marcus’s face, answered: —

“ I saw him the same day that the story of his transgression reached us. He came to me, starving, bleeding, too, from a wound in his side. I gave him my bed; I nursed him until he died; I buried him, and I have hidden and cared for the child which he left in my care.”

A low murmur of amazement ran through the assembly. This from frank, simple-minded Serapion, the Christopher of the community, whose absolute truthfulness was taken for granted as unquestioningly as were his strength and goodwill; the brothers seemed far more surprised than shocked, all save one.

Ammon, who had, until the brief confession was finished, maintained an air of abstraction from all earthly concerns, now turned to Abba Elias with a vehemence which seemed seeking to atone for his previous impassibility.

“Behold, brother, the evil results of rejecting my counsels. Had you profited by my suggestion, and followed our rule in Scetis, this scandal would never have come to light and made you an offense in the nostrils of your neighbors, and this child of the Fiend would never have been allowed to wander up and down devouring the souls of weaklings. Had Marinus been properly walled up in his cell, and duly disciplined instead of being allowed to depart, his guilt would have died with himself, and not have been handed on to others like the light in a heathen torchrace. Sinners should be sequestered; otherwise they breed sinners, and so I told you.

“Unhappy young man,” he added, turning to Serapion, “did your vow of obedience lie so lightly on you that you shook it off at the sight of mere carnal suffering ? Do you entertain every chamberer who knocks at your door ? Where is your hatred of vice, where is your love of holiness ? Is this your fashion of keeping unspotted from the world ? On whose culpable indulgence do you count that you confess your iniquities with such a brow of brass? In Nitria your back would have been scored with discipline ere this!” and Ammon shook his staff over Serapion’s head.

Poor Father Elias hung his head like a chidden hound at this attack, but in mild Father Marcus it awoke a primal instinct which he fondly flattered himself had long ago been eradicated, — the proprietary sense. He had renounced all ownership in material things, but Serapion was his spiritual son; his errors and sins were his father’s exclusive affair, and the old Adam within that father rose to repel interference with his ghostly rights. His resentment, however, was dominated by the Oriental’s courtesy, and the ecclesiastic’s self-control. Without rising from his seat he gently waived Ammon back, and said smoothly enough: —

“Our first duty is to relieve your sick brethren, Father Elias, and the question of my penitent’s disobedience and his penance will come up after your quest is ended. Pray continue, Serapion, and you, Brother Ammon, will perhaps advise me in private later when this pressing business is finished and we have found Marinus’s cross.” This was an unexpected check to Ammon. Fortified by the consciousness of superior sanctity, he had, preceded by the fame of his fasts and self-tortures, come self-appointed to tighten the bonds of discipline in Upper Egypt. No one had hitherto questioned the propriety of his action in a country “where whoever wore a black dress was invested with tyrannical power.” A man who had lived in a dry well for many years on five figs a day was thereby qualified to settle the most difficult points of church government. The very clanking of his irons was an irrefutable argument in support of any statement he might choose to make; and who, in an age of faith, could question the words and acts of one who had not washed himself within the memory of living man ? Such a holy being could not usurp authority; he might assume it for a time, as many a priest or abbot found to his sorrow, for his macerations constituted his divine right to dominion; but Marcus’s calm assumption of his hierarchical superiority in his own laura left Ammon quite defenseless. Accustomed to impose his will on the meek Elias he was unarmed for resistance, and growling something about such boys being treated differently in Scetis, he reluctantly lowered his staff and returned to his place.

In Serapion, too, his apostrophe had evoked latent emotions. Elias’s appeal had touched his heart; all his mother in him had responded tremulously to it; but Ammon’s aggression aroused the man’s combativeness. Under the gentle rule of Marcus he had long remained a dutiful boy; the ascetic’s rough words had matured him suddenly, as a young tree bursts into leaf under the onslaught of a summer storm. With a novel sense of elation which enfranchised him from doubts and tremors, he answered Elias’s pleading look:—

“I will lead you to my cell where Marinus lies; under the tunic I promised not to touch is the cross you seek. He kissed it before he died, and prayed Him who hung on it for us to forgive those who had done evil to him, and offered his torments to his Lord and Saviour;” and Serapion, his exaltation increasing as the memory of Marinus grew to clearer and firmer form in his mind, added slowly and loudly, that all might hear: —

“I do most humbly confess and repent my sin of disobedience, and I will meekly receive whatever punishment you may mete out to me. But were it all to do over again I could not act otherwise, and I thank God that He led Marinus to my door.”

Serapion, after one steady look at the elders, at Ammon, and at the curious crowd of monks, bent his head to receive the blow, or the words more heavy to bear than blows, that his bold avowal had provoked. He had no dread of them, he was singularly uplifted by his championship of the innocent dead, and something of Marinus’s own spirit seemed to have entered into him. The torch had passed from hand to hand as Ammon had predicted. But the thirst for self-abasement was for the nonce unslaked. The two old men before whom he knelt exchanged a look: Father Elias whispered timidly, with a sidelong glance at his guardian angel, who seemed momentarily to have withdrawn himself from the spectacle of such depravity, "' Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,’ — is it not so, my Brother Marcus?” while Marcus added: “Your duty comes first,my son; your confession and penance later. While we talk our brothers are suffering. Lead the way to your cell.”

Serapion had but a dim memory afterwards of a hurried walk over the rockledge ; of digging deep into the loose sand of the newly made grave; of gently lifting out of the sarcophagus that light (so piteously light) burden, and of reverently uncovering the face of his dead friend, which still wore the pathetic, conquered look of those who die in flowering-time. Marinus was quite unchanged; the clean, cool sand had lain lightly on him, and death, in pity of his youth, had spared something of its grace. Serapion felt anew the sense of loss as he straightened the tangled curls, and smoothed the folds of the tunic; then, still seeing the crowd of eager monks at the door, and the little group before him mistily as through tears or driving rain, he stood aside, saying, —

“Father Elias, will you take the cross now ?”

The old Abba, after a short, silent prayer, sunk on his knees and pulled tremulously at the chain on the dead boy’s neck, but it seemed caught in the rope girdle around the waist, and after vainly trying to draw it up, he clumsily untied the knotted drapery on Marinus’s shoulder and turned down the front of the tunic. There lay the cross quite safe, but as if it possessed a Gorgon spell to turn living flesh to stone, the four men glared at it in pallid amazement, looked at one another, blanched, and stared again.

Then Serapion, with a cry of ineffable tenderness and grief and pity, swiftly replaced the tunic,while Ammon, groaning and beating his breast, threw himself down on the sand, and Elias, tumbling into a dejected heap,began to moan and rock himself to and fro. For Marinus was no youth, but a dead maiden; the grave had yielded the girl’s secret.

It was Marcus who first found speech. “Now blessed be He who hath inspired such incomparable humility and refreshed these old eyes by the sight thereof; and blessed are we to have this holy and perfect example in our midst, and thrice blessed are you, Serapion, to have entertained this angel. Be comforted, my brother,” he continued, raising Elias to his unsteady feet, “she who forgave you on earth will intercede for you in heaven.”

“No, no,” sobbed the old man, who possessed the donum lachrymarum in abundance. “I have been an unfaithful steward; his — her father left her in my care when he died, and I drove her — tormented her — worked her to death. I should have guessed — I should have known! ”

“And robbed her of a crown, and us of a saint,” retorted Ammon, whom Marcus’s words had revived like a draught of palm wine. “We have been but instruments in the divine hand to fashion this soul for his service. Let us rejoice, then, and do not forget the cross. Your being commanded to take it from the martyr’s body is surely a sign that you are forgiven. Strange that you were elected for this honor, but the ways of the Lord are inscrutable.”

So the old man was comforted, and at last timidly removed the cross, now freed from the arresting folds of drapery, from the dead girl’s breast. Serapion, who had not moved or spoken since he had reverently replaced the tunic, stood like one in a trance, looking down on the empty sheath of the creature for whom he had sinned. Like the blinding light that on the road to Damascus flashed upon the persecutor, bringing inward illumination, and darkening the outer world, the knowledge of his own heart burst upon Serapion in one crowded moment. He loved! And this love, sanctified by death, for one who could never feel it or need it, was no sinful passion, but an act of adoration. A bewildering sense of discovery, of exultation, mingled with the anguish of frustration and loss, held him rigid and motionless, while a curious crowd, augmented by the villagers, to whom by some mysterious means the news had been instantly conveyed, defiled past the body. When devout women came to carry it away, and to wash and robe it for a triumphal progress down the river, he did not speak, although his eyes betrayed a dumb, intolerable pain. Only those hours of his life that he had spent with Marinus seemed real to him; all the rest was but a vain appearance; all other beings, merely simulacra, dust and shadows.

Wise Father Marcus, noting Serapion’s dazed look, sent for the child, and, putting it in his arms, bade him care for it, saying, “It shall be your penance for disobedience,” and Serapion was led back to duty by those soft, clinging hands.

To duty, but not to peace. The old tranquil delight in work and life was gone. The passionate tenderness, the chivalrous devotion, long dormant in an ardent and reverent nature, stretched out imploring hands fated to remain forever empty, and shook barred gates, closed for all time. “He who sits quiet in the desert has only one enemy to fight, his own heart.” Only one! What more redoubtable or subtle foe could he contend against ? His waking and sleeping dreams, his daily meditations, his nightly vigils, were haunted. One image filled his periphery, quickening mysterious forces in the depths of his nature; it could not be exorcised; all spiritual weapons were shivered against it. His spirit prostrated itself before the martyr, but his heart cried out for the woman. Marina! Marina! Not the saint in glory, not the wounded guest, but the girl whom he had never known, caressing her doves, tending her roses, obsessed his vision; and to shut his eyes against this radiant presence was to feel the elastic resistance of her ringlets against his fingers, the light burden of her slenderness in his arms. Again, like a celestial envoy, rose the remembrance of her holiness, stilling the tumult in his veins, bringing deliverance from vain desire, and he mourned like one who had profaned an altar. Sometimes he could conceive her as a divine essence beckoning him to the height she had gained, and her dear earthly shell became only a tabernacle hallowed by the mystery within: and then he would be shaken by a passion of fierce longing, dogged by a sense of utter desolation, and the unending struggle began again.

It was in communion with a memory at once so inspiring and so enthralling that Serapion found martyrdom, and won sanctity.