Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/440

402 muster as an old ladies' home, save for one clergyman—an ex-clergyman with a weak throat, who had taken up his residence there. He was, however, we grieve to state, a good deal of an old woman himself.

It was a very unjust as well as sacrilegious person who said that there are three sexes in the world—men, women, and clergymen. Nevertheless, there are isolated cases that justify the aspersion, and it is to be feared that this particular clergyman was one of them.

Had Monsieur Planche been as the average of pension proprietors, he would not have been in the slightest perplexity. All his temporal interests lay in refusing the application. But he was not as they.

To begin with, as to his outer man, he was slight of build, with sparse gray hair, and a gentle refinement of feature and manner that would not have done discredit to an earl.

As to his inner man, he was shrewd of observation and judgment, but simple and kindly to a degree. He was devout also. Every Sunday he worshipped in the old cathedral on the hill, above the lake and the vineyards.

It was, perhaps, because of these Sundays in the atmosphere of the cathedral that for a long time monsieur's conscience had been ill at ease about his vocation in life. One would think, on the face of the thing, that an old lady's home, fairly and justly conducted, with never a candle charged that had not been burned, was about as innocent an occupation as a man could indulge in.

Nevertheless, monsieur was troubled. And what troubled him was that, care for his old ladies as wisely and as kindly as he might, they invariably deteriorated morally upon his hands.

Not that they grew bad and wild—far from it! They would hardly have known how to go to work to be bad and wild, even had they wanted to be. What they did do, in the care-free comfort with which he hedged them about, was to grow narrow, selfish, small, and comfort-seeking in a thousand petty ways for which it distressed him that he must feel himself responsible. Exacting they were, moreover, and childishly conscious of imposition.

One old lady had, for instance, only the day before, deposed to putting a pin in the upper side of her mattress every morning, that she might know absolutely whether the maid had turned it over.

Another had come to him possessed of the childish conviction that there were canned vegetables mixed with the fresh to make them go around. He could not disabuse her mind of the absurdity.

The table conversation of his guests had, indeed, degenerated into a discussion of each dish as it was set before them, its proper preparation, and its probable gastronomic effect. They had been well-bred women when they came to him, and there was no one to open their eyes to the depths to which they had sunk.

The tenor of their conversation over their afternoon coffee in each other's rooms was even more to be deplored. They gossiped—how they gossiped!—and backbit, too, it must be confessed. To such a pass, indeed, had matters come that no one of them felt safe except in open conclave with all the others, and even then was on the alert for disparagement and innuendo.

Monsieur felt dimly, though he could not have put it into words, that they were losing their grip on all the great worth-while things of existence—the things of which the cathedral spoke to him. They had no charities, no broad interests, no family duties and claims.

Every year that they spent under his roof he saw the belittling of the original intention of their natures go on, and, in most instances, the years that they spent were many. Already two of them had so outstayed themselves that they had died upon his hands. Having no near friends or relatives, it had fallen to his share to oversee their last illnesses and to bury them tenderly and respectfully in the God's acre behind the cathedral.

As far as he could foresee, it seemed probable that he would have, in the end, to bury the majority of the survivors.

It gave him a feeling of responsibility as to their fitness for the ordeal—or, more strictly speaking, for the existence which he, good Catholic that he was, believed in beyond the grave. Somehow, he could not imagine the angels in authority in the next world putting up with a great deal, at the old ladies' hands, that he had