Free Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

legs very softly with a towel. They were all alone then, just the two of them, and the fire was bright enough to see
clearly. What he remembered particularly was that this old man, after he had dried him like this, bent down and took his
foot in his hand and kissed it; first the one foot, then the other. That much Jacques remembered.
    When the servant returned, they gave the child warm milk with a little bread in it, and put him into the Bishop’s bed,
though Houssart begged to take him to his own.
    “No, we will not move him. He is falling asleep already. I do not know if that flush means a fever or not.”
    “Monseigneur,” Houssart whispered, “now that I have seen him in the light, I recognize this child. He is the son of that
‘Toinette Gaux, the woman they call La Grenouille.”
    “Ah!” the old man nodded thoughtfully. “That, too, may have a meaning. Throw more wood on the fire and go. I shall rest
here in my arm-chair with my fur coat over my knees until it is time to ring the bell.” The Bishop got up at four o’clock
every morning, dressed without a fire, went with his lantern into the church, and rang the bell for early mass for the
working people. Many good people who did not want to go to mass at all, when they heard that hoarse, frosty bell clanging
out under the black sky where there was not yet even a hint of daybreak, groaned and went to the church. Because they
thought of the old Bishop at the end of the bell-rope, and because his will was stronger than theirs. He was a stubborn,
high-handed, tyrannical, quarrelsome old man, but no one could deny that he shepherded his sheep.
    When his donné had gone and he was left with the sleeping child, the Bishop settled his swollen legs upon a stool,
covered them with his cloak, and sank into meditation. This was not an accident, he felt. Why had he found, on the steps of
that costly episcopal residence built in scorn of him and his devotion to poverty, a male child, half-clad and crying in the
merciless cold? Why had this reminder of his Infant Saviour been just there, under that house which he never passed without
bitterness, which was like a thorn in his flesh? Had he been too much absorbed in his struggles with governors and
intendants, in the heavy labour of founding and fixing his church upon this rock, in training a native priesthood and
safeguarding their future?
    Monseigneur de Laval had not always been a man of means and measures. Long ago, in Bernières’s Hermitage at Caen, his
life had been wholly given up to meditation and prayer. Not until he was sent out to Canada to convert a frontier mission
into an enduring part of the Church had he become a man of action. His life, as he reviewed it, fell into two even periods.
The first thirty-six years had been given to purely personal religion, to bringing his mind and will into subjection to his
spiritual guides. The last thirty-six years had been spent in bringing the minds and wills of other people into subjection
to his own, — since he had but one will, and that was the supremacy of the Church in Canada. Might this occurrence tonight
be a sign that it was time to return to that rapt and mystical devotion of his earlier life?
    In the morning, after he returned from offering early mass in the church, before it was yet light, the Bishop sent his
man about over the hill, to this house and that, wherever there were young children, begging of one shoes, of another a
little frock, — whatever the mother could spare from the backs of her own brood.
    ‘Toinette Gaux had returned home meanwhile, and was frightened at missing her son. But she was ashamed to go out and look
for him. Some neighbour would bring him back, she thought, — and, insolent as she was, she dreaded the moment. She got her
deserts, certainly, when two long, black shadows fell upon the glistening snow before her door; the Bishop in his tall fur
cap, prodding the icy crust with his cane, and behind him Houssart, carrying the little