oy
in the Lord; and withal so attractive, so helpful, that she leaves in us
an impression of a healing gesture, the illusion of a blessing made
visible to all who crave it. Her right arm indeed is broken at the
wrist, and her hand is gone; but we can fancy it there still when we
look for it; as a shade, a reflection; it is very plainly seen in the
slight fulness of the bosom, as though it were the palm; in the folds of
the bodice, which distinctly show the four taper fingers and raised
thumb to make the sign of the cross over us.

"How exquisite a forerunner of the Blessed Mother is this royal guardian
of the threshold, this sovereign, inviting wanderers to come back to the
Church, to enter the door over which She keeps watch, and which is
itself one of the symbols of Her Son!" exclaimed Durtal, as he glanced
at the opposite figures--such different women! one a nun rather than a
queen, her head a little bowed; another, every inch a queen, holding
hers aloft; the third saucy, though saintly, her neck neither bent nor
assertive, holding herself in a natural attitude, and moderating the
august mien of a sovereign by the humble, smiling expression of a saint.

"And perhaps," said he to himself, "we may see in the first an image of
the contemplative life, and in the second the embodied idea of the
active life; while the third, like Ruth in the Scriptures, symbolizes
both!"

As to the other statues--prophets wearing the Jewish cap with ears, and
kings holding missals or sceptres, they too are impossible to identify.
One in the middle arch, divided from the so-called Berthe by a king, was
more especially interesting to Durtal because it was like Verlaine. The
statue had indeed thicker hair, but just as strange a head, a skull with
curious bumps, a flattish face, a curling beard, and the same common but
kindly look.

Tradition gives this statue the name of St. Jude, and this resemblance
is suggestive between the saint whom Christians most neglected, and who
for several centuries found so few devotees that suddenly, one day, on
the theory that he, less than the others, would have exhausted his
credit with God, people took to imploring him for desperate cases, lost
souls, and the poet so utterly ignored or so stupidly condemned by the
very Catholics to whom he has given the only mystical verses produced
since the Middle Ages.

"They were ill-starred, one as a saint and the other as a poet," Durtal
concluded, as he drew back