Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

its loneliness.
    "I dare not... I dare not... She would strike me dead if I dared... No need, I submit myself, I own my terrible sin! I went out after the thief, I waited for him to return, and God pity me, I killed that innocent man!"
    Chapter Ten.
    In the horrified hush that followed, Prior Robert, guiding hand still uplifted and stricken motionless, was momentarily turned to stone, his face a mask of utter incredulity. That a creature of his should fall into mortal sin, and that of a violent kind, was astonishment enough, but that this pliable mortal should ever undertake personal action of any kind came as an even greater shock. And so it did to Brother Cadfael, though for him it was equally a shock of enlightenment. This poor soul, pallid and puffy on his bed after desperate vomiting, sick and quiet and unregarded ever since, spent and ulcered mind and spirit by what he had so mistakenly undertaken, Jerome was for the first time wholly pitiful.
    Brother Rhun, youngest and freshest and the flower of the flock, went after his nature, asking no leave, and kneeled beside Jerome, circling his quaking shoulders with an embracing arm, and lifting the hapless penitent closer into his hold before he looked up confidently into the abbot's face.
    "Father, whatever else, he is ill. Suffer me to stay!"
    "Do after your kind," said Radulfus, looking down at the pair with a face almost as blanched as the prior's, "and so must I. Jerome," he said, with absolute and steely authority, "look up and face me."
    Too late now to withdraw this confession into privacy, even had that been the abbot's inclination, for it had been spoken out before all the brothers, and as members of a body they had the right to share in the cure of all that here was curable. They stood their ground, mute and attentive, though they came no nearer. The half-circle had spread almost into a circle.
    Jerome had listened, and was a little calmed by the tone. The voice of command roused him to make an effort. He had shed the first and worst load, and as soon as he lifted his head and made to rise on his knees, Rhun's arm lifted and sustained him. A distorted face appeared, and gradually congealed into human lineaments. "Father, I obey," said Jerome. "I want confession. I want penance. I have sinned most grievously."
    "Penance in confession," said the abbot, "is the beginning of wisdom. Whatever grace can do, it cannot follow denial. Tell us what it is you did, and how it befell."
    The lame recital went on for some time, while Jerome, piteously small and shrunken and wretched, kneeled in Rhun's supple, generous arm, with that radiant, silent face beside him, to point searing differences. The scope of humanity is terrifyingly wide.
    "Father, when it became known that Saint Winifred's relics had been loaded with the timber for Ramsey, when there was no longer any doubt of how it came there, for we knew, every man of us, that there was none, for who else could it have been?, then I was burning with anger against the thief who had dared such sacrilege against her, and such a gross offence against our house. And when I heard that he had asked and been given leave to go forth to Longner that night, I feared he meant to escape us, either by absence, or even by flight, having seen justice might overtake him yet. I could not bear it that he should go free. I confess it, I hated him! But, Father, I never meant to kill, when I slipped out alone, and went to wait for him on the path by which I knew he must return. I never intended violence. I hardly know what I meant to do, confront him, accuse him, bring it home to him that hellfire awaited him at the reckoning if he did not confess his sin and pay the price of it now."
    He paused to draw painful breath, and the abbot asked: "You went empty-handed?" A pertinent question, though Jerome in his throes failed to understand it.
    "Surely, Father! What should I want to take with me?"
    "No matter! Go on."
    "Father, what more can there be? I thought, when I heard him coming down through the bushes, it could be no one but Tutilo. I never knew by what road the other man would come; for all I knew he had already been, and gone again, and all in vain, as the thief intended. And this one, so jauntily he came, striding along in the dark, whistling profane songs. Offence piled upon offence, so lightly to take everything mortal... I could not endure it. I picked up a fallen branch, and as he passed I struck him on the head. I struck him