Aelfden is answered

“But my heart is so small,” Aelfden whispered.

Perhaps it came of having lived a monastic life since his boyhood: his heart was no more than a monk’s cell, cramped and bare and cold. It was scarcely wide enough to fit himself; even he alone could not stretch out enough to repose in it, and still he crammed himself into a corner and tried to invite the world inside.

He had starved all his life for love, had never had enough to feed himself, and still he tried to make do with less, doling out his coarse bread and the crusts of his bread to all comers until he was left with crumbs. And then a pair of sad eyes would look up at him, and he would brush even the crumbs into the sad hands.

“My tears have been my meat by day and by night,” he muttered, swaying with fatigue. Each leg could only bear his weight for a moment before he was forced to shift it to the other.

He had always believed that if he was not suffering, he was not doing enough for the Lord, but it was a truth that was beginning to din hollow to his ear. Fasting for nothing and forcing himself awake for no one was like opening his door to the winter wind alone and burning his bread into ashes.

“O Lord, can this be what you want of me?” he begged.

Almost before he could bow his head to begin a proper prayer, a pair of awkward feet hurried up the corridor and hesitated for a moment, scuffing anxiously outside his door until an awkward hand knocked.

Aelfden looked not at the door but up at the polished crucifix on the wall. Though it would have been the first time, he would not have been surprised to see it nod.

“Enter in,” he said, guessing Gaelic and finding himself right.

Brother Columba bowed quickly and whispered, “Lord Father, there’s a—a young lady in the parlor, in the middle of the night—and a baby, and she—she insisted I wake you, and I—I think you ought to go. It’s all in tears the lady was, and the baby crying sore, and she was a-​cursing at me and swearing—the lady, I mean, not the baby—”

Aelfden coughed into his hand to arrest the young monk’s babbling. “Is she in danger? Did she tell you why she came?”

“No, but… no, but, Lord Father, she was speaking the Gaelic, and it’s all finely dressed she was. In her cloak, I’m meaning. She did not disrobe before me…”

Aelfden patted Columba’s arm and sighed. “I suppose I’m knowing who she is. You did right to tell me,” he added when he saw how anxiety still pinched the monk’s face. “Return to your prayers, Brother. I believe—”

He turned out of habit to cross himself before going down, but his hand stopped short over his breast: at such times even his own shaking fingers could be steadied by the steady pounding of his heart. As in the miracle of the loaves, when the love-​hungry came to him, he always found it refilled.