The White Ladies of Worcester - Florence Louisa Barclay (best classic books of all time txt) 📗

be in opening to a poor lady you helped thrust into her shroud, nigh upon sixty years before? So 'Tap away!' says I; 'tap away, Sister Agatha! Try Saint Peter at the gates of Paradise. Old Antony knows better than to let you in.'"

"What said the Reverend Mother when you reported on a twenty-first White Lady?" asked the Bishop.

"Reverend Mother bid me begone, while she herself dealt with the wraith of Sister Agatha."

"And why did you _not_ go?" asked the Bishop, quietly.

Completely taken aback, Mary Antony's ready tongue failed her. She stood stock still and stared at the Bishop. Her gums began to rattle and she clapped her knuckles against them, horror and dismay in her eyes.

The Bishop looked searchingly into the frightened old face, and there read all he wanted to know. Then he smiled; and, taking her gently by the arm, paced on between the yew hedges.

"Sister Antony," he said, and the low tones of his voice fell like quiet music upon old Antony's perturbed spirit; "you and I, dear Sister Antony, love the Reverend Mother so truly and so faithfully, that there is nothing we would not do, to save her a moment's pain. _We_ know how noble and how good she is; and that she will always decide aright, and follow in the footsteps of our blessed Lady and all the holy saints. But others there are, who do not love her as we love her, or know her as we know her; and they might judge her wrongly. Therefore we must tell to none, that which we know--how the Reverend Mother, alone, dealt with that visitor, who was not the wraith of Sister Agatha."

Mary Antony peeped up at the Bishop. A light of great joy was on her face. Her eyes had lost their look of terror, and began to twinkle cunningly.

"I know naught," she said. "I saw naught; I heard naught."

The Bishop smiled.

"How many peas were left in your wallet, Sister Antony ?"

"Five," chuckled Mary Antony.

"Why did you shew six to the Reverend Mother?"

"To set her mind at rest," whispered the old lay-sister.

"To cause her to think that you had heard naught, seen naught, and knew naught?"

Mary Antony nodded, chuckling again.

"Faithful old heart!" said the Bishop. "What gave thee this thought?"

"Our blessed Lady, in answer to her petition, sharpened the wits of old Antony."

The Bishop sighed. "May our blessed Lady keep them sharp," he murmured, half aloud.

"Amen," said Mary Antony with fervour.


CHAPTER XXVI


LOVE NEVER FAILETH

The Bishop awaited the Prioress on that stone seat under the beech, from which the robin had carried off the pea.

He saw her coming through the sunlit cloisters.

As she moved down the steps, and came swiftly toward him, he was conscious at once of an indefinable change in her.

Had that ride upon Icon set her free from trammels in which she had been hitherto immeshed?

As she reached him, he took both her hands, so that she should not kneel.

"Already I have been received with obeisance, my daughter," he said; and told her of old Mary Antony's quaint little figure, standing to do the honours in the doorway.

The Prioress, at this, laughed gaily, and in her turn told the Bishop of the scene, on this very spot, when old Antony displayed her peas to the robin.

"What peas?" asked the Bishop; and so heard the whole story of the twenty-five peas and the daily counting, and of the identifying of certain of the peas with various members of the Community. "And a large, white pea, chosen for its fine aspect, was myself," said the Prioress; "and, leaving the Sub-Prioress and Sister Mary Rebecca, Master Robin swooped down and flew off with me! Hearing cries of distress, I hastened hither, to find Mary Antony denouncing the robin as 'Knight of the Bloody Vest,' and making loud lamentations over my abduction. Her imaginings become more real to her than realities."

"She hath a faithful heart," said the Bishop, "and a shrewd wit."

"Faithful? Aye," said the Prioress, "faithful and loving. Yet it is but lately I have realised, the love, beneath her carefulness and devotion." The Prioress bent her level brows, looking away to the overhanging branches of the Pieman's tree. "How quickly, in these places, we lose the very remembrance of the meaning of personal, human love. We grow so soon accustomed to allowing ourselves to dwell only upon the abstract or the divine."

"That is a loss," said the Bishop. He turned and began to pace slowly toward the cloister; "a grievous loss, my daughter. Sooner than that you should suffer that loss, beyond repair, I would let the daring Knight of the Bloody Vest carry you off on swift wing. Better a robin's nest, if, love be there, than a nunnery full of dead hearts."

He heard the quick catch of her breath, but gave her no chance to speak.

"'And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three,'" quoted the Bishop; "'but the greatest of these is love.'"

They were moving through the cloisters. The Prioress turned in the doorway, pausing that the Bishop might pass in before her.

"This, my lord," she said, with a fine sweep of her arm, "is the abode of Faith and Hope, and also of that divine Love, which excelleth both Hope and Faith."

"Nay," said the Bishop, "I pray you, listen. 'Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly; seeketh not her own; is not easily provoked, thinking no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth.' Methinks," said the Bishop, in a tone of gentle meditation, as he entered the Prioress's cell, "the apostle was speaking of a most human love; yet he rated it higher than faith and hope."

"Are you still dwelling upon Sister Mary Seraphine, my lord?" inquired the Prioress, and in her voice he heard the sound of a gathering storm.

"Nay, my dear Prioress," said the Bishop, seating himself in the Spanish chair, and laying his biretta upon the table near by; "I speak not of self-love, nor does the apostle whose words I quote. I take it, he writes of human love, sanctified; upborne by faith and hope, yet greater than either; just as a bird is greater than its wings, yet cannot mount without them. We must have faith, we must have hope; then our poor earthly loves can rise from the lower level of self-seeking and self-pleasing and take their place among those things that are eternal."

The Prioress had placed her chair opposite the Bishop. She was very pale, and her lips trembled. She made so great an effort to speak with calmness, that her voice sounded stern and hard.

"Why this talk of earthly loves, my Lord Bishop, in a place where all earthly love has been renounced and forgotten?"

The Bishop, seeing those trembling lips, ignored the hard tones, and answered, very tenderly, with a simple directness which scorned all evasion:

"Because, my daughter, I am here to plead for Hugh."


CHAPTER XXVII


THE WOMAN AND HER CONSCIENCE

"For Hugh?" said the Prioress. And then again, in low tones of incredulous amazement, "For Hugh! What know you of Hugh, my lord?"

The Bishop looked steadfastly at the Prioress, and replied with exceeding gravity and earnestness:

"I know that in breaking your solemn troth to him, you are breaking a very noble heart; and that in leaving his home desolate, you are robbing him not only of his happiness but also of his faith. Men are apt to rate our holy religion, not by its theories, but by the way in which it causeth us to act in our dealings with them. If you condemn Hugh to sit beside his hearth, through the long years, a lonely, childless man, you take the Madonna from his home; if you take your love from him, I greatly fear lest you should also rob him of his belief in the love of God. I do not say that these things should be so; I say that we must face the fact that thus they are. And remember--between a man and woman of noble birth, each with a stainless escutcheon, each believing the other to be the soul of honour, a broken troth is no light matter."

"I did not break my troth," said the Prioress, "until I believed that Hugh had broken his. I had suffered sore anguish of heart and humiliation of spirit, over the news of his marriage with his cousin Alfrida, ere I resolved to renounce the world and enter the cloister."

"But Hugh did not wed his cousin, nor any other woman," said the Bishop. "He was true to you in every thought and act, even after he also had passed through sore anguish of heart by reason of your supposed marriage with another suitor."

"I learned the truth but a few days since," said the Prioress. "For seven long years I thought Hugh false to me. For seven long years I believed him the husband of another woman, and schooled myself to forget every memory of past tenderness."

"You were both deceived," said the Bishop. "You have both passed through deep waters. You each owe it to the other to make all possible reparation."

"For seven holy years," said the Prioress, firmly, "I have been the bride of Christ."

"Do you love Hugh?" asked the Bishop.

There was silence in the chamber.

The Prioress desired, most fervently, to take her stand as one dead to all earthly loves and desires. Yet each time she opened her lips to reply, a fresh picture appeared in the mirror of her mental vision, and closed them.

She saw herself, with hand outstretched, clasping Hugh's as they kneeled together before the shrine of the Madonna. She could feel the rush of pulsing life flow from his hand to the palm of hers, and so upward to her poor numbed heart, making it beat its wings like a caged bird.

She felt again the strength and comfort of the strong arm on which she leaned, as slowly through the darkness she and Hugh paced in silence, side by side.

She remembered each time when obedience had seemed strangely sweet, and she had loved the manly abruptness of his commands.

She saw Hugh, in the ring of yellow light cast by the lantern, kneeling at her feet. She felt his hair, thick and soft, between her fingers.

And then--she remembered that shuddering sob, and the instant breaking down of every barrier. He was hers, to comfort; she was his, to soothe his pain. Then--the exquisite moment of yielding; the relief of the clasp of his strong arms; the passing away of the suffering of long years, as she felt his lips on hers, and surrendered to the hunger of his kiss.

Then--one last picture--when loyal to her wish, felt rather than expressed, he had freed her, and passed, without further word or touch, up into that dim grey light like