I feel very sorry for many of the nuns, especially for the old nuns. They seem to me like children, and yet not child-like. The merest trifles appear to excite or trouble them. They speak of the convent as if it were the world, and of the world as if it were hell. It is a childhood with no hope, no youth and womanhood before it. It reminds me of the stunted oaks we passed on Düben Heath, between Wittemberg and Leipsic, which will never be full-grown, and yet are not saplings.
Then there is one, Sister Beatrice, whom the nuns seem to think very inferior to themselves, because they say she was forced into the convent by her relatives, to prevent her marrying some one they did not like, and could never be induced to take the vows until her lover died,—which, they say, is hardly worthy of the name of a vocation at all.
She does not seem to think so either, but moves about in a subdued, broken-spirited way, as if she felt herself a creature belonging neither to the Church nor to the world.
The other evening she had been on an errand for the prioress through the snow, and returned blue with cold. She had made some mistake in the message, and was ordered at once, with contemptuous words, to her cell, to finish a penance by reciting certain prayers.
I could not help following her. When I found her, she was sitting on a pallet shivering, with the prayer-book before her. I crept into the cell, and, sitting down beside her, began to chafe her poor icy hands.
At first she tried to withdraw them, murmuring that she had a penance to perform; and then her eyes wandered from the book to mine. She gazed wonderingly at me for some moments, and then she burst into tears, and said,—
"Oh, do not do that! It makes me think of the old nursery at home. And my mother is dead; all are dead, and I cannot die."
She let me put my arms round her, however; and, in faint, broken words, the whole history came out.
"I am not here from choice," she said. "I should never have been here if my mother had not died; and I should never have taken the vows if he had not died, whatever they had done to me; for we were betrothed, and we had vowed before God we would be true to each other till death. And why is not one vow as good as another? When they told me he was dead, I took the vows,—or, at least, I let them put the veil on me, and said the words as I was told, after the priest; for I did not care what I did. And so I am a nun. I have no wish now to be anything else. But it will do me no good to be a nun, for I loved Eberhard first, and I loved him best; and now that he is dead, I love no one, and have no hope in heaven or earth. I try, indeed, not to think of him, because they say that is sin; but I cannot think of happiness without him, if I try for ever."
I said, "I do not think it is wrong for you to think of him."