I was sitting shivering in my room, wondering how it was that things succeeded so differently with St. Elizabeth and with us, when Aunt Ursula's round pleasant voice sounded up the stairs, and in another minute she was holding me laughing in her arms.
"My poor little Elsè! We must wait a little before we imitate our patron saint; or we must begin at the other end. It would never do, for instance, for me to travel to Rome with eleven thousand young ladies like St. Ursula."
My grandmother had guessed the meaning of our foray, and Aunt Ursula coming in at the time, had heard the narrative, and insisted on sending us another Christmas dinner. Fritz and I secretly believed that St. Elizabeth had a good deal to do with the replacing of our Christmas dinner; but after that, we understood that caution was needed in transferring the holy example of the saints to our own lives, and that at present we must not venture beyond the ten commandments.
Yet to think that St. Elizabeth, a real canonized saint—whose picture is over altars in the churches—whose good deeds are painted on the church windows, and illumined by the sun shining through them—whose bones are laid up in reliquaries, one of which I wear always next my heart—actually lived and prayed in that dark old castle above us, and walked along these very streets—perhaps even had been seen from this window of Fritz's and my beloved lumber-room.
Only three hundred years ago! If only I had lived three hundred years earlier, or she three hundred years later, I might have seen her and talked to her, and asked her what it was that made her a saint. There are so many questions I should like to have asked her. I would have said, "Dear St. Elizabeth, tell me what it is that makes you a saint? It cannot be your charity, because no one can be more charitable than Aunt Ursula, and she is not a saint; and it cannot be your sufferings, or your patience, or your love, or your denying yourself for the sake of others, because our mother is like you in all that, and she is not a saint. Was it because you left your little children, that God loves you so much? or because you not only did and bore the things God laid on you, as our mother does, but chose out other things for yourself, which you thought harder?" And if she were gentle (as I think she was), and would have listened, I would have asked her, "Holy Landgravine, why are things which were so right and holy in you, wrong for Fritz and me?" And I would also have asked her, "Dear St. Elizabeth, my patroness, what is it in heaven that makes you so happy there?"
But I forgot—she would not have been in heaven at all. She would not even have been made a saint, because it was only after her death, when the sick and crippled were healed by touching her body, that they found out what a saint she had been. Perhaps, even, she would not herself have known she was a saint. And if so, I wonder if it can be possible that our mother is a saint after all, only she does not know it.
Fritz and I are four or five years older than any of the children. Two little sisters died of the plague before any more were born. One was baptized, and died when she was a year old, before she could soil her baptismal robes. Therefore we feel sure she is in paradise. I think of her whenever I look at the cloud of glory around the Blessed Virgin in St. George's Church. Out of the cloud peep a number of happy child-faces—some leaning their round soft cheeks on their pretty dimpled hands, and all looking up with such confidence at the dear mother of God. I suppose the little children in heaven especially belong to her. It must be very happy, then, to have died young.
But of that other little nameless babe who died at the same time none of us ever dare to speak. It was not baptized, and they say the souls of little unbaptized babes hover about for ever in the darkness between heaven and hell. Think of the horror of falling from the loving arms of our mother into the cold and the darkness, to shiver and wail there for ever, and belong to no one. At Eisenach we have a Foundling Hospital, attached to one of the nunneries founded by St. Elizabeth, for such forsaken little ones. If St. Elizabeth could only establish a Foundling somewhere near the gates of paradise, for such little nameless outcast child-souls! But I suppose she is too high in heaven, and too far from the gates to hear the plaintive cries of such abandoned little ones. Or perhaps God, who was so much pleased with her for deserting her own little children, would not allow it. I suppose the saints in heaven who have been mothers, or even elder sisters like me, leave their mother's hearts on earth, and that in paradise they are all monks and nuns like Aunt Agnes and Father Christopher.
Next to that little nameless one came the twin girls Chriemhild (named after our grandmother), and Atlantis, so christened by our father on account of the discovery of the great world beyond the sea which he had so often thought of, and which the great admiral Christopher Columbus accomplished about that time. Then the twin boys Boniface Pollux and Christopher Castor; their names being a compromise between our father, who was struck with some remarkable conjunction of their stars at their birth, and my mother, who thought it only right to counterbalance such Pagan appellations with names written in heaven. Then another boy, who only lived a few weeks; and then the present baby, Thekla, who is the plaything and darling of us all.