In Convent Walls / The Story of the Despensers

by Emily Sarah Holt

Only six years old was I—for though my seventh birthday was near, it was not past—when I was thrust into this house of religion. My vocation and my will were never asked. We—Margaret and I—were in Queen Isabel’s way; and she plucked us and flung us over the hedge like weeds that cumbered her garden. It was all by reason she hated our father: but what he had done to make her thus hate him, that I never knew. And I was an affianced bride when I was torn away from all that should have made life glad, and prisoned here for ever more. How my heart keeps whispering to me, “It might have been!” There is a woman who comes for doles to the convent gate, and at times she hath with her the loveliest little child I ever saw; and they smile on each other, mother and child, and look so happy when they smile. Why was I cut off thus from all that makes other women happy? Nobody belongs to me; nobody loves me. The very thought of being loved, the very wish to be so, is sin in me, who am a veiled nun. But why was it made sin? It was not sin aforetime. He might have loved me, he whom I never saw after I was flung over the convent wall—he who was mine and not hers to whom I suppose they will have wedded him. But I know nothing: I shall never know. And they say it is sin to think of him. Every thing seems to be sin; and loving people more especially. Mother Ada told me one day that she saw in me an inclination to be too much drawn to Mother Alianora, and warned me to mortify it, because she was my father’s sister, and therefore there was cause to fear it might be an indulgence of the flesh. And now, these weeks past, my poor, dry, withered heart seems to have a little faint pulsation in it, and goes out to Margaret—my sister Margaret with the strange dark eyes, my own sister who is an utter stranger to me. Must I crush the poor dry thing back, and hurt all that is left to hurt of it? Oh, will no saint in Heaven tell me why it is, that God, who loveth men, will not have monks and nuns to love each other? The Lord Prior saith He is a jealous God, and demands that we give all our love to Him. Yet I may love the blessed saints without any derogation to Him—but I must not love mine own sister. It is very perplexing. Do earthly fathers forbid their children to love one another, lest they should not be loved themselves sufficiently? I should have thought that love, like other things, increased by exercise, and that loving my sister would rather help me to love God. But they say not. I suppose they know.

Ah me, if I should find out at last that they mistook God’s meaning!—that I might have had His love and Margaret’s too!—nay, even that I might have had His love and that other, of which it is so wicked in me to think, and yet something is in me that will keep ever thinking! O holy and immaculate Virgin, O Saint Margaret, Saint Agnes, and all ye blessed maidens that dwell in Heaven, have mercy on me, miserable sinner! My soul is earth-bound, and I cannot rise. I am the bride of Christ, and I cannot cease lamenting my lost earthly bridal.

But hath Christ a thousand brides? They say holy Church is His Bride, and she is one. Then how can all the vestals in all the convents be each of them His bride? I suppose I cannot understand as I ought to do. Perhaps I should have understood better if that might have been had been—if I had not stood withering all these years, taught to crush down this poor dried heart of mine. They will not let me have any thing to love. When Mother Ada thought I was growing too fond of little Erneburg, she took her away from me and gave her to Sister Roberga to teach. Yet the child seemed to soften my heart and do it good.

“Are the holy Mother and the blessed saints not enough for thee?” she said.

But the blessed saints do not look at me and smile, as Erneburg did. She doth it even now, across the schoolroom—though I have never been permitted to speak word to her since Mother Ada took her from me. And I must smile back again,—ay, however many times I have to lick a cross on the oratory floor for doing it. Why ought I not? Did not our Lord Himself take the little children into His arms? I am sure He must have smiled on them—they would have been frightened if He had not done so.

They say I have but a poor wit, and am fit to teach only babes.

“And not fit to teach them,” saith Mother Ada—in a tone which I am sure people would call cross and snappish if she were an extern—“for her fancy all runs to playing with them, rather than teaching them any thing worth knowing.”

Ah, Mother Ada, but is not love worth knowing? or must they have that only from their happy mothers, who not being holy women are permitted to love, and not from a poor, crushed, hopeless heart like mine?

There is nothing in our life to look forward to. “Till death” is the vow of the Sisterhood. And death seems a poor hope.

I know, of course, what Mother Ada would say: that I have no vocation, and my heart is in the world and of the world. But God sent me to the world: and man—or rather woman—thrust me against my will into this Sisterhood.