“What on earth does it matter?” said Mother Gaillarde. “Aren’t you both going to Heaven? You can talk there—without fear of disobedience.”
“My Lord Prior said. Mother, in his last charge, that a convent ought to be a little heaven. If that be so, why should we not talk now?”
Mother Gaillarde’s laugh positively frightened me. It was the hardest, driest, most metallic sound I ever heard.
“Sister Annora, you must be a baby! You have lived in a convent nearly fifty years, and you ask if it be a little heaven!”
“I cry you mercy, Mother. I asked if it should not be so.”
“That’s another matter,” said she, with a second laugh, but it did not startle me like the first. “We should all be perfect, of course. Pity we aren’t!”
As she worked away at the plums she was stoning without saying either yes or no, I ventured to repeat my question.
“You may do as you are told!” was Mother Gaillarde’s answer. “Can’t you let things alone?”
Snappishly as she spoke, yet—I hardly know why,—I did not feel the appeal to her as hopeless as to Mother Ada. To entreat the latter was like beseeching a stone wall. Mother Gaillarde’s very peevishness (if I dare call it so) showed that she was a woman, and not an image.
“Mother Gaillarde,” I said, suddenly—for something seemed to bid me speak out—“be not angry with me, I pray you. I am afraid of letting things alone. My heart seems to be like a dry bough, and my soul withering up, and I want to keep them alive and warm. Surely death is not perfection!”