Does she love me, where she is with God? They say she was so gentle and pious, I am sure she must be in Heaven. She stayed only a very little while with us; I was not two years old when she died. Marguerite says she used to carry me up and down the long gallery, looking tenderly down at my baby face, and call me her darling, her dove, her precious Elaine. Oh, why could I not have heard her, to remember it, only once?
There is no need to ask why I feel lonely and desolate, and muse on my dead mother, as I always do when I am miserable. I can never be anything else, now that Guy is gone. Monseigneur, our gracious Lord and father, gave consent a month since that Guy should take the holy cross, and yesterday morning he set forth with a company on his perilous journey. Was there no one in all the world but my Guy to fight for our Lord's sepulchre? And does our Lord think so very much about it, that He does not care though a maiden's heart be broken and her life desolate, if she give up her best beloved to defend it?
Well, I suppose it is wrong to say that. The good God is always good, of course. And I suppose it is right that Guy should put the sepulchre before me. He is the true knight, to sacrifice himself to duty; and I am not the noble-hearted damsel, if I wish he had done otherwise. And I suppose the great tears that fell on that red cross while I was broidering it, were displeasing to the good God. He ought to have the best. Oh yes! I see that, quite clearly. And yet I wonder why He wanted my best, when He has all the saints and angels round Him, to do Him homage. And I had only Guy. I cannot understand it.
Oh dear! I do get so puzzled, sometimes. I think this is a very perplexing world to live in. And it is of no use to say a word to Alix, because she only calls me a simpleton, and that does not explain anything: and Marguerite says, "Hush! My Damoiselle would not speak against the good God?"
And neither of them helps me a bit. They do not see that I never mean to speak against the good God. I only want to understand. They do not feel the same sort of want, I suppose, and so they think it wicked in me to feel it.
Does my mother understand it all? Must one die, to understand? And if so, why?
Guy would let me ask him such questions. I do not know that he saw the answer any better than I did, but at least we could agree in feeling them, and could try to puzzle the way out. But Alix appears not even to see what I mean. And it is disheartening, when one takes the trouble to brace up one's courage to ask such questions from somebody above one, of whom one feels ever so little afraid, only to be told in reply what the same person had told one a hundred times before—that one is a simpleton.
I wish somebody would listen to me. If I could have seen a saint,—some one who lived in perpetual communion with our Lord, and knew all things! But do saints know all things? If so, why could not I be a saint myself, and then I should know too?
Well, I have no doubt of the answer to that question. For if I were a saint, I must first be a nun; and that would mean to go away from home, and never, never see Guy any more.
Oh no! that would not do. So it is plain I can never be a saint.