One Snowy Night / Long ago at Oxford

by Emily Sarah Holt

“No,” he said, “leave it alone to-night, dear. Lay it before the Lord, and ask of Him whether that is the road He hath prepared for thee to walk in. It might be for the best, Ermine.”

There was a rather sorrowful intonation in his voice.

“I will wait till the morning, and do as you desire,” was Ermine’s reply. “But I could give the answer to-night, for I know what it will be. The best way, and the prepared way, is that which leads the straightest Home.”

It was very evident, when the morning arrived, that Gerhardt would much have liked Ermine to accept the lowly but safe and sheltered position of companion to Derette in the anchorhold. While the hermit lived alone, but wandered about at will, the anchorite, who was never allowed to leave his cell, always had with him a companion of his own sex, through whom he communicated with the outer world. Visitors of the same sex, or children, could enter the cell freely, or the anchorite might speak through his window to any person. Derette, therefore, would really be less cut off from the society of her friends in the anchorhold, than she would have been as a cloistered sister at Godstowe, where they would only have been permitted to see her, at most, once in a year. But outside the threshold of her cell she might never step, save for imminent peril of life, as in the case of fire. She must live there, and die there, her sole occupation found in devotional exercises, her sole pleasure in her friends’ visits, the few sights she could see from her window, and through a tiny slit into the chancel of the Church of Saint John the Baptist, which we know as the chapel of Merton College. Every anchorhold was built close to a church, so as to allow its occupant the privilege of seeing the performance of mass, and of receiving the consecrated wafer, by the protrusion of his tongue through the narrow slit.

In those early days, and before the corruptions of Rome reached their full development, this cloistered life was not without some advantages for the securing of which it is not required now. In rough, wild times, when insult or cruelty to a woman was among the commonest events, it was something for a woman to know that by wearing a certain uniform, her person would be regarded as so sacred that he who dared to molest her would be a man of rare and exceptional wickedness. It was something, also, to be sure, even moderately sure, of provision for her bodily needs during life: something to know that if any sudden accident should deprive her of the services of her only companion, the world deemed it so good a deed to serve her, that any woman whom she might summon through her little window would consider herself honoured and benefited by being allowed to minister to her even in the meanest manner. The loss of liberty was much assuaged and compensated, by being set against such advantages as these. The recluse was considered the holiest of nuns, not to say of women, and the Countess of Oxford herself would have held it no degradation to serve her in her need.

Derette would dearly have liked to secure the companionship of Ermine, but she saw plainly that it was not to be. When the morning came, therefore, she was much less surprised than sorry that Ermine declined the offer. Gerhardt pressed it on her in vain.

“If you command me, my brother,” said Ermine, “I will obey, for you have a right to dispose of me; but if the matter is left to my own choice, I stay with you, and your lot shall be mine.”

“But if our lot be hardship and persecution, my Ermine—cold and hunger, nakedness, and peril and sword! This might be a somewhat dull and dreary life for thee, but were it not a safe one?”

“Had the Master a safe and easy life, Brother, that His servants should seek it? Is the world so safe, and the way to Paradise so hard? Is it not written, ‘Blessed are ye, when they shall persecute you’? Methinks I see arising, even now, that little cloud which shall ere long cover all the sky with darkness. Shall I choose my place with the ‘fearful’ that are left without the Holy City, rather than with them that shall follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth?”

“It is written again, ‘When they persecute you in one city, flee ye into another,’” replied Gerhardt.