“Come forth, daughters!” she exclaimed; “and behold the punishment due to female frailty.”
The Countess of Arestino and Flora Francatelli mechanically obeyed this command; and a strange—a heart-rending sight met their eyes.
The chamber of penitence was filled with nuns in their convent-garbs; and the penitents in a state of semi-nudity. On one side of the apartment, a huge door with massive bolts and chains stood open, allowing a glimpse, by the glare of the lamps, tapers, and torches, of the interior of a small cell that looked like a sepulcher. Near the entrance to that tomb, for such, indeed, it was—stood the lady abbess: and on the pavement near her knelt a young and beautiful girl, with hands clasped and countenance raised in an agony of soul which no human pen can describe. The garments of this hapless being had been torn away from her neck and shoulders, doubtless by the force used to drag her thither: and her suppliant attitude, the despair that was depicted by her appearance, her extreme loveliness, and the wild glaring of her deep blue eyes, gave her the appearance of something unearthly in the glare of that vacillating light.
“No, daughter,” said the abbess, in a cold, stern voice; “there is no mercy for you on earth.”
Then echoed through the chamber of penitence a scream, a shriek so wild, so long, so full of agony, that it penetrated to the hearts of Flora, the countess, and some of the penitents, although the abbess and her nuns seemed unmoved by that appalling evidence of female anguish. At the same instant the bell struck again; and the funeral hymn was recommenced by the junior recluses.
Sister Alba now approached Flora and the countess, and said in a low whisper, “The vengeance of the conventual discipline is terrible on those who sin! That miserable girl completed her novitiate five months ago; and the night before she was to take the veil she escaped. This awful crime she committed for the sake of some man she had known ere she first entered the convent, and for whom she thus endangered her immortal soul. But her justly incensed relations yesterday discovered her retreat; and she was restored to this house of penitence and peace. Alas! the effects of her frailty were but too apparent; and that benighted girl would become a mother—had she long enough to live!”
These last words were uttered with terrible significancy; and the nun turned aside, leaving Flora and the countess each a prey to the most unspeakable horror.
In the meantime the helpless victim of ecclesiastical vengeance—the poor erring creature, who had dared and sacrificed everything for the love of her seducer—had risen from her suppliant posture, and flown wildly—madly round to the elder nuns in succession, imploring mercy, and rending the very roof of the subterrane with piercing screams. But those to whom she appealed turned a deaf ear; for a convent is a tomb in which all human sympathies are immured—a vortex wherein all the best feelings that concrete in the mortal heart are cruelly engulfed!
And while this wretched girl—for she was scarcely yet a woman, although were life spared her, on the way to maternity—was thus fruitlessly imploring the mercy of hearts that were stern and remorseless, the hymn continued, and the bell tolled at short intervals.
Suddenly at a particular verse in the funeral chant, the three nuns who usually did the bidding of the lady abbess, glided noiselessly—but surely, like black serpents—toward the victim—seized her in their powerful grasp—and bore her to the cell in which she was to be immured.