Jaime Rodriguez: I fear there are other things as well: fleas and dust, and tumblers and singers, and unseemly talk.
Sister Pilar: Hence I’d liefer go on pilgrimage by the road of my own dreams. (Passionately) Oh, these other things, small and pullulating and fertile, and all of them the spawn of sin! One cannot be rid of them. Why, even in the Books of Hours, round the grave Latin psalms the monks must needs draw garlands and butterflies and hawks and hounds; and we nuns powder our handiwork—the copes and vestments for the mass—not with such meet signs as crosses and emmies, but with swans and true-love knots and birds and butterflies ... (she breaks off, half laughing). I would have things plain and grave.
Jaime Rodriguez (impatiently): Yes, yes, but you are forgetting that Nature is the mirror in which is reflected the thoughts of God; hence, to the discerning eye, there is nothing mean and trivial, but everything, everything, is a page in the great book of the Passion and the Redemption. For him who has learned to read that book, the Martyrs bleed in roses and in amethysts, the Confessors keep their council in violets, and in lilies the Virgins are spotless—not a spray of eglantine, not a little ant, but is a character in the book of Nature. Why, without first reading it, the holy fathers could not crack a little nut; it is the figure of Christ, said Adam of Saint-Victor—its green husk is His humanity, its shell the wood of the Cross, its kernel the heavenly nourishment of the Host. Nay, daughter, I tell you....
Sister Pilar: Yes, yes, but do you verily believe the nun with her needle, the clerk with his brush, wots anything of these hidden matters? Nay, it is nought but vanity. Oh! these multitudinous seeds of vanity that lie broadcast in every soul, in every mote of sunshine, in every acre of the earth! There is no soul built of a substance so closely knit but that it has crannies wherein these seeds find lodging; and, ere you can say a pater, lo! they are bourgeoning! ’Tis like some church that stands four-square to the winds and sun so long as folk flock there to pray; then comes a rumour that the Moors are near, and the folks leave their homes and fly; and then, some day, they may return, and they will find the stout walls of their church all starred with jessamine, intagliated with ivy, that eat and eat until it crumbles to the ground. So many little things ... everywhere! And our thoughts ... say it be the Passion of Our Lord we choose for contemplation; at first, all is well, the tears flow, ’tis almost as if we smelled the sweat and dust of the road to Calvary ... and then, after a little space, we stare around bewildered, and know that our minds have broken into scores of little bright thoughts, like the margins of the Hours, and then ...
Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, daughter, but I tell you you should obtain the key to the Creation; read St. Ambrose’s Hexæmeron, and thus school your mind by figures for the naked types of Heaven; there every house will be a church, its hearth an altar on which, no longer hid under the species of bread and wine, Jesus Christ will be for ever enthroned. And its roof will be supported not by pillars carved into the semblance of the Patriarchs and Apostles, but by the Patriarchs ... oh, yes, and the housewife’s store of linen will all be corporals, and her plate ... you are smiling!
Sister Pilar: How happy you must have been playing with your toys when you were a child! I can see you with an old wine-keg for an altar, a Moor’s skull for a chalice, and a mule’s discarded shoe for a pyx, chanting meaningless words, and rating the other children if their wits wandered ... but ... you are angry?
Jaime Rodriguez (rising in high dudgeon): Aye, ever mocking! Methinks ... I cannot call to mind ever reading that holy women of old mocked their confessors.
He walks across the court to the door at the side. Sister Pilar sits on for some minutes in a reverie, then rises, and goes and tends the plants round the fountain, so that she is not visible to any one entering the court from the convent. Enter from the convent Trotaconventos and Sister Assumcion.
Trotaconventos: As to hell-fire, my dear, you’ll meet with many a procuress and bawd in Paradise, for we have a mighty advocate in St. Mary Magdalene, who was of our craft. And as to the holy life, why, when your hams begin to wither and your breasts to sag, then cast up your eyes and draw as long an upper lip as a prioress at a bishop’s visitation. A sinful youth and a holy old age—thus do we both enjoy the earth and win to Paradise hereafter. Well, my sweeting, all is in train—I’d eat some honey, it softens the voice; and repeat the in Temerate and the De Profundis, for old wives say they are wonderful lucky prayers in all such business, and ... well, I think that is all. Be down at the orchard wall at nine o’clock to-night, and trust the rest to what the Moors call the ‘great procuress’—Night.