My mother sighed again.
"That is true, my child, but it is possible to hold the truth in unrighteousness. Here, where to be of the Religion is to put one's neck into the halter, there is no temptation to the careless and dissolute to join our numbers. Yet even here, under the very cross of persecution, the church is far from perfect. But we will talk more another time."
I was so penitent and so humbled in my own eyes that I made no objection when my mother deprived me of my two grand sources of amusement, the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney, and Mr. Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene," telling me that she should not let me have them again for a month.
I am somewhat inclined to doubt the wisdom of this measure. I know it threw me back upon myself for amusement in the hours when I was deprived of my mother's society, and left me more time to meditate, or rather, I should say, to dream of that fairy-land to which the volume of plays had introduced me.
However, I had them back again at the end of a fortnight, and with them a new book—a great quarto volume of voyages and travels, with several historical pieces, collected by Mr. Hackluyt, formerly a preacher to Queen Elizabeth. This gave a new turn to my thoughts. I rejoiced in the destruction of the great Armada, and wept while I exulted over the glorious death of Sir Richard Greville, and travelled to the Indies and the New World and dreamed over their marvels.
When I went, as I did now and then, to visit my old friends at the farm, I entertained David with these tales by the hour together, and even Lucille forgot her jealousy to listen. What castles in the air we built on the margins of those great rivers, and what colonies we planted in those unknown lands—colonies where those of the Religion were to find a peaceful refuge, and from which all the evils incident to humanity were to be excluded! They were harmless dreams at the least, and served to amuse us for many a long hour. I have seen some of these colonies since then, and have learned that wherever man goes his three great foes—the world, the flesh, and the devil—go also.
Our new neighbors at the hospital of St. Jacques—St. James indeed! I should like to hear what he would have said to them—gave us little trouble for some time. Indeed, they had troubles enough of their own. They were hardly settled in their new abode before a dreadful pestilential fever broke out among them, and several of the nuns died, while others were so reduced that there were not enough of well to tend the sick.
The French country people have a great dread of infection, so that nobody would go near them; and I don't know but they would have starved only that my father himself on one or two occasions carried them provisions, wine, and comforts for the sick.
There was great talk about the sickness, and those of the Religion did not hesitate to ascribe it to the pestiferous air of the cellars and vaults, which were known to be very extensive, and in which several persons had died after long confinement.
"It is the avenging ghost of poor Denise Amblot, who perished there with her infant," said old Marie, our cook.