The foster-sisters

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

Another consoling circumstance was the recession of the water in the subterranean pool. Mother Prudentia, who had had occasion to visit the vaults several times, to bring out from their concealment, things which had been hidden away on the night of the attack, told us that the water was falling rapidly, so that places heretofore impassable were now quite dry. It seemed as if the spirit which dwelt in those awful depths was content with the victims he had received, and wished for no more.

I have said that things fell into their usual train, and so it seemed at first; but presently it became apparent that the health of our dear mother superior was rapidly failing. Though over sixty at the time of the robbers' visit, she had hitherto shown her age very little, but now she seemed to grow old all at once. She had a cough, and a slight spitting of blood, and began to be subject to fainting fits. She herself attributed her illness to a cold taken in the cavern. I think now that the strain of that terrible night, with, perhaps, the added agitation of seeing again the lover she had so long believed dead, were too much for a frame already enfeebled with fasting.

I do verily believe that those people who are said to bear trouble the best are those who are usually most affected by it. Some, indeed, get the credit of enduring with patience and cheerfulness things which really trouble them very little, and such people are usually excessively impatient of the grief of others. But I must not stop to moralize, or I shall never get to the end of my story.

One day, the mother superior announced to the family as a settled thing that in the course of the following October, the community would be removed to a much smaller but more comfortable house in the neighborhood of Toulon, which was at that very time being fitted up for its reception. This house, she said, was a small chateau, formerly called Fleurs, which belonged to the Count de Crequi, and had been given by him to the community on condition that certain services should be performed in perpetuum for the soul of his unfortunate heir and nephew, who had been drowned while fishing.

We were surprised enough to hear this news, for the Count de Crequi was well-known to be an out and out infidel, if not an atheist. In France you may have no religion at all with impunity. It is even rather a genteel thing to believe in nothing and nobody but Monsieur Voltaire; but if you set up to have a religion at all, you must be content to take that which the king prescribes for you.

But the death of the young count was a terrible blow to his uncle, who had no son and was not like to have any. And it may be, that the poor old man thought it best, in case he might, after all, be mistaken, to have friends at court, as it were.

He was, indeed (so I have since understood), held up afterward as a shining instance of conversion by the Jesuits, under whose influence he fell—but I never heard that his conversion led him to give up that twenty-five acres of meadow, which had been exacted from our sisterhood as the price of his protection, or to pay for the ruin of our buildings, caused by his secret emissaries on night of the robbery.

However this might be, there was no doubt that he had given us a new dwelling, to which we were all to be removed before the coming on of cold weather.

The church was to be kept up, with a resident priest to say mass. The other parts of the building would be closed.

This news was received with varying feelings by the sisters. The elders wept, and regretted that they must leave the place which had been their home so long, and the graves of those who had been their companions in youth. The younger sisters were divided, as was natural, between sorrow at parting and the novelty of a new house and situation.