It was the adieu of the Grand Duchess Tatyana to the living world––her last glimpse of it through the flames of the altar candles gilding the dead Christ on his jewelled cross––the image of that Christ she was so soon to gaze upon when those lovely, mischievous young eyes of hers unclosed in Paradise....
The door of the crypt slammed. A terrible silence reigned in the chapel.
Then the novice uttered a cry, caught the foot of the cross with desperate hands, hung there convulsively.
To her the Mother Superior turned, weeping. But at her touch the girl, crazed with grief, lifted both hands and tore from her own face the veil of her novitiate just begun;––tore her white garments from her shoulders, crying out in a strangled voice that if a Christian God let such things happen then He was no God of hers––that she would never enter His service––that the Lord Christ was no bridegroom for her; and, her novitiate was ended––ended together with every vow of chastity, of humility, of poverty, of even common humanity which she had ever hoped to take.
The girl was now utterly beside herself; at one moment flaming and storming with fury among the terrified, huddling nuns; the next instant weeping, stamping her felt-shod foot in ungovernable revolt at this horror which any God in any heaven could permit.
And again and again she called out on Christ to stop this thing and prove Himself a real God to a pagan world that mocked Him.
Dishevelled, her rent veil in tatters on her naked shoulders, she sprang across the chapel to the crypt door, shook it, tore at it, seized chair after chair and shattered them to splinters against the solid panels of oak and iron.
Then, suddenly motionless, she crouched and listened.
“Oh, Mother of God!” she panted, “intervene now––now!––or never!”