"That he and God alone can tell!" said Wyso, shrugging his shoulders.
"Take leave of your wife," said the Prior as the monks disappeared. "I dare not give you any farther respite, for the stern father Correntian will assuredly watch us from his window up there."
The husband and wife fell into each other's arms in bitter grief, but they suddenly started apart again, for a monk still remained behind--are they not to be allowed to press heart to heart before parting?
But the monk who has stayed behind is brother Eusebius; his face is radiant with mild dignity and sweet compassion. He signs to them with his slender withered hand that they need have no fear of him, for he has stayed to be a comfort to the miserable wife and not as a spy.
"Do as your heart bids you," he says. "Nature is sacred--woe to those who violate her rights!"
All was as still in the room as in a church, and he who had spoken these words stood there in calm grandeur, in divine unselfish peace, and looked on pityingly while the couple held each other in a close embrace and could not bear to tear themselves asunder, till the Prior separated them almost by force. A stifled scream from the woman--and the door closed, shutting her husband out for ever. The cloistered nurse was alone with the old monk, the gnome, who lived only between the grave and Heaven. She threw herself sobbing at his feet and he whispered words mighty to comfort in her ear, in a tongue as it were from another world that she but half comprehended; but they quelled the wild outbreak of her sorrow and lulled her soul, as if it were rocked by spirit-hands, filling her with strangely melancholy and yet glorious presentiments.
Dawn was already breaking in the lonely turret-chamber, the bell was ringing for matins. The mother sat pale and weary on the edge of the bed and held her child to her breast. She had taken it in her arms unthinkingly--it had waked before the other child--never remembering that after this night's work the milk might be poison which her frail baby was drinking in eager draughts. Father Eusebius had left her to attend the early mass. She had not yet slept at all; but now she sank back on the pillow, nature asserted its rights--she fell asleep--while the poison was slowly but fatally coursing through the veins of the infant which, in her slumbers, she still held closely and tenderly to her breast.
CHAPTER IV.
A scream of anguish rang through the still convent court-yard from the eastern tower; it rang out to the clear spring sky and through the open turret-window, following the glorified infant soul that had taken its flight to Heaven up, up into the eternal blue; it startled the brooding swallow from the roof, and fearing some mortal evil she fluttered round her nest; it roused the grey monk in the western tower from the books and writings among which he sat day and night poring over his little desk and imbibing living food for his soul's roots from the dead parchment. He closed his book and rose. Meanwhile someone was already knocking at his door. For father Eusebius was the sick nurse of the whole convent; whenever any one was ill in the Abbey or in the neighbourhood he was sent for.
"Come quickly, brother Eusebius," cried the messenger. "The nurse's baby has died suddenly."