"Now indeed, poor woman--you have lost all!"
Father Eusebius was sitting in the nurse's little room, which during the last three days had been to her a cell of torment; he held the unconscious woman's head between his hands and rubbed her forehead and temples with strong spirit of lavender; but her mind was wandering far away in the twilight of oblivion and must return to a consciousness of nothing but horror--torment and to suffering. Her hands moved with a feeble gesture to push him away, her dumb lips parted as though she would say, "Do not be cruel--do not wake me--I am at peace--leave me, leave me."
But though his heart seemed to stand still for pity, he must call her back to life.
At last she was roused; she looked round enquiringly, for all her world was in ruins and she knew not whom she could turn or cling to. Before her on the floor lay her dead husband's clothes--there stood the cradle out of which they had carried away her baby only yesterday to the charnel-house--what was left her in the world? There still was one! Father Eusebius took the living baby from the bed and brought it to her. "It is a stranger's child," he said. "But it is yours too!" and the bleeding heart-strings, torn up by the roots, clung to the strange child as if he were her own--the poor beggared soul accepted it as the last alms of love bestowed upon her by the Creator; for she was humbled in her misfortune, she did not strive, she did not contend, nor did she bear any malice to the child, for all that it had unconsciously been guilty of. "The child is yours," spoke comfort to her heart, and she believed it as father Eusebius himself did when he spoke the words.
"What is yours? Who within these walls may venture to boast that anything is his own?" said Correntian's stern voice at the door.
"Oh! that man!" shrieked the terrified woman and she fled with the child into the remotest corner of the room from the sinister monk who now came in.
"I spoke of the child--to comfort the poor soul, and if you are a man you will leave her that comfort," said brother Eusebius.
"In this house nothing is ours--but suffering and the hope of redemption," the dark man went on pitilessly. "Know that, woman; and remember it at every hour--The venerable fathers have sent me to tell you that you must now wean the child, that the shock of the last few days may do him no harm."
A flood of tears burst from the nurse's large and innocent eyes as she heard this, and she asked with white lips,
"Must I go away then?"