The Hour Will Come: A Tale of an Alpine Cloister. Volumes I and II

by Wilhelmine von Hillern

From that time Correntian hated him if possible more than before, and the child was so much afraid of him that he fled from him crying when by any chance he approached him. Never had he favoured the child with a single word but one of rebuke, nor a look but one of reproach. The merriment of the brethren was in his eyes an outrage and a crime against the rule of Saint Benedict which did not allow of speech "with gesticulations, nor with showing of the teeth, nor with laughter and outcry."

But the others who set the spirit above the letter, and who better understood the rule of Saint Benedict, did not care, but loved the child all the more. Correntian was like a seceder from the rest of the brethren, and the unacknowledged breach between them grew daily more impossible to heal. Here again it was the child that was guilty. "The seed of hell that I pointed out is beginning to germinate," said the implacable man.

Three summers had passed over little Donatus and the autumn wind was once more blowing over the stubble-fields though the midday sun still blazed with much power. The nurse was sitting with the boy in an arbour of blossomless juniper; the brethren were busy in the house with their prayers and duties. She was quite alone; as often as the autumn winds blew, the old wounds broke out again in the saddened heart and bled anew; it was now near the season when, four years ago, she had first left her husband and her lowly home, which was now empty and ruined. "You--you took everything from me--and yet I cannot help loving you, you child of sorrow," said she to the boy, who was playing at her feet at a burial, and was just then placing a cross he had made of two little sticks on the top of a mound he had thrown up. It was a delightful occupation and the child was eager at his play; he decked the grave with red bird-cherries as he had seen done in the grave-yard when one of the brethren took him there; then he swung his little clay mug over it by a string for a censer and sang an edifying litany in his baby way as he had heard the brethren do, and he was so absorbed in his pretty play that he screamed and struggled when his nurse suddenly caught hold of him and took him up. But he was easily pacified and, well-pleased with his foster-mother's caresses, he clung closely to that faithful breast. It was long since she had forgotten the prohibition to kiss him. She clasped him again and again with melancholy fervour and pressed a thousand kisses on his sweet baby-lips.

At this moment, as if it had sprung from the earth, a dark shadow stood between her and the sun, which threw a golden light on the grass-plot in front of the arbour. She looked up startled--again it was Correntian who stood before her. And as if that most sacred feeling, a mother's love, were a sin, she blushed and set the child down on the ground. She was suddenly conscious that she ought not to kiss him--a look of loathing from the monk told her all and she trembled before him. But he only shook his head and said,

"This must have an end. Stay here!" he added in a tone of rough command and quitted her with a rapid step.

The woman sat still as if spell-bound and dared not move from the spot. What misery would he bring upon her now? All at once it had grown cloudy and chill, and yet the sun was shining as before; the grass, the trees--though still green, the sky--though still blue--everything was all at once autumnal and sere as if metamorphosed by a touch. And the child looked to her so strange, so distant, so unattainable, and yet she need only put out her arms to clasp him.

So she waited with folded hands, motionless.

At last she heard returning steps over the path; it was the Abbot and a few of the elder brethren. The Abbot hurried up with unwonted haste.

"You are an incorrigible woman," he scolded out. "We have shown more than due pity for you, we have kept you here longer than was fit although the boy has long since ceased to need you; there was no way left for you to sin--so we thought--and now I hear that even this child is not sacred to you! Why, have I not forbidden you to kiss the boy? 'under heavy penalty,' I said; and you--you despise our orders, you compel the child to submit to your caresses although he struggles with vague misgiving, and you teach his innocent mouth, which is consecrated to God's service, to kiss a woman's lips; you outrage the sight of the brethren who betake themselves to the garden for devout contemplation? It must come to an end, brother Correntian is right. There," he added, drawing a little bag full of gold coins out of his frock, and laying it in her hand, "there is your honest pay. I think you will be satisfied with us, it is a donation worthy of a prince. You may buy yourself a farm and land with it down there near Nauders or wherever you will, but take yourself off out of the sacred precincts of our cloister, for ever."

The nurse made no answer, she stood there pale and dumb; tears dimmed her eyes as if she had been plunged into a lake, and saw everything through water. Her clenched hands trembled so that she had let the purse fall, the wretched price of her life's ruined happiness. Now the last treasure was taken from her, the only thing left--the child to whom she had sacrificed all; this too! "Within these walls nothing is our own but suffering," Correntian had said, she remembered that.