An Episode Under the Terror | Page 6

the
whole building was in total darkness.
Meanwhile the old lady climbed not without difficulty up the rough,
clumsily built staircase, with a rope by way of a hand-rail. At the door
of the lodging in the attic she stopped and tapped mysteriously; an old
man brought forward a chair for her. She dropped into it at once.
"Hide! hide!" she exclaimed, looking up at him. "Seldom as we leave
the house, everything that we do is known, and every step is
watched----"
"What is it now?" asked another elderly woman, sitting by the fire.
"The man that has been prowling about the house yesterday and to-day,
followed me to-night----"
At those words all three dwellers in the wretched den looked in each
other's faces and did not try to dissimulate the profound dread that they
felt. The old priest was the least overcome, probably because he ran the
greatest danger. If a brave man is weighed down by great calamities or
the yoke of persecution, he begins, as it were, by making the sacrifice
of himself; and thereafter every day of his life becomes one more
victory snatched from fate. But from the way in which the women
looked at him it was easy to see that their intense anxiety was on his
account.
"Why should our faith in God fail us, my sisters?" he said, in low but
fervent tones. "We sang His praises through the shrieks of murderers
and their victims at the Carmelites. If it was His will that I should come
alive out of that butchery, it was, no doubt, because I was reserved for
some fate which I am bound to endure without murmuring. God will
protect His own; He can do with them according to His will. It is for
you, not for me that we must think."
"No," answered one of the women. "What is our life compared to a
priest's life?"
"Once outside the Abbaye de Chelles, I look upon myself as dead,"
added the nun who had not left the house, while the Sister that had just
returned held out the little box to the priest.
"Here are the wafers . . . but I can hear some one coming up the stairs."
At this, the three began to listen. The sound ceased.
"Do not be alarmed if somebody tries to come in," said the priest.
"Somebody on whom we could depend was to make all necessary

arrangements for crossing the frontier. He is to come for the letters that
I have written to the Duc de Langeais and the Marquis de Beauseant,
asking them to find some way of taking you out of this dreadful
country, and away from the death or the misery that waits for you
here."
"But are you not going to follow us?" the nuns cried under their breath,
almost despairingly.
"My post is here where the sufferers are," the priest said simply, and
the women said no more, but looked at their guest in reverent
admiration. He turned to the nun with the wafers.
"Sister Marthe," he said, "the messenger will say Fiat Voluntas in
answer to the word Hosanna."
"There is some one on the stairs!" cried the other nun, opening a
hiding-place contrived in the roof.
This time it was easy to hear, amid the deepest silence, a sound echoing
up the staircase; it was a man's tread on the steps covered with dried
lumps of mud. With some difficulty the priest slipped into a kind of
cupboard, and the nun flung some clothes over him.
"You can shut the door, Sister Agathe," he said in a muffled voice.
He was scarcely hidden before three raps sounded on the door. The
holy women looked into each other's eyes for counsel, and dared not
say a single word.
They seemed both to be about sixty years of age. They had lived out of
the world for forty years, and had grown so accustomed to the life of
the convent that they could scarcely imagine any other. To them, as to
plants kept in a hot-house, a change of air meant death. And so, when
the grating was broken down one morning, they knew with a shudder
that they were free. The effect produced by the Revolution upon their
simple souls is easy to imagine; it produced a temporary imbecility not
natural to them. They could not bring the ideas learned in the convent
into harmony with life and its difficulties; they could not even
understand their own position. They were like children whom mothers
have always cared for, deserted by their maternal providence. And as a
child cries, they betook themselves to prayer. Now, in the presence of
imminent danger, they were mute and passive, knowing no defence
save Christian resignation.
The man at