The floor was covered with common matting, and the ceiling with plain whitewash. The furniture was of the simplest kind; a low chair with a praying-desk fixed to the back, and a finely carved oak bookcase, studded all over with brass crosses, being the only useful objects that I could discern which had any conventional character about them. As for the ornaments of the room, they were entirely beyond my appreciation. I could feel no interest in the coloured prints of saints, with gold platters at the backs of their heads, that hung on the wall; and I could see nothing particularly impressive in the two plain little alabaster pots for holy water, fastened, one near the door, the other over the chimneypiece. The only object, indeed, in the whole room which in the slightest degree attracted my curiosity was an old worm-eaten wooden cross, made in the rudest manner, hanging by itself on a slip of wall between two windows. It was so strangely rough and misshapen a thing to exhibit prominently in a neat roam, that I suspected some history must be attached to it, and resolved to speak to my friend the nun about it at the earliest opportunity.
“Mother Martha,” said I, taking advantage of the first pause in the succession of quaintly innocent questions which she was as usual addressing to me, “I have been looking at that rough old cross hanging between the windows, and fancying that it must surely be some curiosity — ”
“Hush! hush!” exclaimed the nun, “you must not speak of that as a ‘curiosity’; the Mother Superior calls it a Relic.”
“I beg your pardon,” said I; “I ought to have chosen my expressions more carefully — ”
“Not,” interposed Mother Martha, nodding to show me that my apology need not be finished — ”not that it is exactly a relic in the strict Catholic sense of the word; but there were circumstances in the life of the person who made it — ” Here she stopped, and looked at me doubtfully.
“Circumstances, perhaps, which it is not considered advisable to communicate to strangers,” I suggested.
“Oh, no!” answered the nun, “I never heard that they were to be kept a secret. They were not told as a secret to me.”
“Then you know all about them?” I asked.
“Certainly. I could tell you the whole history of the wooden cross; but it is all about Catholics, and you are a Protestant.”
“That, Mother Martha, does not make it at all less interesting to me.”
“Does it not, indeed?” exclaimed the nun, innocently. “What a strange man you are! and what a remarkable religion yours must be! What do your priests say about ours? Are they learned men, your priests?”
I felt that my chance of hearing Mother Martha’s story would be a poor one indeed, if I allowed her to begin a fresh string of questions. Accordingly, I dismissed the inquiries about the clergy of the Established Church with the most irreverent briefness, and recalled her attention forthwith to the subject of the wooden cross.
“Yes, yes,” said the goodnatured nun; “surely you shall hear all I can tell you about it; but — ” she hesitated timidly, “but I must ask the Mother Superior’s leave first.”
Saying these words, she summoned the portress, to my great amusement, to keep guard over the inestimable Correggio in her absence, and left the room. In less than five minutes she came back, looking quite happy and important in her innocent way.
“The Mother Superior,” she said, “has given me leave to tell all I know about the wooden cross. She says it may do you good, and improve your Protestant opinion of us Catholics.”
I expressed myself as being both willing and anxious to profit by what I heard; and the nun began her narrative immediately.
She related it in her own simple, earnest, minute way; dwelling as long on small particulars as on important incidents; and making moral reflections for my benefit at every place where it was possible to introduce them. In spite, however, of these drawbacks in the telling of it, the story interested and impressed me in no ordinary degree; and I now purpose putting the events of it together as skillfully and strikingly as I can, in the hope that this written version of the narrative may appeal as strongly to the reader’s sympathies as the spoken version did to mine.
The Nun’s Story of Gabriel’s Marriage
Chapter I
One night, during the period of the first French Revolution, the family of Francois Sarzeau, a fisherman of Brittany, were all waking and watching at a late hour in their cottage on the peninsula of Quiberon. Francois had gone out in his boat that evening, as usual, to fish. Shortly after his departure, the wind had risen, the clouds had gathered; and the storm, which had been threatening at intervals throughout the whole day, burst forth furiously about nine o’clock. It was now eleven; and the raging of the wind over the barren, heathy peninsula still seemed to increase with each fresh blast that tore its way out upon the open sea; the crashing of the waves on the beach was awful to hear; the dreary blackness of the sky terrible to behold. The longer they listened to the storm, the oftener they looked out at it, the fainter grew the hopes which the fisherman’s family still strove to cherish for the safety of Francois Sarzeau and of his younger son who had gone with him in the boat.
There was something impressive in the simplicity of the scene that was now passing within the cottage.
On one side of the great, rugged, black fireplace crouched two little girls; the younger half asleep, with her head in her sister’s lap. These were the daughters of the fisherman; and opposite to them sat their eldest brother, Gabriel. His right arm had been badly wounded in a recent encounter at the national game of the Soule, a sport resembling our English football; but played on both sides in such savage earnest by the people of Brittany as to end always in bloodshed, often in mutilation, sometimes even in loss of life. On the same bench with Gabriel sat his betrothed wife — a girl of eighteen — clothed in the plain, almost monastic black-and-white costume of her native district. She was the daughter of a small farmer living at some little distance from the coast. Between the groups formed on either side of the fireplace, the vacant space was occupied by the foot of a truckle-bed. In this bed lay a very old man, the father of Francois Sarzeau. His haggard face was covered with deep wrinkles; his long white hair flowed over the coarse lump of sacking which served him for a pillow, and his light gray eyes wandered incessantly, with a strange expression of terror and suspicion, from person to person, and from object to object, in all parts of the room. Whenever the wind and sea whistled and roared at their loudest, he muttered to himself and tossed his hands fretfully on his wretched coverlet. On these occasions his eyes always fixed themselves intently on a little delf image of the Virgin placed in a niche over the fireplace. Every time they saw him look in this direction Gabriel and the young girls shuddered and crossed themselves; and even the child, who still kept awake, imitated their example. There was one bond of feeling at least between the old man and his grandchildren, which connected his age and their youth unnaturally and closely together. This feeling was reverence for the superstitions which had been handed down to them by their ancestors from centuries and centuries back, as far even as the age of the Druids. The spirit warnings of disaster and death which the old man heard in the wailing of the wind, in the crashing of the waves, in the dreary, monotonous rattling of the casement, the young man and his affianced wife and the little child who cowered by the fireside heard too. All differences in sex, in temperament, in years, superstition was strong enough to strike down to its own dread level, in the fisherman’s cottage, on that stormy night.
Besides the benches by the fireside and the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room was a coarse wooden table, with a loaf of black bread, a knife, and a pitcher of cider placed on it. Old nets, coils of rope, tattered sails, hung, about the walls and over the wooden partition which separated the room into two