Chapter IV: The Old Home (3)

"Mary," I said, "one really would think the devil was at your heels the moment you enter a church, you are in such a violent hurry to get out of it."

She laughed, not mockingly, with a sort of half-ashamed expression, and turning her pure, full eyes on me.

"I hate to stay anywhere under false appearances," she said, "and I always feel such a hypocrite kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament! I feel as if I would choke if I stay there over five minutes."

I felt shocked, and I suppose I looked it.

"Don't look at me as if I were possessed of the devil," she said, still laughing, though there was a touch of sadness, it struck me, in her voice and face. "I mean to be converted by-and-by, and mend my ways; but meantime let me have my fun, and, above all, don't preach to me!"

"I don't feel the least inclined," I replied.

"I suppose you think I'm gone beyond it. Well, you can pray for me. I'm not gone beyond the reach of that!"

This was the only serious conversation, if it deserves the name, that we had during the first week of her visit. She enjoyed herself thoroughly, throwing all the zest of her earnest nature into everything. The people and their odd French ways, the shops and their exquisite wares, the opera, the gay Bois with the brilliant throng of fashion that crowded round the lake every day at the hour of promenade--the novelty of the scene and the place altogether enchanted her, and there was something quite refreshing in the spirit of enjoyment she threw into it all.

One evening, after a long day of sight-seeing, we were invited by a friend of hers to dine at the _table d'hôte_ of the Louvre. It was the _grande nouveauté_ just then, and Mary was consequently wild to see it. We went, and during dinner the admiration excited by her beauty was so glaringly expressed by the persistent stare of every eye within range of her at the table that my mother was provoked at having brought her and exposed her to such an ordeal. But Mary herself was blissfully unconscious of the effect she was producing; indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say she was unconscious of the cause. Certainly, no woman ever had less internal perception or outward complacency in her beauty than she had. This indifference amounted to a fault, for it pervaded her habits of dress, which were very untidy, and betokened a total disregard of personal appearance. The old fault that had been one of Mother Benedicta's standing grievances was as strong as ever, and it was all I could do to get her to put on her clothes straight, and to tie her bonnet under her chin instead of under her ear, when she came out with us.

But to return to the Louvre. It had been settled that after dinner we should walk across to the Palais Royal, and let Mary see the diamond shops illuminated, and all the other wonderful shops; but during dinner she overheard some one saying that the Emperor and Empress were to be at the Grand Opera that night. Her first impulse was to take a box and go there. But my mother objected that it was Saturday, the opera was never over before midnight, and consequently we could not be home and in bed before one o'clock on Sunday morning.

With evident disappointment, but, as usual, with the sweetest good temper, Mary gave way. Her friend then proposed that, before going to the Palais Royal, we should walk on to the Rue Lepelletier, and see the Emperor and Empress going in to the Opera. There was no difficulty in the way of this amendment, so it was adopted.

On coming out of the Louvre, however, we found, to our surprise and discomfiture, that the weather had been plotting against our little programme. The ground, which was frozen dry and hard when we drove down from the Champs Elysées less than two hours before, had become like polished glass under a heavy fall of sleet; the horses were already slipping about in a very uncomfortable way, and there was a decided disinclination on the part of pedestrians to trust themselves to cabs. Fate had decreed that Mary was not to see the Emperor on any terms that night. It would have been absurdly imprudent to venture on the macadam of the boulevards, and increase the risk of driving at all by waiting till the streets were so slippery that no horse could keep his footing on them. There was nothing for it but to go straight home, which we did, the horse snailing at a foot-pace all the way.

It was a memorable night this one of which I am chronicling a trivial recollection--trivial in itself, but weighty in its consequences.

It was the 14th of January, 1858.

We went to bed, and slept, no doubt, soundly. None the less soundly for the thundering crash that, before we lay down, had shaken the Rue Lepelletier from end to end, making the houses rock to their foundations, shattering to pieces every window from garret to cellar, and reverberating along the boulevards like the roar of a hundred cannon. The noise shook half Paris awake for that long night. The people, first merely terrified, then lashed to a frenzy of horror and of enthusiasm, rushed from their houses, and thronged the boulevards and the streets in the vicinity of the Opera. In the pitch darkness that followed simultaneously with the bursting of Orsini's bombs, it was impossible to know how many were murdered or how many wounded. There had been a great crowd of _curieux_ and strangers as usual waiting to see their majesties alight--the street was lined with them. Were they all murdered, blown to the four winds of heaven, in that explosion that was loud enough to have blown up half Paris? Of course, popular fear and fury exaggerated the number of the victims enormously, and the night resounded with the shrieks and lamentations of women, the plunging and moaning of horses, wounded or only frantic with terror, and the passionate cries of _Vive l'Empereur!_ intermingled with curses on the fiends who, to secure the murder of one man, had sacrificed the lives of hundreds.

While this ghastly tumult was scaring sleep and silence from the city close to us, we slept on, all unconscious of the cup of trembling to which we had stretched out our hand, and which had been so mercifully snatched away from us.

It was only next morning, on going out to Mass, that the _concierge_ stopped us to tell the news of the attempt on the Emperor's life.

And we had been vexed and felt aggrieved with the rain that drove us home, and prevented our going to stand amongst those _curieux_ in the Rue Lepelletier!

Mary did not hear of it till we met at breakfast. I never shall forget the look of blank horror on her face as she listened to the account of what had happened on the very spot where we had been so bent on going.

Although this attack of Orsini's comes into my narrative simply as a datum, I cannot resist making a short digression toward it.

Most of my readers will remember the singular stoicism displayed by the Emperor at the moment of the explosion. One of the horses was killed under his carriage, which was violently shaken by the plunging of the terrified animals, and a splinter from one of the bombs, flashing through the window, grazed him on the temple. In the midst of the general panic and confusion of the scene, the equerry rushed forward, and, taking the Emperor by the arm, cried hurriedly:

"Come out, sire! Come out!"

"Let down the steps," observed his master with unruffled _sang froid_, and quietly waited till it was done before he moved.

He entered the Opera amidst deafening cheers, and sat out the representation as coolly, and to all appearances with as much attention, as if nothing had occurred to disturb him, now and then quietly drawing his handkerchief across the splinter-mark on his forehead, from which the blood was oozing slightly.

Next day a solemn Te Deum was celebrated at the Tuileries. The Empress wished the little prince, then a baby in arms, to be present at the thanksgiving for her own and his father's miraculous preservation. The child was carried into the Salle des Maréchaux, where the court and the Corps Diplomatique were assembled, and immediately put out his hands, clamoring for his father to take him. The Emperor took him in his arms, and the child, looking up at his face, noticed the red mark on the temple.

"Papa _bobo_!"[29] he lisped, and put up his little hand to touch it.

The hard, sphynx-like face struggled for a moment; but the child's touch had melted the strong man. He clasped him to his heart, and literally shook with sobs.

These details, which were probably never written before, were told to me by one who was present at the attempt the previous night, and at the Te Deum Mass next day.

That night, when we were alone, Mary and I talked over the diabolical crime that had within four and twenty hours shaken the whole country like an earthquake, and over the merciful interposition that had arrested us on our way to what might have been for us, as it was for many, a certain and horrible death. Mary, though she said little on this latter point, was evidently very deeply impressed, and what she did say carried in it a depth of religious emotion that revealed her to me in quite a new light.

It was agreed that she would go to confession next day, and that we were to begin a novena together in thanksgiving for our preservation.

"Mary," I said impulsively, after we had been silent a little while, "why have you such a dislike to go to the sacraments? I can't understand how, believing in them at all, you can be satisfied to approach them so seldom."

"It isn't dislike; it is _fear_," she answered. "It's precisely because I realize so _awfully_ the power and sanctity of the Blessed Sacrament that I keep away. I believe so intensely in it that, if I went often to holy communion, I should have to divorce from everything, to give up my whole life to preparation and thanksgiving. I know I should. And I don't want to do it. Not yet, at any rate," she added, half-unconsciously, as if speaking to herself.

I shall never forget the effect her words had on me, nor her face as she uttered them. The night was far spent. The emotions of the day, the long watch, and perhaps the flickering of our bedroom candle that was burning low, all conspired to give an unwonted pallor to her features that imbued them with an almost ethereal beauty. I always think of her now as she sat there, in her girlish white dressing-gown, her hands locked resting on her knees, her head thrown back, and her eyes looking up, so still, as if some far beyond were breaking on her gaze and holding it transfixed.

Nothing broke on mine. In my dull blindness I did not see that I was assisting at the beginning of a great mystery, a spectacle on which the gaze of angels was riveted--the wrestling of a soul with God: the soul resisting; the Creator pleading and pursuing.

She left us at the end of January to return home. We parted with many tears, and a promise to correspond often and pray for each other daily.

For a time we did correspond very regularly--for nearly a year. During this period her life was an unpausing whirl of dissipation. Balls, visits, operas, and concerts during the season in town were succeeded in the country by more balls, and hunting, and skating, and the usual round of amusements that make up a gay country life. Mary was everywhere the beauty of the place, the admired of all admirers. Strange to say, in spite of her acknowledged supremacy, she made no enemies. Perhaps it would have been stranger still if she had. Her sweet, artless manner and perfect unconsciousness of self went for at least as much in the admiration she excited as her beauty. If she danced every dance at every ball, it was never once for the pleasure of saying she did it, of triumphing over other girls, but for the genuine pleasure of the dance itself.

Her success was so gratuitous, so little the result of coquetry on her side, that, however much it might be envied, it was impossible to resent it.

I am not trying to make out a case for Mary, or to excuse, still less justify, the levity of the life she was leading at this time. My only aim is to convey a true idea of the spirit in which she was leading it--mere exuberance of spirits, the zest of youth in the gay opportunities that were showered upon her path. She was revelling like a butterfly in flowers and sunshine. The spirit of worldliness in its true and worst sense did not possess her; did not even touch her. Its cankerous breath had not blown upon her soul and blighted it; the worm had not eaten into her heart and hardened it. Both were still sound--only drunk; intoxicated with the wine of life. She went waltzing through flames, like a moth round a candle; like a child letting off rockets, and clapping hands with delight at the pretty blue blaze, without fear or thought of danger. There was no such thing as premeditated infidelity in her mind. She was not playing a deliberate game with God; bidding him wait till she was ready, till she was tired of the world and the world of her. No, she was utterly incapable of such a base and guilty calculation. She had simply forgotten that she had a soul to save. The still, small voice that had spoken to her in earlier days, especially on that night of the 15th of January, stirring the sleeping depths, and calling out momentary yearnings toward the higher life, had altogether ceased its pleadings. How could that mysterious whisper make itself heard in such a din and clangor of unholy music? There was no silent spot in her soul where it could enter and find a listener. But Mary did not think about it. She was inebriated with youth and joy, and had flung herself into the vortex, and raced round with it till her head reeled. On the surface, all was ripple and foam, rings running round and round; but the depths below were sleeping. The one, the visible hold that she retained on God at this time was her love for his poor. Her heart was always tender to suffering in every form, but to the poor especially. As an instance of this, I may mention her taking off her flannel petticoat, on a bitter winter's day, to give it to a poor creature whom she met shivering at the roadside, and then running nearly a mile home in the cold herself.

After about a year our correspondence slackened, and gradually broke down altogether. I heard from her once in six months, perhaps. The tone of her letters struck me as altered. I could not exactly say how, except that it had grown more serious. She said nothing of triumphs at archery meetings or of brushes carried off "at the death;" there seemed to be no such feats to chronicle. She talked of her family and of mine, very little of herself. Once only, in answer to a direct question as to what books she read, she told me that she was reading Father Faber, and that she read very little else. This was the only clue I gained to the nature of the change that had come over her.

At the expiration of about two years, a clergyman, who was an old friend of her family, and a frequent visitor at the house, came to Paris, and gave me a detailed account of the character and extent of the change.

The excitement into which she had launched on returning home, and which she had kept up with unflagging spirit, had, as might have been expected, told on her health, never very strong. A cough set in at the beginning of the winter which caused her family some alarm. She grew thin to emaciation, lost her appetite, and fell into a state of general ill-health. Change of air and complete rest were prescribed by the medical men. She was accordingly taken from one sea-side place to another, and condemned to a _régime_ of dulness and quiet. In a few months the system told favorably, and she was sufficiently recovered to return home.

But the monotony of an inactive life which was still enforced, after the mad-cap career she had been used to, wearied her unspeakably. For want of something better to do, she took to reading. Novels, of course. Fortunately for her, ten years ago young ladies had not taken to writing novels that honest men blush to review, and that too many young ladies do not blush to read. Mary did no worse than waste her time without active detriment to her mind. She read the new novels of the day, and, if she was not much the better, she was probably none the worse for it. But one day--a date to be written in gold--a friend, the same who gave me these particulars, made her a present of Father Faber's _All for Jesus_. The title promised very little entertainment; reluctantly enough, Mary turned over the pages and began to read. How long she read, I cannot tell. It might be true to say that she never left off. Others followed, all from the same pen, through uninterrupted days, and weeks, and months. She told me afterward that the burning words of those books--the first especially, and _The Creator and the Creature_--pursued her even in her dreams. She seemed to hear a voice crying after her unceasingly: "Arise, and follow!"

Suddenly, but irrevocably, the whole aspect of life was changed to her. She began to look back upon the near past, and wonder whether it was she herself who had so enjoyed those balls and gaieties, or whether she had not been mad, and imagined it, and was only now in her right mind. The most insuperable disgust succeeded to her love of worldly amusement. She cared for nothing but prayer and meditation, and the service of the poor and suffering. An ardent longing took possession of her to suffer for and with our Divine Master. Yielding to the impulse of her new-born fervor, she began to practise the most rigorous austerities, fasting much, sleeping little, and praying almost incessantly. This was done without the counsel or cognizance of any spiritual guide. She knew of no one to consult. Her life had been spiritually so neglected during the last two years that direction had had no part to play in it. There was nothing to direct. The current was setting in an opposite direction. The supernatural was out of sight.

Under cover of her health, which, though it was fairly recovered, still rendered quiet and great prudence desirable, Mary contrived to avoid all going out, and secretly laid down for herself a rule of life that she adhered to scrupulously.

But this could not go on long. As she grew in the ways of prayer, the spirit of God led her imperceptibly but inevitably into the sure and safe high-road of all pilgrims travelling toward the bourn of sanctity and aiming at a life of perfection.

The necessity of a spiritual director was gradually borne in upon her, as she said to me, while at the same time the difficulty of meeting with this treasure, whom St. Teresa bids us seek amongst ten thousand, grew more and more apparent and disheartening.

Her father, a man of the world and very little versed in the mysteries of the interior life, but a good practical Catholic nevertheless, saw the transformation that had taken place in his daughter, and knew not exactly whether to be glad or sorry. He acknowledged to her long after that the first recognition of it struck upon his heart like a death-knell. He felt it was the signal for a great sacrifice.

Mary opened her heart to him unreservedly, seeking more at his hands perhaps than any mere father in flesh and blood could give, asking him to point out to her the turning-point of the new road on which she had entered, and to help her to tread it. That it was to be a path of thorns in which she would need all the help that human love could gather to divine grace, she felt already convinced.

Her father, with the honesty of an upright heart, confessed himself inadequate to the solving of such a problem, and bravely proposed taking her to London to consult Father Faber.

Mary, in an ecstasy of gratitude, threw her arms round his neck, and declared it was what she had been longing for for months. Father Faber had been her guide so far; his written word had spoken to her like a voice from the holy mount, making all the dumb chords of her soul to vibrate. What would he not do for her if she could speak to him heart to heart, and hear the words of prayer-inspired wisdom from his own lips!

They set out in a few days for London; but they were not to get there. The promise that looked so near and so precious in its accomplishment was never to be fulfilled. They had no sooner reached Dublin than Mary fell ill. For some days she was in high fever; the medical men assured the panic-stricken father that there was no immediate cause for alarm; no remote cause even, as the case then stood; the patient was delicate, but her constitution was good, the nervous system sound, although shaken by the present attack, and apparently by previous mental anxiety. The attack itself they attributed to a chill which had fallen on the chest.

The event justified the opinion of the physicians. Mary recovered speedily. It was not judged advisable, however, to let her proceed to London. She relinquished the plan herself with a facility that surprised her father. He knew how ardently she had longed to see the spiritual guide who had already done so much for her, and he could not forbear asking why she took the disappointment so coolly.

"It's not a disappointment, father. God never disappoints. I don't know why, only I feel as if the longing were already satisfied; as if I were not to go so far to find what I'm looking for," she answered; and quietly set about preparing to go back home.

But they were still on the road of Damascus. On the way home, they rested at the house of a friend near the Monastery of Mount Melleray. I cannot be quite sure whether the monks were giving a retreat for seculars in the monastery, or whether it was being preached in the neighboring town. As well as I remember, it was the latter. Indeed, I doubt whether women would be admitted to assist at a retreat within the monastery, and, if not, this would be conclusive. But of one thing I am sure, the preacher was Father Paul, the superior of La Trappe. I don't know whether his eloquence, judged by the standard of human rhetoric, was anything very remarkable, but many witnesses go to prove on exhaustive evidence that it was of that kind whose property it is to save souls.

To Mary it came like a summons straight from heaven. She felt an imperative desire to speak to him at once in the confessional.

"I can give you no idea of the exquisite sense of peace and security that came over me the moment I knelt down at his feet," she said, in relating to me this stage of her vocation. "I felt certain that I had found the man who was to be my Father Faber."

And so she had.

All that passes between a director and his spiritual child is of so solemn and sacred a nature that, although many things which Mary confided to me concerning her intercourse with the saintly abbot of La Trappe might prove instructive and would certainly prove edifying to many interior souls, I do not feel justified in repeating them. If I were even not held back by this fear of indiscretion, I should shrink from relating these confidences, lest I should mar the beauty or convey a false interpretation of their meaning. While she was speaking, I understood her perfectly. While listening to the wonderful experiences of divine grace with what she had been favored, and which she recounted to me with the confiding simplicity of a child, her words were as clear and reflected her thoughts as luminously as a lake reflects the stars looking down into its crystal depths, making the mirror below a faithful repetition of the sky above. But when I tried to write down what she had said while it was quite fresh upon my mind, the effort baffled me. There was so little to write, and that little was so delicate, so mysteriously intangible, I seemed never to find the right word that had come so naturally, so expressively, to her. When she spoke of prayer especially, there was an eloquence, rising almost to sublimity, in her language that altogether defied my coarse translation, and seemed to dissolve like a rainbow under the process of dissection. The most elevated subjects she was at home with as if they had been her natural theme, the highest spirituality her natural element. The writings of St. Teresa and St. Bernard had grown familiar to her as her catechism, and she seemed to have caught the note of their inspired teaching with the mastery of sainthood. This was the more extraordinary to me that her intellect was by no means of a high order. Quite the contrary. Her taste, the whole bent of her nature, was the reverse of intellectual, and what intelligence she had was, as far as real culture went, almost unreclaimed. Her reading had been always of the most superficial, non-metaphysical kind; indeed, the aversion to what she called "hard reading" made her turn with perverse dislike from any book whose title threatened to be at all instructive. She had never taken a prize at school, partly because she was too lazy to try for it, but also because she had not brain enough to cope with the clever girls of her class. Mary was quite alive to her shortcomings in this line, indeed she exaggerated them, as she was prone to do most of her delinquencies, and always spoke of herself as "stupid." This she decidedly was not; but her intellectual powers were sufficiently below superiority to make her sudden awakening to the sublime language of mystical theology and her intuitive perception of its subtlest doctrines matter of great wonder to those who only measure man's progress in the science of the saints by the shallow gauge of human intellect.

"How do you contrive to understand those books, Mary?" I asked her once, after listening to her quoting St. Bernard _à l'appui_ of some remarks on the Prayer of Union that carried me miles out of my depth.

"I don't know," she replied with her sweet simplicity, quite unconscious of revealing any secrets of infused science to my wondering ears. "I used not to understand them the least; but by degrees the meaning of the words began to dawn on me, and the more I read, the better I understood. When I come to anything very difficult, I stop, and pray, and meditate till the meaning comes to me. It is often a surprise to myself, considering how stupid I am in everything else," she continued, laughing, "that I should understand spiritual books even as well as I do."

Those who have studied the ways of God with his saints will not share her surprise. In our own day, the venerable Curé d'Ars is among the most marvellous proofs of the manner in which he pours out his wisdom on those who are accounted and who account themselves fools, not worthy to pass muster amongst men. But I am anticipating.

Her meeting with Father Paul was the first goal in her new career, and from the moment Mary had reached it she felt secure of being led safely to the end.

Those intervening stages were none the less agitated by many interior trials; doubts as to the sincerity of her vocation; heart-sinkings as to her courage in bearing on under the cross that she had taken up; misgivings, above all, as to the direction in which that cross lay. While her life-boat was getting ready, filling its sails, and making out of port for the shoreless sea of detachment and universal sacrifice, she sat shivering; her hand on the helm; the deep waters heaving beneath her; the wind blowing bleak and cold; the near waves dashing up their spray into her face, and the breakers further out roaring and howling like angry floods. There were rocks ahead, and all round under those foaming billows; sad havoc had they made of many a brave little boat that had put out to sea from that same port where she was still tossing--home, with its sheltering love and care; piety enough to save any well-intentioned soul; good example to give and to take; good works to do in plenty, and the body not overridden by austerities against nature; not starved to despondency; not exasperated by hunger, and cold, and endless vigils, and prayer as endless. It was a goodly port and safe, this home of hers. See how the deep throws up its prey on every side! Wrecks and spars, the shattered remnants of bold vessels, and the lifeless bodies of the rash crew are everywhere strewn over the waters. "Take heed!" they cry to her as she counts the records one by one. "This is an awful sea, and bold must be the heart, and stout and iron-clad the boat that tempts the stormy bosom. We came, and perished. Would that we had never left the port!"

Mary never argued with the storm. She would fall at the feet of Him who was "sleeping below," and wake him with the loud cry of trembling faith, "Help me, Master, or I perish!" and the storm subsided.

But when the wind and the waves were hushed, there rose up in the calm a voice sweet and low, but more ruthlessly terrible to her courage than the threatening fury of ten thousand storms. She was her father's oldest and darling child; she had a brother, too, and sisters, all tenderly loved, and cousins and friends only less dear; she was a joy and a comfort to many. Must she go from them? Must she leave all this love and all the loveliness of life for ever?

Mary's vocation, notwithstanding its strongly marked supernatural character, was not proof against these cruel alternations of enthusiastic courage, and desolate heart-sinkings, and bewildering doubts. Nay, they were no doubt a necessary part of its perfection. It was needful that she should pass through the dark watch of Gethsemani before setting out to climb the rugged hill of Calvary.

All this history of her interior life she told me _viva voce_ when we met. In her letters, which were at this period very rare and always very uncommunicative, she said nothing whatever of these strifes and victories.

But her adversaries were not all within. A hard battle remained to be fought with her father. His opposition was active and relentless. He had at first tacitly acquiesced in her consecration to God in a religious life of some sort; but he believed, as every one else did, that to let her enter La Trappe would be to consign her to speedy and certain death; and when she announced to him that this was the order she had selected, and the one which drew her with the power of attraction, that she had struggled in vain to resist, he declared that nothing short of a written mandate from God would induce him to consent to such an act of suicide. In vain Mary pleaded that when God called a soul he provided all that was necessary to enable her to answer the call; that her health, formerly so delicate when she was leading a life of self-indulgence, was now completely restored; that she had never been so strong as since she had lived in almost continual abstinence (she did not eat meat on Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday); that the weakness of nature was no obstacle to the power of grace, and there are graces in the conventual life that seculars did not dream of, nor receive because they did not need them.

In answer to these plausible arguments, the incredulous father brought out the laws of nature, and reason and common sense, and the opinion of the medical men who had attended her in Dublin, and under whose care she had been more or less ever since. These men of natural science and human sympathies declared positively that it was neither more nor less than suicide to condemn herself to the rule of St. Bernard in the cloister, where want of animal food and warmth would infallibly kill her before the novitiate was out. They were prepared to risk their reputation on the issue of this certificate.

Mary's exhaustive answer to all this was that grace was always stronger than nature; that the supernatural element would overrule and sustain the human one. But she pleaded in vain. Her father was resolute. He even went so far as to insist on her returning to society and seeing more of the world before she was divorced from it irrevocably. This check was as severe as it was unexpected. Though her disgust to the vanities of her former life continued as strong as ever, while her longing for the perfect life grew every day more intense and more energizing, her humility made her tremble for her own weakness. Might not the strength that had borne her bravely so far break down under the attack of all her old tempters let loose on her at once? Her love of pleasure, that fatal enemy that now seemed dead, might it not rise up again with overmastering power, and, aided by the reaction prepared by her new life, seize her and hold her more successfully than ever? Yes, all this was only too possible. There was nothing for it but to brave her father, to defy his authority, and to save her soul in spite of him. She must run away from home.

Before, however, putting this wise determination into practice, it was necessary to consult Father Paul. His answer was what most of our readers will suspect:

"Obedience is your first duty. No blessing could come from such a violation of filial piety. Your father is a Christian. Do as he bids you; appeal to his love for your soul not to tax its strength unwisely; then trust your soul to God as a little child trusts to its mother. He sought you, and pursued you, and brought you home when you were flying from him. Is it likely he will forsake you now, when you are seeking after him with all your heart and making his will the one object of your life? Mistrust yourself, my child. Never mistrust God." Mary felt the wisdom of the advice, and submitted to it in a spirit of docility, of humble mistrust and brave trust, and made up her mind to go through the trial as an earnest of the sincerity of her desire to seek God's will, and accomplish it in whatever way he appointed.

She had so completely taken leave of the gay world for more than a year that her reappearance at a county ball caused quite a sensation.

Rumor and romance had put their heads together, and explained after their own fashion the motive of the change in her life and her total seclusion from society. Of course, it could only be some sentimental reason, disappointed affection, perhaps inadequate fortune or position on one side, and a hard-hearted father on the other, etc. Whispers of this idle gossip came to Mary's ears and amused her exceedingly. She could afford to laugh at it as there was not the smallest shadow of reality under the fiction.

Her father, whose parental weakness sheltered itself behind the doctors and common sense, did not exact undue sacrifices from her. He allowed her to continue her ascetic rule of life unmolested, to abstain from meat as usual, to go assiduously amongst the poor, and to devote as much time as she liked to prayer. There were two Masses daily in the village church, one at half-past six, another at half-past seven. He made a difficulty at first about her assisting at them. The church was nearly half an hour's walk from the house, and the cold morning or night air, as it really was, was likely to try her severely. But after a certain amount of arguing and coaxing Mary carried her point, and every morning long before daybreak sallied forth to the village. Her nurse, who was very pious and passionately attached to her, went with her. Not without hesitating, though. Every day as regularly as they set out Malone entered a protest.

"It's not natural, Miss Mary, to be gadding out by candle-light in this fashion, walking about the fields like a pair of ghosts. Indeed, darlin', it isn't."

The nurse was right. It certainly was not natural, and, if Mary had been so minded, she might have replied that it was not meant to be; it was supernatural. She contented herself, however, by deprecating the good soul's reproof and proposing to say the rosary, a proposal to which Malone invariably assented. So, waking up the larks with their matin prayer, the two would walk on briskly to church.

Once set an Irish nurse to pray, and she'll keep pace with any saint in the calendar. Malone was not behind with the best. The devout old soul, never loath to begin, when once on her knees and fairly wound up in devotion, would go on for ever, and, when the two Masses were over and it was time to go, Mary had generally to break her off in the full tide of a litany that Malone went on muttering all the way out of church and sometimes finished on the road home.

But if she was ready to help Mary in her praying feats, she highly disapproved of the fasting ones, as well as of the short rest that her young mistress imposed on herself. Mary confessed to me that sleep was at this period her greatest difficulty. She was by nature a great sleeper, and there was a time when early rising, even comparatively early, seemed to her the very climax of heroic mortification. By degrees she brought herself to rise at a given hour, which gradually, with the help of her angel guardian and a strong resolve, she advanced to five o'clock.

During this time of probation, her father took her constantly into society, to archery meetings, and regattas, and concerts, and balls, as the season went on. Mary did her part bravely and cheerfully. Sometimes a panic seized her that her old spirit of worldliness was coming back--coming back with seven devils to take his citadel by storm and hold it more firmly than ever. But she had only to fix her eyes steadily on the faithful beacon of the Light-house out at sea, and bend her ear to the Life-bell chiming its _Sursum Corda_ far above the moaning of the waves and winds, and her foolish fears gave way.

No one who saw her so bright and gracious, so gracefully pleased with everything and everybody, suspected the war that was agitating her spirit within. Her father wished her to take part in the dancing, otherwise he said her presence in the midst of it would be considered compulsory and her abstention be construed into censure or gloom. Mary acquiesced with regard to the square dances, but resolutely declined to waltz. Her father, satisfied with the concession, did not coerce her further.

So things went on for about a year. Father Paul meantime had had his share in the probationary action. He knew that his patient's health was not strong, and taking into due account her father's vehement and up to a certain point just representations on the physical impossibility of her bearing the rule of St. Bernard, he endeavored to attract her toward an active order, and used all his influence to induce her to try at any rate a less austere one before entering La Trappe. Animated by the purest and most ardent love for the soul whose precious destinies were placed under his guidance, he left nothing undone to prevent the possibility of mistake or ultimate regret in her choice. He urged her to go and see various other convents and make acquaintance with their mode of life. Seeing her great reluctance to do this, he had recourse to stratagem in order to compel her unconsciously to examine into the spirit and rule of several monastic houses that he held in high esteem. One in particular, a community of Benedictines, I think it was, he thought likely to prove attractive to her as uniting a great deal of prayer with active duties toward the poor, teaching, etc., and at the same time of less crucifying discipline than that of Citeaux. He gave her a commission for the superioress, with many excuses for troubling her, and begging that she would not undertake it if it interfered with any arrangement of her own or her father's just then.

Mary, never suspecting the trap that was laid for her, made a point of setting out to the convent at once. The superioress, previously enlightened by Father Paul, received her with more than kindness, and, after discussing the imaginary subject of the visit, invited her to visit the chapel, then the house, and finally, drawing her into confidential discourse, explained all about its spirit and manner of life.

Mary, in relating this circumstance to me, said that, though the superioress was one of the most attractive persons she ever met, and the convent beautiful in its appointments, rather than enter it she would have preferred spending the rest of her days in the dangers of the most worldly life. Everything but La Trappe was unutterably antagonistic to her. Yet, with the exception of Mount Melleray she had never seen even the outside walls of a Cistercian convent, and the fact of there not being one for women in Ireland added one obstacle more in the way of her entering La Trappe.

When Father Paul heard the result of this last _ruse_, he confessed the truth to her. Noways discouraged, nevertheless he persisted in saying that she was much better fitted for a life of mixed activity and contemplation than for a purely contemplative one, and he forbade her for a time to let her mind dwell on the latter as her ultimate vocation, to read any books that treated of it, even to pray specially that she might be led to it. To all these despotic commands Mary yielded a prompt, unquestioning obedience. She was with God like a child with a schoolmaster. Whatever lesson he set her, she set about learning it. Easy or difficult, pleasant or unpleasant, it was all one to her cheerful good-will. Why do we not all do like her? We are all children at school, but, instead of putting our minds to getting our lesson by heart, we spend the study-hour chafing at the hard words, dog-earing our book, and irreverently grumbling at the master who has set us the task. Sometimes we think in our conceit that it is too easy, that we should do better something difficult. When the bell rings, we go up without knowing a word of it, and stand sulky and disrespectful before the desk. We are chided, and turn back, and warned to do better to-morrow. And so we go on from year to year, from childhood to youth, from youth to age, never learning our lesson properly, but dodging, and missing, and beginning over and over again at the same point. Some of us go on being dunces to the end of our lives, when school breaks up, and we are called for and taken home--to the home where there are many mansions, but none assuredly for the drones who have spent their school-days in idleness and mutiny.

To Father Paul, the childlike submission and humility with which Mary met every effort to thwart her vocation were no doubt more conclusive proof of its solidity than the most marked supernatural favors would have been.

At last her gentle perseverance was rewarded, grace triumphed over her father's heart, and he expressed his willingness to give her up to God.

In the summer of 1861, we went to stay at Versailles, and it was there that I received from Mary the first definite announcement of her vocation. She wrote to me saying that, after long deliberation and much prayer and wise direction, she had decided on entering a convent of the Cistercian order. As there was no branch of it in Ireland, she was to come to France, and she begged me to make inquiries as to where the novitiate was, and to let her know with as little delay as possible. I will not dwell upon my own feelings on reading this letter. I had expected some such result, though, knowing the state of her health, it had not occurred to me she could have joined, however she might have wished it, so severe an order as that of the founder of Citeaux.

I had not the least idea where the novitiate in France was; and, as the few persons whom I was able to question at once on the subject seemed to know no more about it than I did myself, the hope flashed across my mind that there might not be a convent of Trappistines at all in France. But this was not of long duration.

We had on our arrival at Versailles made the acquaintance of a young girl whom I shall call Agnes. My mother was already acquainted with her parents and other members of the family; but Agnes had either been at school or absent visiting relations, so from one cause or another we had never met till now. She was seventeen years of age, a fair, fragile-looking girl, who reminded most people of Schaeffer's Marguerite.

Agnes had a younger sister at the Convent of La Sainte Enfance, not far from her father's residence, and she asked me one day to come and see this sister and a nun that she was very fond of. I went, and, being full of the thought of my sweet friend in Ireland, I immediately opened the subject of Citeaux with the pretty talkative little nun who came to the parlor with Agnes's sister.

"What a singular chance!" she exclaimed, when I had told as much of my story as was necessary. "Why, we have at this moment a community of Cistercian nuns in the house here! Their monastery is being repaired, and in the meantime we have permission from the bishop to harbor them. See," she went on, pointing to a row of windows whose closed _Persiennes_ were visible at an angle from where we sat, "that is where our mother has lodged them. You can speak to the prioress, if you like, but of course you cannot see her."

I was more struck by the strange coincidence than overjoyed at being so near the solution of my difficulty. I could not, however, but take advantage of the opportunity. Sister Madeleine, which was the little nun's name, ran off to ask "our mother's" permission for me to speak with their Cistercian sister, and in a few minutes returned with an affirmative.

I was led to the door of the community-room, and, through a little extempore grating cut through the panel and veiled on the inside, I held converse with the mother abbess.

A few words assured me that Sister Madeleine had been mistaken in supposing her guests to be the daughters of St. Bernard. They were Poor Clares--an order more rigorous, even, than the Trappistines; bare feet, except when standing on a stone pavement or in the open air, when the rule is to slip the feet into wooden sandals, are added to the fasting and perpetual silence of Citeaux. Of this latter the abbess could tell me nothing--nothing, at least, of its actual existence and branches in France, though she broke out into impulsive and loving praise of its spirit and its saintly founder, and the rich harvest of souls he and his children had reaped for our Lord.

Here, then, was another respite. It really seemed probable that, if, in a quarter so likely to be well informed on the point, there was no account to be had of a Trappistine convent, there could not be one in existence, and Mary, from sheer inability to enter La Trappe, might be driven to choose some less terrible rule.

Mary meantime had set other inquirers on the track of St. Bernard, and soon learned that the novitiate was at Lyons. The name of the monastery is _Notre Dame de toute Consolation_.

After some preliminary correspondence with the abbess, the day was fixed for her to leave Ireland and set out to her land of promise.

She came, of course, through Paris. It was three years since we had met. I found her greatly altered; her beauty not gone, but changed. She looked, however, in much better health than I had ever seen her. Her spirits were gone, but there had come in their place a serenity that radiated from her like sunshine. We went out together to do some commissions of hers and the better to escape interruption, for this was in all human probability to be our last meeting on earth, and we had much to say to each other.

We drove first to Notre Dame des Victoires, where, at her constantly recurring desire, I had been in the habit of putting her name down for the prayers of the confraternity, and we knelt once again side by side before the altar of our Blessed Lady.

From this we went to the Sacré Cœur, where Mary was anxious to see some of her old mistresses and ask their prayers. Perseverance in her vocation, and the accomplishment of God's will in her and by her, were the graces she was never weary asking for herself, and imploring others to ask for her. Her greediness for prayers was only equalled by her intense faith in their efficacy. She could not resist catering for them, and used to laugh herself at her own importunity on this point.

The sister who tended the gate gave us a cordial greeting; but, when she heard that Mary was on her way to La Trappe, her surprise was almost ludicrous. If her former pupil had said she was going to be a Mohammedan, it could not have called up more blank amazement than was depicted in the good sister's face on hearing her say that she was going to be a Trappistine.

The mistress of schools and another nun, who had been very kind to her during her short stay at the Sacred Heart, came to the parlor. I was not present at the interview, but Mary told me they were quite as much amazed as the _sœur portière_.

"It only shows what a character I left behind me," she said, laughing heartily as we walked arm in arm. "My turning out good for anything but mischief is a fact so miraculous that my best friends can hardly believe in it!"

It was during this long afternoon that she told me all the details of her vocation which I have already narrated. She seemed transcendently happy, and so lifted by grace above all the falterings of nature as to be quite unconscious that she was about to make any sacrifice. She was tenderly attached to her family, but the pangs of separation from them were momentarily suspended. Her soul had grown strong in detachment. It had grown to the hunger of divine love. Like the Israelites, she had gone out into the desert where the manna fell, and she had fed upon it till all other bread was tasteless to her.

When I expressed surprise at seeing her so completely lifted above human affections, and observed that it would save her so much anguish, she answered quickly, with a sudden look of pain: