Part 26 (1/2)
It was a monstrous piece of inconsistency on Girard's part. He first frightened the poor girl, and then suddenly took a base, a cruel advantage of her fears.
In this case no plea of love can be offered in extenuation. The truth is far otherwise: he loved her no more. And this forms the most dreadful part of the story. We have seen how cruelly he drugged her; we have now to see her utterly forsaken. He owed her a grudge for being of greater worth than those other degraded women. He owed her a grudge for having unwittingly tempted him and brought him into danger.
Above all, he could not forgive her for keeping her soul in safety. He sought only to tame her down, but caught hopefully at her oft-renewed a.s.surance, ”I feel that I shall not live.” Villanous profligate that he was, bestowing his shameful kisses on that poor shattered body whose death he longed to see!
How did he account to her for this shocking antagonism of cruelty and caresses? Was it meant to try her patience and obedience, or did he boldly pa.s.s on to the true depths of Molinos' teaching, that ”only by dint of sinning can sin be quelled”? Did she take it all in full earnest, never perceiving that all this show of justice, penitence, expiation, was downright profligacy and nothing else?
She did not care to understand him in the strange moral crash that befell her after that 23rd May, under the influence of a mild warm June. She submitted to her master, of whom she was rather afraid, and with a singularly servile pa.s.sion carried on the farce of undergoing small penances day by day. So little regard did Girard show for her feelings that he never hid from her his relations with other women.
All he wanted was to get her into a convent. Meanwhile she was his plaything: she saw him, let him have his way. Weak, and yet further weakened by the shame that unnerved her, growing sadder and more sad at heart, she had now but little hold on life, and would keep on saying, in words that brought no sorrow to Girard's soul, ”I feel that I shall soon be dead.”
CHAPTER XI.
CADIERE IN THE CONVENT: 1730.
The Abbess of the Ollioules Convent was young for an abbess, being only thirty-eight years old. She was not wanting in mind. She was lively, swift alike in love and in hatred, hurried away by her heart and her senses also, endowed with very little of the tact and the moderation needed for the governing of such a body.
This nunnery drew its livelihood from two sources. On the one side, there came to it from Toulon two or three nuns of consular families, who brought good dowers with them, and therefore did what they pleased. They lived with the Observantine monks who had the ghostly direction of the convent. On the other hand, these monks, whose order had spread to Ma.r.s.eilles and many other places, picked up some little boarders and novices who paid for their keep: a contact full of danger and unpleasantness for the children, as one may see by the Aubany affair.
There was no real confinement, nor much internal order. In the scorching summer nights of that African climate, peculiarly oppressive and wearying in the airless pa.s.ses of Ollioules, nuns and novices went to and fro with the greatest freedom. The very same things were going on at Ollioules in 1730 which we saw in 1630 at Loudun. The bulk of nuns, well-nigh a dozen out of the fifteen who made up the house, being rather forsaken by the monks, who preferred ladies of loftier position, were poor creatures, sick at heart, and disinherited, with nothing to console them but tattling, child's play, and other school-girls' tricks.
The abbess was afraid that Cadiere would soon see through all this.
She made some demur about taking her in. Anon, with some abruptness, she entirely changed her cue. In a charming letter, all the more flattering as sent so unexpectedly from such a lady to so young a girl, she expressed a hope of her leaving the ghostly guidance of Father Girard. The girl was not, of course, to be transferred to her Observantines, who were far from capable of the charge. The abbess had formed the bold, enlivening idea of taking her into her own hands and becoming her sole director.
She was very vain. Deeming herself more agreeable than an old Jesuit confessor, she reckoned on making this prodigy her own, on conquering her without trouble. She would have worked the young saint for the benefit of her house.
She paid her the marked compliment of receiving her on the threshold, at the street-door. She kissed her, caught her up, led her into the abbess's own fine room, and bade her share it with herself. She was charmed with her modesty, with her invalid grace, with a certain strangeness at once mysterious and melting. In that short journey the girl had suffered a great deal. The abbess wanted to lay her down in her own bed, saying she loved her so that she would have them sleep together like sisters in one bed.
For her purpose this was probably more than was needful. It would have been quite enough to have the saint under her own roof. She would now have too much the look of a little favourite. The lady, however, was surprised at the young girl's hesitation, which doubtless sprang from her modesty or her humility; in part, perhaps, from a comparison of her own ill-health with the young health and blooming beauty of the other. But the abbess tenderly urged her request.
Under the influence of a fondling so close and so continual, she deemed that Girard would be forgotten. With all abbesses it had become the ruling fancy, the pet ambition, to confess their own nuns, according to the practice allowed by St. Theresa. By this pleasant scheme of hers the same result would come out of itself, the young woman telling her confessors only of small things, but keeping the depths of her heart for one particular person. Caressed continually by one curious woman, at eventide, in the night, when her head was on the pillow, she would have let out many a secret, whether her own or another's.
From this living entanglement she could not free herself at the first. She slept with the abbess. The latter thought she held her fast by a twofold tie, by the opposite means employed on the saint and on the woman; that is, on the nervous, sensitive, and, through her weakness, perhaps sensual girl. Her story, her sayings, whatever fell from her lips, were all written down. From other sources she picked up the meanest details of her physical life, and forwarded the report thereof to Toulon. She would have made her an idol, a pretty little pet doll. On a slope so slippery the work of allurement doubtless moved apace. But the girl had scruples and a kind of fear. She made one great effort, of which her weak health would have made her seem incapable. She humbly asked leave to quit that dove's-nest, that couch too soft and delicate, to go and live in common with the novices or the boarders.
Great was the abbess's surprise; great her mortification. She fancied herself scorned. She took a spite against the thankless girl, and never forgave her.
From the others Cadiere met with a very pleasant welcome. The mistress of the novices, Madame de Lescot, a nun from Paris, refined and good, was a worthier woman than the abbess. She seemed to understand the other--to see in her a poor prey of fate, a young heart full of G.o.d, but cruelly branded by some eccentric spell which seemed like to hurry her onward to disgrace, to some unhappy end. She busied herself entirely with looking after the girl, saving her from her own rashness, interpreting her to others, excusing those things which might in her be least excusable.
Saving the two or three n.o.ble ladies who lived with the monks and had small relish for the higher mysticism, they were all fond of her, and took her for an angel from heaven. Their tender feelings having little else to engage them, became concentred in her and her alone. They found her not only pious and wonderfully devout, but a good child withal, kind-hearted, winning, and entertaining. They were no longer listless and sick at heart. She engaged and edified them with her dreams, with stories true, or rather, perhaps, unfeigned, mingled ever with touches of purest tenderness. She would say, ”At night I go everywhere, even to America. Everywhere I leave letters bidding people repent. To-night I shall go and seek you out, even when you have locked yourselves in. We will all go together into the Sacred Heart.”
The miracle was wrought. Each of them at midnight, so she said, received the delightful visit. They all fancied they felt Cadiere embracing them, and making them enter the heart of Jesus. They were very frightened and very happy. Tenderest, most credulous of all, was Sister Raimbaud, a woman of Ma.r.s.eilles, who tasted this happiness fifteen times in three months, or nearly once in every six days.
It was purely the effect of imagination. The proof is, that Cadiere visited all of them at one same moment. The abbess meanwhile was hurt, being roused at the first to jealousy by the thought that she only had been left out, and afterwards feeling a.s.sured that, lost as the girl might be in her own dreams, she would get through so many intimate friends but too clear an inkling into the scandals of the house.
These were scarcely hidden from her at all. But as nothing came to Cadiere save by the way of spiritual insight, she fancied they had been told her in a revelation. Here her kindliness shone out. She felt a large compa.s.sion for the G.o.d who was thus outraged. And once again she imagined herself bound to atone for the rest, to save the sinners from the punishment they deserved, by draining herself the worst cruelties which the rage of devils would have power to wreak.
All this burst upon her on the 25th June, the Feast of St. John. She was spending the evening with the sisters in the novices' rooms. With a loud cry she fell backward in contortions, and lost all consciousness.
When she came to, the novices surrounded her, waiting eager to hear what she was going to say. But the governess, Madame Lescot, guessed what she would say, felt that she was about to ruin herself. So she lifted her up, and led her straight to her room, where she found herself quite flayed, and her linen covered with blood.