TWICE DECEIVED
The blood-red banner had drooped, dipped, and vanished.
The sky overhead had deepened to purple, and opened starry eyes upon
the world beneath. Each time the silent woman, alone upon the
battlements, lifted a sorrowful face to the heavens, yet another bright
eye seemed to spring wide and gaze down upon her.
At length the whole expanse of the sky was studded with stars; the
planets hung luminous; the moon, already waning, rose large and golden
from behind the firs, growing smaller and more silvery as she mounted
higher.
Mora covered her face with her hands. The summer night was too full of
scented sweetness. The stars sang together. The moon rode triumphant
in the heavens. In this her hour of darkness she must shut out the
brilliant sky. She let her face sink into her hands, and bowed her
head upon her knees.
Blow after blow had fallen upon her from the Bishop's letter.
First that the Bishop himself was plotting to deceive her, and seemed
to take Hugh's connivance for granted.
Then that she had been hoodwinked by old Mary Antony, on the evening of
Hugh's intrusion into the Nunnery; that this hoodwinking was known to
the Bishop, and appeared but to cause him satisfaction, tempered by a
faint amusement.
Then the overwhelming news that Mary Antony's vision had been an
imposition, devised and contrived by the almost uncannily shrewd wits
of the old woman; and that the Bishop advised the Knight to praise
heaven for those wits, and to beware lest any chance word of his should
lead her--Mora--to doubt the genuineness of the vision, and to realise
that she had been hocussed, hoodwinked, outwitted! In fact the Bishop
and her husband were to become, and to continue indefinitely, parties
to old Antony's deception.
She now understood the full significance of the half-humorous,
half-sceptical attitude adopted by the Bishop, when she recounted to
him the history of the vision. No wonder he had called Mary Antony a
"most wise and prudent babe."
But even as her anger rose, not only against the Bishop, but against
the old woman she had loved and trusted and who had so deceived her,
she came upon the news of the death of the aged lay-sister and the
account of her devoted fidelity, even to the end.
Mary Antony living, was often a pathetic figure; Mary Antony dead,
disarmed anger.
And, after all, the old lay-sister and her spurious vision faded into
insignificance in view of the one supreme question: What course would
Hugh take? Would he keep silence and thus tacitly become a party to
the deception; or would he, at all costs, tell her the truth?
It was evidence of the change her love had wrought in her, that this
one point was so paramount, that until it was settled, she could not
bring herself to contemplate other issues.
She remembered, with hopeful comfort, his scrupulous honesty in the
matter of Father Gervaise. Yet wherefore had he gone to consult with
the Bishop unless he intended to fall in with the Bishop's suggestions?
Not until she at last sought her chamber and knelt before the shrine of
the Madonna, did she realise that her justification in leaving the
Convent was gone, if there had been no vision.
"Blessèd Virgin," she pleaded, with clasped hands uplifted; "I, who
have been twice deceived--tricked into entering the Cloister, and
tricked into leaving it--I beseech thee, by the sword which pierced
through thine own soul also, grant me now a vision which shall be, in
very deed, a VISION OF TRUTH."