Chapter One.

Nobody’s Child.

“Oh, how full of briars is this working-day world!”
 
                Shakspere.

“It is so cold, Mother!”

The woman addressed languidly roused herself from the half-sheltered nook of the forest in which she and her child had taken refuge. She was leaning with her back supported by a giant oak, and the child was in her arms. The age of the child was about eight. The mother, though still young in years, was old before her time, with hard work and exposure, and it might be also with sorrow. She sat up, and looked wearily over the winter scene before her. There was nothing of the querulous, complaining tone of the little girl’s voice in hers; only the dull, sullen apathy of hopeless endurance.

“Cold, child!” she said. “’Tis like to be colder yet when the night cometh.”

“O Mother! and all snow now!”

“There be chiller gear than snow, maid,” replied the mother bitterly.

“But it had been warmer in London, Mother?—if we had not lost our road.”

“May-be,” was the answer, in a tone which seemed to imply that it did not signify.

The child did not reply; and the woman continued to sit upright, and look forward, with an absent expression in her face, indicating that the mind was not where the eyes were.

“Only snow and frost!” she muttered—not speaking to the child. “Nought beyond, nor here ne there. Nay, snow is better than snowed-up hearts. Had it been warmer in London? May-be the hearts there had been as frosty as at Pleshy. Well! it will be warm in the grave, and we shall soon win yonder.”

“Be there fires yonder, Mother?” asked the child innocently.

The woman laughed—a bitter, harsh laugh, in which there was no mirth.

“The devil keepeth,” she said. “At least so say the priests. But what wit they? They never went thither to see. They will, belike, some day.”

The little girl was silent again, and the mother, after a moment’s pause, resumed her interrupted soliloquy.

“If there were nought beyond, only!” she murmured; and her look and tone of dull misery sharpened into vivid pain. “If a man might die, and have done with it all! But to meet God! And ’tis no sweven, (dream) ne fallacy, this dread undeadliness (immortality)—it is real. O all ye blessed saints and martyrs in Heaven! how shall I meet God?”

“Is that holy Mary’s Son, Mother?”

“Ay.”

“Holy Mary will plead for us,” suggested the child. “She can alway peace her Son. But methought He was good to folks, Mother. Sister Christian was wont to say so.”

“To saints and good women like Sister Christian, may-be.”

“Art thou not good, Mother?”

The question was put in all innocence. But it struck the heart of the miserable mother like a poisoned arrow.

“Good!” she cried, again in that tone of intense pain. “I good? No, Maude!—I am bad, bad, bad! From the crown of mine head to the sole of my foot, there is nothing in me beside evil; such evil as thou, unwemmed (undefiled, innocent) dove as thou art, canst not even conceive! God is good to saints—not to sinners. Sister Christian—and thou, yet!—be amongst the saints. I am of the sinners.”

“But why art thou not a saint, Mother?” demanded the child, as innocently as before.

“I was on the road once,” said the woman, with a heavy sigh. “I was to have been an holy sister of Saint Clare. I knew no more of ill than thou whiteling in mine arms. If I had died then, when my soul was fair!”

Suddenly her mood changed. She clasped the child close to her breast, and showered kisses on the little wan face.

“My babe Maude, my bird Maude!” she said. “My dove that God sped down from Heaven unto me, thinking me not too ill ne wicked to have thee! The angels may love thee, my bird in bower! for thou art white and unwemmed. The robes of thy chrism (see Note 1) are not yet soiled; but, O sinner that I am! how am I to meet God? And I must meet Him—and soon.”

“Did not God die on the rood, Mother?”

The woman assented, the old listless tone returning to her voice.

“Wherefore, Mother?”

“God wot, child.”

“Sister Christian told me He had no need for Himself, but that He loved us; yet why that should cause Him to die I wis not.”

The mother made no answer. Her thoughts had drifted away, back through her weary past, to a little village church where a fresco painting stood on the wall, sketched in days long before, of a company of guests at a feast, clad in Saxon robes; and of One, behind whom knelt a woman weeping and kissing His feet, while her flowing hair almost hid them from sight. And back to her memory, along with the scene, came a line from a popular ballad (“The Ploughman’s Complaint”) which referred to it. She repeated it aloud—

“‘Christ suffered a sinful to kisse His fete.’

“Suffered her, for that she was a saint?” she asked of herself, in the dreamy languor which the intense cold had brought over her. “Nay, for she was ‘a sinful.’ Suffered her, then, for that she sinned? Were not that to impeach His holiness? Or was He so holy and high that no sin of hers could soil the feet she touched? What good did it her to touch them? Made it her holy?—fit to meet God in the Doom (Judgment), when she had thus met Him here in His lowliness? How wis I? And could it make me fit to meet Him? But I can never kiss His feet. Nor lack they the ournment (adornment) of any kiss of mine. Yet methinks it were she, not He, which lacked it then. And He let her kiss His feet. O Christ Jesu! if in very deed it were in love for us that Thou barest death on the bitter rood, hast Thou no love left to welcome the dying sinner? Thou who didst pity her at yonder feast, hast Thou no mercy for Eleanor Gerard too?”

The words were spoken only half aloud, but they were heard by the child cradled in her arms.

“Mother, why christened you me not Eleanor?” she asked dreamily.

“Hush, child, and go to sleep!” answered the mother, startled out of her reverie.

Maude was silent, and Eleanor wrapped her closer in the old cloak which enfolded both of them. But before the woman yielded herself up to the stupor which was benumbing her faculties, she passed her hand into her bosom, and drew out a little flat parcel, folded in linen, which she secreted in the breast of the child’s dress.

“Keep this, Maude,” she said gravely.

“What is it, Mother?” was Maude’s sleepy answer.

“It is what thou shalt find it hereafter,” was the mysterious rejoinder. “But let none take it away, neither beguile thee thereof. ’Tis all I have to give thee.”

Maude seemed too nearly asleep for her curiosity to be roused; and Eleanor, leaning back against the tree, resigned herself to slumber also.

Not long afterwards, a goatherd passing that way in search of a strayed kid, came on the unconscious pair, wrapped in each other’s arms. He ran for help to his hut, and had them conveyed to a convent at a little distance, which the wanderers had failed to find. The rescue was just in time to bring the life back to the numbed limbs of the child. But for the mother there was no waking in this world. Eleanor Gerard had met God.

Four years after that winter evening, in the guest-chamber of the Convent of Sopwell sat a nun of middle age and cheerful look, in conversation with a woman in ordinary costume, but to whom the same description would very nearly apply.

“Then what were the manner of maid you seek, good Ursula?” inquired