Spanish Highways and Byways

The door shut out the day;
They sat me on a marble stool
And cut my hair away.

"The pendants from my ears they took,
And the ring I loved to wear,
But the hardest loss of all to brook
Was my mat of raven hair.

"If I run out to the garden
And pluck the roses red,
I have to kneel in church until
Twice twenty prayers are said.

"If I steal up to the tower
And clang the convent bell,
The holy Abbess utters words
I do not choose to tell.

"My parents, O my parents,
Unkindly have you done,
For I was never meant to be
A dismal little nun."

I came but slightly in contact with Spanish nuns. Among the figures that stand out clear in memory are a kindly old sister, at Seville, in the Hospital de la Caridad, who paused midway in her exhibition of the famous Murillos there to wipe her eyes and grieve that we were Protestants, and an austere, beautiful woman in La Cuna, or Foundling Asylum of Seville, who caressed a crying baby with the passionate tenderness of motherhood denied. The merriest Spanish hermana of our acquaintance we encountered on the French side of the Pyrenees. At Anglet, halfway between Biarritz and Bayonne, is the Convent of the Bernardines, Silent Sisters. The visitor sees them only from a distance, robed in white flannel, with large white crosses gleaming on the back of their hooded capes. These, too, were originally white, and the hoods so deep that not even the profile of the features could be seen; but the French Government, disturbed by the excessive death-rate in this order, recently had the audacity to interfere and give summary orders that the hoods be cut away, so that the healthful sunshine might visit those pale faces. The mandate was obeyed, but, perhaps in sign of mournful protest, the new hoods and capes are black as night. These women Trappists may recite their prayers aloud, as they work in field or garden, or over their embroidery frames, but they speak for human hearing only once a year, when their closest family friends may visit them and listen through a grating to what their disused voices may yet be able to utter. From all other contact with the world they are shielded by an outpost guard of a few of the Servants of Mary, an industrious, self-supporting sisterhood, whose own convent, half a mile away, is a refuge for unwedded mothers and a home for unfathered children. Hither the pitying sisters brought, a few days before our visit, a wild-eyed girl whom they had found lying on one of the sea rocks, waiting for the rising tide to cover her and her shame together. The chief treasure of this nunnery, one regrets to add, is the polished skull of Mary Magdalene.

That one of the Servants of Mary who showed us over the Trappist convent was a bright-eyed Spanish dame of many winters, as natural a chatterbox as ever gossiped with the neighbors in the sun. Her glee in this little opportunity for conversation was enough to wring the heart of any lover of old ladies. She walked as slowly as possible and detained us on every conceivable pretext, reaching up on her rheumatic tiptoes to pluck us red and white camellias, and pointing out, with a lingering garrulity, the hardness of the cots in the bare, cold little cells, the narrowness of the benches in the austere chapel, and, in the cheerless dining room, the floor of deep sand, in which the Bernardines kneel throughout their Friday dinner of bread and water. Longest of all, she kept us in the cemetery, all spick and span, with close-set rows of nameless graves, each with a cross shaped upon it in white seashells. The dear old soul, in her coarse blue gown, with tidy white kerchief and neatly darned black hood and veil, showed us the grave of her own sister, adding, proudly, that her four remaining sisters were all cloistered in various convents of Spain.

"All six of us nuns," she said, "but my brother – no! He has the dowries of us all and lives the life of the world. Just think! I have two nephews in Toledo. I have never seen them. My sister's grave is pretty, is it not? They let me put flowers there. Oh, there are many families in Spain like ours, where all the daughters are put into convents. Spain is a very religious country. The sons? Not so often. Sometimes, when there is a conscription, many young men become priests to escape military service but it is the women who are most devout in Spain."

And after the rustic gate was shut on the sleeping-place of the Bernardines, scarcely more silent and more dead beneath the sod than above it, she still detained us with whispered hints of distinguished Spanish ladies among those ghostly, far-off figures that, pitchfork or pruning knife in hand, would fall instantly upon their knees at the ringing of the frequent bell for prayers. Spanish ladies, too, had given this French convent many of its most costly treasures. We said good-by to our guide near an elaborate shrine of the Madonna, which a bereaved Spanish mother had erected with the graven request that the nuns pray for the soul of her beloved dead.

"Even we Servants of Mary are not allowed to talk much here," said in parting this most sociable of saints, clinging to us with a toil-roughened, brown old hand. "It is a holy life, but quiet – very quiet. I have been here forty-four years this winter. My name is Sister Solitude."

The nun whom I knew best was an exquisite little sister just back from Manila. During several months I went to her, in a Paris convent, twice or three times a week, for Spanish lessons. The reception room in which I used to await her coming shone not as with soap and water, but as with the very essence of purity. The whiteness of the long, fine curtains had something celestial about it. The only book in sight, a bundle of well-worn leaves bound in crimson plush and placed with precision in the centre of the gleaming mahogany table, was a volume of classic French sermons, – the first two being on Demons, and the next on Penance. Further than this I never read; for very punctually the slight figure, in violet skirt and bodice, with a white cross embroidered upon the breast, swept softly down the hall. A heavy purple cord and a large-beaded rosary depended from the waist. In conversation she often raised her hand to press her ring, sign of her sacred espousals, to her lips. Her type of face I often afterward saw in Spain, but never again so perfect. Her complexion was the richest southern brown, the eyes brightening in excitement to vivid, flashing black. The eyebrows, luxuriant even to heaviness, were nevertheless delicately outlined, and the straight line of the white band emphasized their graceful arch. The nose was massive for a woman's face, and there was a slight shading of hair upon the upper lip. The mouth and chin, though so daintily moulded, were strong. Not the meek, religious droop of the eyelids could mask the fire, vigor, vitality, intensity, that lay stored like so much electricity behind the tranquil convent look.

We would go for the lesson to a severe little chamber, whose only ornament was a crucifix of olive wood fastened against the wall. Then how those velvet eyes would glow and sparkle in the eagerness of rushing speech! The little sister loved to tell of her Manila experience, almost a welcome break, I fancied, in the monotonous peace of cloister life. All that Sunday morning, when the battle was on, the nuns maintained their customary services, hearing above their prayers and chants and the solemn diapason of the organ, the boom, boom, boom of our wicked American cannon. For, according to this naive historian, Catholic Spain, best beloved of Our Lady among the nations of the earth, had labored long in the Philippines to Christianize the heathen, when suddenly, in the midst of those pious labors with which she was too preoccupied to think of fitting out men-of-war and drilling gunners, a pirate fleet bore down upon her and overthrew at once the Spanish banner and the Holy Cross. Tears sparkled through flame as the hermanita told of her beautiful convent home, now half demolished. The sisters did not abandon it until six weeks after the battle, but as the nunnery stood outside the city walls, their superior judged it no safe abode for Spanish ladies, and ordered them away. The French consul arranged for their transport to Hongkong on a dirty little vessel, where they had to stay on deck, the twenty-seven of them, during their week's voyage, suffering from lack of proper shelter and especially from thirst, the water supply running short the second day out. But all this was joy of martyrdom.

"Is not Hongkong a very strange city?" I asked. "Did it seem to you more like Manila than like Paris and Madrid?"

The little sister's voice was touched with prompt rebuke.

"You speak after the fashion of the world. All cities look alike to us. Ours is the life of the convent. It matters nothing where the convent stands."

Stimulated by reproof, I waxed impertinent. "Not even if it stands within range of the guns? Now, truly, truly, were you not the least bit frightened that morning of the battle?"

The sunny southern smile was a fleeting one, and left a reminiscent shadow in the eyes.

"Frightened? Oh, no! There were no guns between us and Paradise. From early dawn we heard the firing, and hour after hour we knelt before the altar and prayed to the Mother of God to comfort the souls of the brave men who were dying for la patria; but we were not frightened."

There were strange jostlings of ideas in that cloistered cell, especially when the dusk had stolen in between our bending faces and the Spanish page.

Once we talked of suicide. That morning it had been a wealthy young Parisian who had paid its daily tribute to the Seine.

"What a horror!" gasped the little sister, clasping her slender hands against her breast. "It is a mortal sin. And how foolish! For if life is hard to bear, surely perdition is harder."

"It does not seem to me so strange in case of the poor," I responded, waiving theology. "But a rich man, though his own happiness fails, has still the power of making others happy."

"Ah, but I understand!" cried Little Manila, her eyes like stars in the dimness. "The devil does not see truth as the blessed spirits do, but sees falsehoods even as the world. And so in his blindness he believes the soul of a rich man more precious than the souls of the poor, and tempts the rich man more than others. Yet when the devil has that soul, will he find it made of gold?"

One chilly November afternoon, gray with a fog that had utterly swallowed the Eiffel Tower above its first huge uprights, which straddled disconsolately like legs forsaken of their giant, she explained in a sudden rush of words why Spain had been worsted in the war with America.

"Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. As with persons, so with nations. Those that are not of His fold He gives over to their fill of vainglory and greed and power, but the Catholic nations He cleanses again and again in the bitter waters of defeat – ah, in fire and blood! Yet the end is not yet. The rod of His correction is upon Spain at this hour, and the Faithful are glad in the very heart of sorrow, for even so shall her sins be purged away, even so shall her coldness be quickened, even so shall she be made ready for her everlasting recompense."

"And the poor Protestant nations?" I asked, between a smile and a sigh.

The little sister smiled back, but the Catholic eyes, for all their courtly graciousness, were implacable.

She was of a titled family and had passed a petted childhood in Madrid. There she had been taken, on her seventh birthday, to a corrida de toros, but remembered it unpleasantly, not because of the torture inflicted on the horses and bulls, but because she had been frightened by the great beasts, with their tossing horns and furious bellowing. Horns always made her think of the devil, she said. From her babyhood she had been afraid of horns.

One day a mischievous impulse led me to inquire, in connection with a chat about the Escorial, "And how do you like Philip II?"

The black eyes shot one ray of sympathetic merriment, but the Spaniard and the nun were on their guard.

"He was a very good Catholic," she replied demurely.

"So was Isabel la Católica," I responded. "But don't you think she may have been a trifle more agreeable?"

"Perhaps she was a little more simpática," admitted the hermanita, but that was her utmost concession. She would not even allow that Philip had a sorry end.

"If his body groaned, his soul was communing with the Blessed Saints and paid no heed."

At the corner of the street which led under the great garden wall to the heavily barred gate of the convent was a flower-stand. The shrewd, swift-tongued Madame in charge well knew the look of the unwary, and usually succeeded in selling me a cluster of drooping blossoms at twice the value of the fresh, throwing in an extra leaf or stem at the close of the bargain with an air of prodigal benevolence. The handful of flowers would be smilingly accepted by the little sister, but instantly laid aside nor favored with glance or touch until the close of the visit, when they would be lifted again with a winsome word of acknowledgment and carried away, probably to spend their sweetness at the marble feet of the Virgin. In vain I tried to coax from this scorner of God's earth some sign of pleasure in the flowers themselves.

"Don't you care for tea-roses?" "Ah, el mundo pasa. But their color is exquisite."

Yet her eyes did not turn to the poor posy for the two hours following.

"This mignonette has only the grace of sweetness."

"It is a delicate scent, but it will not last. El mundo pasa."

She held the sprays at arm's length for a moment, and then laid them down on a mantel at the farther end of the room.

"I am sorry these violets are not fresher."

"But no! The touch of Time has not yet found them. Still, it is only a question of to-morrow. El mundo pasa."

"Yes, the world passes. But is it not good while it lasts?"