Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/150

 frilled white coif, just like a picture out of a book. But this was different. When the dark, gaunt, hollow-eyed, old missionary-priest had given her one somber look and made the sign of the cross over her, she had felt her heart begin to beat faster. And as he talked to her afterwards, in the bare, whitewashed parlor of the convent, with the light filtering in through the closed shutters, he had made her tremble with excitement, as he himself had trembled throughout all his thin powerful old body. His deep-set eyes had burned into her, as he talked, his emaciated fingers, scorched brown by tropical suns, shook as he touched the Crucifix. How he had yearned over her as he told her that, never, never would she know what it really was to live, till she cast out her stubborn unbelief and threw herself into the living arms of her true Mother, the Church of God. Flora had not known that she had any belief in particular to cast out … she had never thought anything special about religion at all, one way or the other. She only wanted him to go on making her tremble and feel half-faint, while Sister Ste. Lucie clasped her rosary beads and prayed silently, the tears on her cheeks! And then the very next day the Father Superior of his Order had sent him off to Africa. Would he ever come back?

Perhaps she could become a Catholic. Why not? If it moved you like this just to be in contact with the Church—what must it bring you to be intimately of it? She remembered that in a book Sister Ste. Lucie had given her, stories were told of women who lost consciousness from sheer emotion, when they felt the consecrated wafer of Communion on their tongues; others who were caught up among the saints for hours, hearing heavenly music and when they came to themselves, the room was all scented richly with invisible roses.…

Also, without a word spoken she thought she had understood that the Marquise de Charmières and all that old aristocratic set would not be so stand-offish if she were converted.

But as this last idea slid into her mind from behind something else, there came with it as frighteningly as if she had seen the walls of her stone corridor closing in on her, a doubt