Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/297

 

R. WINNERY, listening to the tale, grew more and more bewildered. This woman whom he had expected to find sensible he saw was no different from all the others. He saw that she believed all that she was telling him and that he could never persuade her that it was all nonsense. She too was like all the others, the prey of superstition, the victim of ancient legends. It was simply another kind of superstition, different and more ancient and more deeply rooted than the superstitions which led Sister Annunziata to believe that she was chosen by Saint Francis as the elect of God. Sister Annunziata was more than half crazy, and they were right perhaps in shutting her up, but this shrewd hard peasant woman was clearly not mad. To Sister Annunziata Miss Annie Spragg was a white saint and to Signora Bardelli the old maid was a black saint.

He said to her, "But the Stigmata? How can a witch have received the miracle of the Stigmata?"

She looked at him mysteriously and replied, "That I do not know."

"It is all very strange."

"I do not know," observed Signora Bardelli, "unless it is the work of the Devil. Perhaps it is a joke played on the Church by something that is older than the Church, older even than Christianity. I