A Few Short Sketches | Page 8

if she had been foolish for her years, and had, in an hour of human weakness, yielded to a love which was useless, out of the question, unnatural. She was twelve, yet the little blind maid was old enough to know her loss, to feel her sorrow.
Rose, cold, selfish, unsympathetic, lamenting the loss of a lover whom she had no power to hold more than the death of her mother, feeling no love for the sister who had made for her sake a useless sacrifice, was not a desirable companion for the little blind sister.
Grace, upon whom the care of the child had fallen these latter years, and who had been faithful and loving to her charge, had begun to put worldly things from her, and when that long-expected but sudden death came upon them, she resolved, after much meditation and prayer, to enter some holy order and lead a life dedicated to the Master.
Clad in the robes of a Carmelite nun, she may have been too unmindful of the little blind one who had clung to her and plead with her not to leave her alone with Rose. For after all, what is raiment even if it be fine, aye, purple and fine linen; what is food, even if it be dainty like the ambrosia of the Gods; what is warmth, what is comfort, what are all these things if the heart be cold, naked and hungry? Grace had provided for her bodily comforts, but she had failed to fill her own place left vacant with some heart that would be kind and loving to Mary, blind and helpless.
After Grace entered the Carmelite Convent, which was many miles away from their old home, Rose and Mary returned to the big smoky city, and were swallowed up in the multitude of people who exist in buildings and houses, where men and women huddle together and have, as they had, a certain amount of comfort, but lose their identity, and are finally swept away into that great stagnant pool of obscurity where existence in great cities goes on and on without either ebb or flow.
The little blind maid was lonely and sick at heart. The noise and the cry of the street smote her to the earth. The people in the house where they lived, were as kind as they knew how to be; but how little they knew about kindness, and nothing about peace and quiet. She felt that she was a burden to Rose, and she knew that Rose could never be any thing to her. Those poor, sightless eyes shed tears of homesickness for Grace, and she was sorely oppressed with the desire to be with her again and feel the touch of those cool, quiet hands against her face and over her eyelids that so often burned with pain, and to hear that voice, which was never loud and harsh. But what could she do? This is what she did: With her own hand, unaided, she wrote a letter to the Pope at Rome, and gave it with a piece of silver to an honest house-maid, who carried it to her priest for proper direction, which he wrote upon it, marveling much when he read her earnest words of entreaty, begging the Pope to please send back her Sister Grace from the convent, because she was a little girl, "blind, helpless and very lonely."
The Pope may be infallible, but he is surely human, for when he read the simple words sprawled out upon a sheet of paper, blistered with the tears of the little blind maid crying out from across the seas her appeal for the return of her sister from those convent walls, he was moved to a compassion which was not only priestly, but very human. He bestirred himself in her behalf. He wrote letters to the convent of those Carmelite nuns. He made earnest inquiry about Grace, and finally, after many days of weary, heart-sick waiting, a letter came to the parish priest for little Mary. It was written by the Pope himself, and brought to the blind girl in far-off America the greeting and the blessing of the great Roman Pontiff. He told her in kindly words that she had asked what he was powerless to grant; that he could not drive out her sister from the shelter of those holy walls which she had so wisely chosen, and where she devoutly wished to remain, and therein peacefully, prayerfully end her days, but that he could send her there to the arms of that sister; that he could and would gladly give her dispensation from the duties and the obligations of the holy order; that she might do, as no other had ever done, live among the Carmelites and yet not be a