They
hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs who
perished long ago for the conversion of a race that has perished, and
whose relics they had come, fresh from their reading of Parkman, with
some vague and patronizing intention to revere. An elderly sister with a
pale, kind face led them through a ward of the hospital into the chapel,
which they found in the expected taste, and exquisitely neat and cool,
but lacking the martyr's skull. They asked if it were not to be seen.
"Ah, yes, poor Pere Brebeuf!" sighed the gentle sister, with the tone and
manner of having lost him yesterday; "we had it down only last week,
showing it to some Jesuit fathers; but it's in the convent now, and isn't
to be seen." And there mingled apparently in her regret for Pere Brebeuf
a confusing sense of his actual state as a portable piece of furniture.
She would not let them praise the chapel. It was very clean, yes, but
there was nothing to see in it. She deprecated their compliments with
many shrugs, but she was pleased; for when we renounce the pomps and
vanities of this world, we are pretty sure to find them in some
other,--if we are women. She, good and pure soul, whose whole life was
given to self-denying toil, had yet something angelically coquettish in
her manner, a spiritual-worldliness which was the clarified likeness of
this-worldliness.
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