CHAPTER XXIV.

Resolves to escape.

As summer approached, I expected to be sent to the farm again, but for some reason I was still employed in the kitchen.  Yet I could not keep my mind upon my work.  The one great object of my life; the subject that continually pressed upon my mind was the momentous question, how shall I escape?  The dreaded December was rapidly approaching.  To some it would bring a joyous festival, but to me, the black veil and a life long imprisonment.  Once within those dreary walls, and I might as well hope to escape from the grave.  Such are the arrangements, there is no chance for a nun to escape unless she is promoted to the office of Abbess or Superior.  Of course, but few of them can hope for this, especially, if they are not contented; and certainly, in my case there was not the least reason to expect anything of the kind.  Knowing these facts, with the horrors of the Secret Cloister ever before me, I felt some days as though on the verge of madness.  Before the nuns take the black veil, and enter this tomb for the living, they are put into a room by themselves, called the forbidden closet, where they spend six months in studying the Black Book.  Perchance, the reader will remember that when I first came to this nunnery, I was taken by the door-tender to this forbidden closet, and permitted to look in upon the wretched inmates.  From that time I always had the greatest horror of that room.  I was never allowed to enter it, and in fact never wished to do so, but I have heard the most agonizing groans from those within, and sometimes I have heard them laugh.  Not a natural, hearty laugh, however, such as we hear from the gay and happy, but a strange, terrible, sound which I cannot describe, and which sent a thrill of terror through my frame, and seemed to chill the very blood in my veins.

I have heard the priests say, when conversing with each other, while I was tidying their room, that many of these nuns lose their reason while studying the Black Book.  I can well believe this, for never in my life did I ever witness an expression of such unspeakable, unmitigated anguish, such helpless and utter despair as I saw upon the faces of those nuns.  And well they may despair.  Kept under lock and key, their windows barred, and no air admitted to the room except what comes through the iron grate of their windows from other apartments; compelled to study, I know not what; with no hope of the least mitigation of their sufferings, or relaxation of the stringent rules that bind them; no prospect before them but a life-long imprisonment; what have they to hope for?  Surely, death and the grave are the only things to which they can look forward with the least degree of satisfaction.