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84
SÖNYA KOVALÉVSKY
after a long and mysterious conference with the
abbess, had settled there forever.
That abbess had died long since. The pale nun
still flitted about there like a shadow, but none of
those who now dwelt in the convent had ever heard
the sound of her voice.
The young nuns, and all the poor folks of the
country round about revered her as a saint. Mothers
brought their sick children to her, that she might
touch them with her hand, in the hope that they
would be healed by her touch. But there were people
who maintained that, in her youth, she must have been
a great sinner, since she was obliged to expiate the
past by such a penance.
At last, after many, many years of self-sacrificing
toil, the hour of her death arrives. All the nuns,
young and old, are bending over her deathbed. The
mother abbess herself, who has long since lost the use
of her feet, has ordered them to carry her to the dying
woman’s cell.
Then the priest enters. By the authority delegated
to him by our Lord Jesus Christ, he releases the
dying woman from her self-imposed vow of silence, and
adjures her to tell him, before she dies, who she is;
what sin, what crime, weighs on her conscience.
The dying woman, with great effort, sits up in bed.
Her bloodless lips seem to have turned to stone with
their long silence, and to have become unused to
human speech. For several seconds they move
convulsively and mechanically before she can succeed in
uttering a single sound. At last, obeying the
command of her confessor, the nun begins to speak, but
her voice, unused for twenty years, sounds choked
and unnatural.
" I am Edith," she utters with difficulty. " I am the
wife of the dead King Harold."
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