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Well has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy can never be lost or cast away: and fitly is she too a haven of refuge for the afflicted because of the seven dolours which transpierced her own heart.
AS soon as night had fallen Marie, still lying on her bed at the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, became extremely impatient, for she had learnt from Madame de Jonquiere that Baron Suire had obtained from Father Fourcade the necessary permission for her to spend the night in front of the Grotto. Thus she kept on questioning Sister Hyacinthe, asking her: "Pray, Sister, is it not yet nine o'clock?"
And alas, we hear no longer the tempests of the great organs and the majestic dolours of plain chant, save at the funerals of the monied classes; for the poor, nothing no choir, no organ, just a handful of prayers, then a few dips of the brush in the holy water stoup, and there is a dead man the more on whom the rain falls, who is carried away.
About this time I did light on that dreadful story of that miserable mortal, Francis Spira, a book that was to my troubled spirit as salt when rubbed into a fresh wound; every groan of that man with all the rest of his actions in his dolours, as his tears, his prayers, his gnashing of teeth, his wringing of hands, was as knives and daggers in my soul, especially that sentence of his was frightful to me: "Man knows the beginning of sin, but who bounds the issues thereof?" We never read anything like Spira's experience and Grace Abounding and Giant Despair's dungeon in the books of our day.
ABOUT eleven o'clock that night, leaving M. de Guersaint in his room at the Hotel of the Apparitions, it occurred to Pierre to return for a moment to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours before going to bed himself. He had left Marie in such a despairing state, so fiercely silent, that he was full of anxiety about her.
Live a little as I do; and you will take your fatigues and illnesses and occasional dolours and dumps as incidents of the day's work and not magnify them into the mountainous overshadowing calamities from which you deduce your philosophy of universal misery." No advice could have been more wholesome or more timely. And with what pictures of her own busy felicity she reenforces her advice!
Meanwhile, after begging Ferrand and Sister Saint-Francois to go and wait for her in the courtyard of the station, near the reserved vehicle which was to take them to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, Sister Hyacinthe returned to the railway carriage and talked of helping her patients to alight before going away. But Marie would not let her touch her.
It had therefore been decided that they should in the first instance be taken to the Hospital of Our Lady of Dolours, where they would be able to rest awhile after their trying journey. Whilst the Baron and the superintendent were thus settling what measures should be adopted, Gerard shook hands with a priest who had sat down beside him.
I will not trouble you with the number of falsehoods he has stuft into his letters. I have trained myself to fortitude, and go about with as many knives stuck in my heart as our Lady of the Seven Dolours that I saw in Vienna, but make much less display of them.
Nan's uncle, moving with hopeless and dragging steps about the sides of Maam hill, ruminating constantly on nature's caprice with sheep and crop, man's injustice, the poverty of barns, the discomforts of seasons, nourishing his sour self on reflections upon all life's dolours, would be coming after that for days upon the girl and Gilian gathering berries or on some such childish diversion in the woods behind the river.
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