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Updated: May 19, 2025
"No, Daniel; it won't do to be rude. I must tell Brother Friedsam good-by." "No, don't," said Daniel, turning pale with terror. "If you go in to see the director you will never come with me." "Why won't I?" laughed the defiant girl. "He's a wizard, and has charms that he gets out of his great books. Don't go in there; you'll never get away."
It was the personal fascination of Brother Friedsam and her own vigorous hatred of the commonplace that had led her three years before to join the sisterhood in the Sharon house. She did not know to what degree a desire for Beissels's companionship had drawn her to accept his speculations concerning the mystical Sophia and the Philadelphian fellowship. But the convent had proved a disappointment.
He could never speak to this girl without some mental disturbance. "Brother Friedsam," she said, "I am sent by the sisters to say that they are very indignant at your treatment of them in the rehearsals, and that they are not going to attend them hereafter." Beissels's sensitive lips quivered a moment; this sudden rebellion surprised him, and he did not at first see how to meet it.
Only Sister Jael, who for lack of voice was not included in either of the three choruses of the sisterhood, stoutly defended Brother Friedsam, thinking, perhaps, that it was not a bad thing to have the conceit of the singers reduced; indeed, she was especially pleased that Tabea, the unsurpassed singer of the sisters' gallery, should have suffered rebuke.
"Brother Friedsam, I have denied the Lord!" Friedsam regarded the kneeling figure for a moment, and then he reached out his hands, solemnly placing them on her head with a motherly tenderness, while a tremor went through his frame. "Thou, dear child, shalt do thy first work over again," he said.
"Do you know," said the good-hearted, gossipy little Sister Persida, coming into Tabea's cell two or three days later, "that the sisters have all yielded to Brother Friedsam? He coaxed and managed them so, you know. Has he talked to you?" "No." "You'll have to give up when he does. Nobody can resist Brother Friedsam." "I can."
The last speaker was a sister with an austere face and gray eyes which had no end of cold-blooded religious enthusiasm in them. "I need not give you a nickname," retorted Thecla to the last speaker; "Brother Friedsam did that when he called you Jael. You are just the kind of person to drive a tent-nail through a man's head."
"You suggested this course to them, I suppose?" he said after a pause. "No, Brother Friedsam, I had nothing to do with it until now. But I think they are right, and I hope they will keep to their word. You have been altogether too hard on us." The director made no reply, but wearily leaned his pale, refined face upon his hand and looked up at Tabea.
The sisters who came to call Tabea to supper that evening also failed to elicit any response. Late in the night, when she had become calm, Tabea heard the crowing of a cock, and her heart was deeply touched at the thought that Friedsam, the revered Friedsam, now more than ever the beloved of her soul, was at that moment going to prayer for the disciple who had broken her vow.
In the convent, where he reigned supreme, Beissels was known as Brother Friedsam; later he was reverently called Father Friedsam Gottrecht, a name that, like all their convent names, had plenty of mystical significance attached to it.
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