ered the pictures
painted for her. Above all, Jean strained to bring her to the knowledge
of the God of the Christian, for he himself was an earnest, intelligent
disciple. He found her mind clearer than he had expected. Judith (this
he now knew was the mother's name) was a remarkable woman; her mind was
lofty, if darkened. While others were satisfied with the grossness of a
material creed her spirit soared aloft. Her Gods commanded her implicit
faith, her unswerving allegiance. Seated on the storm-clouds, sweeping
through space, they represented to her infinite force. She attributed to
them no love for mankind, which was in her creed rather their plaything,
but she credited them with the will and the power to scatter good and
ill before they claimed the soul of the hero to their fellowship, or
cast into a lower abyss that of the coward or the traitor. She believed
that she saw their giant forms half bending from their vapoury thrones,
and she thought that she read their decrees. Sorceress she may have
been; in those days sorcery was attributed to many who had obtained a
knowledge of laws of nature, then considered occult, now recognized
among the guiding principles from which scientific deductions are drawn.
She believed in the power of magic, which she was universally understood
to possess; but she was no vulgar witch: rather was she a worthy
priestess of her not ignoble deities. The effect upon Hilda's mind of
the teachings of such a woman is easy to conceive. She had been allowed
to know little of the wild orgies of the barbaric feasts offered to the
Gods by her countrymen, of their brutal excesses, of their human
sacrifices: from this knowledge she had been as far as possible
shielded: she knew only of the dim mystic beings, half men, half Gods,
from whose wrath she shrank with terror. To a mind so constituted and
trained the revelation of the story of the infant Christ was a
passionate pleasure. She never tired of listening to the tale of the
birth in the stable of Bethlehem; but she loved not to dwell on the
history of the passion and death, which was at that time beyond her
understanding. She drank in with parted lips all that concerned the Holy
Mother, of whom she was never weary of hearing. Jean had a rude drawing
of the Madonna and Child, given him by Father Austin: the figures had
the angularity and rigidity of Byzantine art, but the artist had
represented his subject with reverence, and no lack of skill, and s