CHAPTER I.
BREAD-AND-WATER--AND KITCHEN THERETO!
Oh, I was so tired--so weary. I could hear my jaw crack at the corners where the strings are, each time I yawned. And not without reason. For I was nearly eighteen and had been two years in the nunnery of the holy St. Brigida of Cheverney.
Lord, Lord! how I hated it--I, Margaret Douglas, who had been the petted of great men and strong men ever since I could remember--ay, and before! I, who had known Maud Lindsay (called the “Snarer of Hearts”) in her best time, who had sworn, when no more than thirteen, that I would outdo her--to end thus, to be despatched like a bale of goods at sixteen years of age out of Scotland! (Well, _that_ I would not have minded so greatly. ’Tis a dull sour place, wet above and boggy below, with much damp mist between!)
But what irked me was that I, who before I could walk had been called the Fair Maid of Galloway, should be let grow fusty and frowsy as the Sister of Mercy who goes from door to door, begging for the poor--all because I had a cousin who wanted to marry me and so keep Galloway and the Highland estates in the family coffer--bah!
Well, at any rate, I had just to bear it. _Tinkle-tankle!_ Oh yes, there went the weary bells, like cracked tin mugs which the gipsy-folk peddle out of their asses’ saddlebags along with coarse cloth for “jupes,” or sleeved waistcoats, and at the bottom red earth for marking sheep withal!
At six o’clock in the morning, black roaring winter or gracious June--out you must turn in this our Convent of the Birch--ay, though you be thrice a princess in your own right. And they would not let you have so much as a drop of warm water in a pottery jar for the foot of your bed (mightily comforting it is to lone women!), nor even suffer you to sleep in your woollen _gonelle_, which is to say gown, that hath a hood to it, and, being turned head-and-heels, makes an admirable nest for cold great-toes a-nights. I have suffered from cold feet all my days. Indeed, if I had not, perhaps I had been a happier woman.[1]
Then _tinkle-tankle_ all over again and prayers and reading of the Scripture at nine. Never a bite or a sup till half-past ten, when, while you feed in silence, they read to you out of the _Lives of the Saints_--about how Sister Brigida, afterwards martyred, established this holy order of nuns and died in the hope of a better life. The which I judged to be an _espérance_ noways over-sanguine! For the Good God knows she would have had to travel fast and far, that same holy Bridget, to find a worse life than that rule conventual she established, and which, for my sins, had been transported from the savage land of Ireland (where it belonged) to the sweet and smiling Touraine that lay outside these weary walls. But since you cannot see a smile even thirty miles broad through walls four feet thick, I might just as well have been on the Bog of Allen.
So it went on. _Tinkle-tank_ of bells--whirr of doves’ wings (we had them three times a week to evening refection--the wings oftener than the doves, so far as I was concerned). _Coo-roo-coo-roo!_ From high up in the bell-tower the sound came. Then the buzz of flies and wasps and angry red-bottomed bees trying to find their way through the painted window-panes. Yes, oh yes, it was peaceful, and hungrysome and chastening, and made me wish to be a crow or a sparrow or a midge--I was not at all particular--at any rate something that could fly away into the blue beyond the confinement of these sorrowful walls, within which the Lady Superior for ever snored in her cell and Sister Eulalie yattered eternally at one’s tail, snivelling out threats of punishment if you climbed a tree or so much as took a garden ladder to look over the wall. Not that there was much to see, when you did look over--only the wide spread of the forest and the green fields--not in patches, as in Scotland, with heather and whin-bloom everywhere, but all in cultivated squares, like a painted chess-board. There were poor men, also, with legs blackened in the sun, half-naked or even with no more than a clout about them, that ran at a look, or shrieked for the clink of an iron ring.
Once I threw over the wall to one of these poor wretches my purple jupe (the colour never became me), which was of warm cloth--also because the weather, being August, made me to sweat when I wore it.
And for this, as well as for speaking to a man, Sister Eulalie docked me of all food save bread-and-water for four days. “Yet,” said I, “Bridget of Kildare, the holy, never had petticoat in her life to bless herself withal! So where is the harm?”
“You have looked upon a man--a mortal sin!” said she, turning up the sourish, plum-coloured tip of her nose, which had a drop on it chilly as winter, even in the summer heats.
“Well, people do not die of it. So did my mother before me!” quoth I, knowing well all the time that I was not wise, yet being tempted, and my choler getting the better of me.
“But he looked upon you,” she cried, raising her voice in order to wake the Superior, “the while you took off”--
“No, no,” I said, willing to appease her if possible before it was too late, “he was no man really, only a wild savage, black as a Moor of Barbary. And, besides, I went down the ladder backwards, and let my jupe fall to the ground betwixt the wall and a gooseberry bush”--
“Silence!” commanded Sister Eulalie, raising her hand, with one finger pointed to the zenith; “silence, or I will take you indoors forthwith to Madame the Superior!”
Then, being at the time but a girl, I pouted, and answered back.
“Why, it is nothing,” I said. “Did not the Scripture which was read from the lectern in the refectory on Wednesday tell of the never-to-be-sufficiently-reverenced Judith who did more than that? Yes, much more, or she is sore belied”--
“Take from me, thou wicked one, _six days’ bread-and_”--
But at that very moment the great gate opened, and through it I could see, with a train of churchmen behind him--shaven, shorn, clad in white and scarlet and green, with a peaked cap all glittering with gold upon his head--who but Laurence M‘Kim, my old playmate, who had helped to save me (though I had forgotten much of the details) from the terrible Sieur de Retz, at Machecoul. Also, who used to kiss me--I remember that. Yes, it is true, my memory only shows in patches, but the patches are mostly bright ones.
Well, who will blame if I broke away from Sister Eulalie, crying “Larry, Larry!”
Half crying too--or perhaps a little more than half. And so would anyone--yes, anyone! That is, anyone who had been as long as I in the convent-prison of St. Brigida of Cheverney.
I flung myself upon him. He was riding a white mule--oh, finer, much finer than that of the Bishop of Evreaux. And I was so agile from being fed like a greyhound, and with being so very glad to see him, that I would have kissed him if I could. Yes, truly, what is the use of being a princess else! But, as it was, I could only get my arm half about his waist, before Sister Eulalie was upon me.
He bent down to disengage me gently, murmuring in Scots, “Wait a little while!” And then he stretched out two fingers over my head and said in a voice full of the music which first made my uncle take him to Dulce Cor as a chorister, “_Bless you, my child!_”
As one stricken by palsy, Sister Eulalie fell back, marvelling at the great ecclesiast and his princely retinue. And (best of all) Larry, my Larry, gave her his ring to kiss. It was good to see. Also he queried with his eye if I loved her--if she had been good to me. But I shook my head and frowned till he understood, and nodded, meaning thereby that he had come to do some little regulating of accounts.
“I have been to Rome, sister,” he said; “the point of my right shoe and the four iron shoes of my beast have been blessed by the Holy Father. If there be sin upon you, bend down and kiss them also.”
And while Sister Eulalie was, for her soul’s good, embracing of the beast’s near front hoof (and doing it gingerly, too, for the mule had a spirit of its own), Larry whispered to me, “These behind there do not matter!” At the same time he waved his hand towards his followers. They all with one accord turned their heads from us in the direction of the garden gate.
He then pushed out his foot in the silver stirrup for a mounting step.
“Now!” he whispered.
And in a moment, with the help of his hand, I was up like a bird. And it is past telling how good it was. For, judge ye, it was two years since I had been kissed--by a man, that is. And others do not really count, as I have seen. Well, in a moment I was down again and toying demurely with my rosary, before the white mule and Sister Eulalie had agreed about the salutation of the last shoe of blessed iron. Larry had his people well trained. For nobody laughed. Indeed, what more natural than that I should embrace one of my own folk after two years. Yet what the young man’s manners at Rome must have been, to make them so biddable, it is, as I tell him, better only guessing.
Ah, it was a good world after all--that which God had made; and has a way of improving suddenly when it is at its black worst.