CHAPTER II.

A FRIENDLESS FUGITIVE.

Mother Benedicta, careful of many things, had meant to add the mystery of Beryl Corselas to her burden, but fate was stronger than she, who had been for so many years the capable head of the community.

Two days after Andria’s departure, death had called her very quietly. Unanointed, unshriven, and with the questions she had meant to ask Sister Felicitas yet unspoken, the good mother had followed the beaten pathway the saints have left toward heaven.

It was Sister Felicitas who found her dead in her bed, but it was not prayer for the superior’s soul that sent the sister to her knees, but utter thankfulness that a stumbling-block was gone from her path. Beryl Corselas heard the news in stony silence. Only once had the reverend mother ever noticed her; and yet she felt alone. Andria, though the weeks went by, never wrote, just as the child had prophesied; for with all her unchildlike wisdom she never thought that it was Sister Felicitas who opened the letters now, and that Andria’s promise was well kept for a year.

After that year perhaps she dared not write to the convent--who shall say? But her letters ceased. And Sister Felicitas rose steadily in the community, till five years after Mother Benedicta’s death she had been made Mother Superior.

Only Beryl Corselas knew what the story of those five years had been. Years of injustice, of petty tortures--Mother Benedicta was not cold in her grave before the rabbits were killed by the cook before the very eyes of their shrieking, fainting owner--years of slow warping of a child’s spirit till, now a girl of sixteen, she was deceitful from fear, silent from sullen hopelessness, and almost ugly from misery.

She sat alone in an empty class-room, where her face was but a white spot in the growing dusk of evening. The heavy lids drooped over her tearless eyes; she was past crying now, as she was past all childish things. Mother Benedicta would have turned in her grave had she seen how those years of pain had changed the child’s looks, how tall and ill-nourished she was in her out-grown convent uniform. Sister Felicitas punished by depriving the growing girl of proper food; she was under sentence now where she sat in the empty class-room, and heard the clatter of other hungry girls in the refectory. And hunger--and something else--was making her as dangerous as a wild beast.

“If I don’t get out of this I’ll kill her!” she thought, clasping and unclasping her strong young hands. “And I know she doesn’t mean me ever to get out. She means to make me a nun, and it’s no use my telling Father Parker I’ve no vocation, for he’s deaf, and never hears what I say. She can take her time and yell at him. If I shout in the confessional I only get punished. The other nuns would stand up for me--some of them. But, though this might keep me from being made a novice, they couldn’t keep me from being made a lay sister; for it’s in the charter that charity girls must pay the convent back for their keep, somehow. And she’ll never let me go out into the world to do it. I--I’d be willing to starve if I could only get away!”

She got up and went to the window, heedless of bumps against the empty forms. But outside there was nothing to see but a November garden, cold and barren, and a homeless cat, crossing it furtively.

The girl watched the miserable creature with the painful sympathy she felt for all animals. In the dusk she saw it leap nimbly to the top of the high wall and disappear. The convent rebel did not even know what was on the other side of that wall; but she knew too well what was on this side. A lay sister’s life, spent in the kitchens; in scrubbing and killing fowls. She shuddered. And Mother Felicitas’ eye was always on her; always with the same threat, the same malice.

She peered into the twilight. The stray cat was gone. Beryl Corselas stretched her young body, stiff with long sitting, just as the cat itself might have done before it started on its furtive journey. But when a sad-eyed nun came and let her out of the locked class-room her face was as sullenly vacant as usual. There was no one, not even Mother Felicitas, full of self-conceit at her realized ambition, to know that the girl’s pulses were playing a wild tune that night, and that the childhood that had sat so strangely on her had fallen from her like a garment.

Unnoticed, Beryl slipped up to bed before the other charity pupil; and undressed in their joint alcove. Pale and too slender in her white cotton nightgown, she passed under the white sheet that separated her cubicle from the next. It belonged to a rich West Indian girl, and in a box on the table were sovereigns, as she had known there would be. Without a pang of hesitation Beryl Corselas took two in the glimmer of the floating night-light. Then she lifted the sheet and slipped under it, back to her own alcove, just in time. As she put the coins noiselessly into her bed, the stout girl who shared the alcove came in. She whispered sharply, though talking was forbidden: “You’re to be moved to-morrow; sent to the kitchen with Sister Agnes. I wish I was you; you’ll get enough to eat. Sister Agnes is just sweet.”

Beryl raised her eyebrows significantly. The sister in charge was clapping her hands as a signal for the girls to say their evening prayers. But there were no prayers on the lips of one girl on her knees.

Would it ever be quiet? Would the tossing of the girls never cease as they twisted on their narrow beds? It seemed years to Beryl, lying motionless in hers, longing for the dead middle of the night to bring quiet breathing to the hundred sleepers round her. A wakeful devil seemed to be making his rounds among them; girl after girl turned, tossed, and coughed; not till long after midnight was the hush settled and complete, and not till then did Beryl Corselas, whose blood was thumping with suspense and determination, stir on her hard bed.

Absolutely without sound she sat upright and looked about her.

Her business would have been more easily done in the dark, but in every alcove there floated a wick in an inch of oil buoyed up in a jar full of water. In the glimmering, unearthly light the white sheets separating the alcoves seemed to stir, but she was used to that; and to have put out the dull light would have waked the heavy sleeper in the next bed.

Barefooted, Beryl slipped to the cold floor, dressed, put her stolen money in her pocket, and, shoes in hand, crept through the wide corridor between the double row of alcoves.

Even the sister in charge heard no sounds as the light step passed, and not a soul stirred in the convent as the girl stole down the wide, polished stairs in her stocking feet. In the lower flat it was dark; she was forced to keep one hand stretched out at arm’s length before her as she crept inch by inch through the silent house.

The schoolroom door creaked as she opened it, but once inside floods of moonlight made her way clear. She looked round the room, where she had sat a hungry prisoner from afternoon school till bedtime, and in her fierce exultation at leaving it forgot she was still hungry.

The window-fastening gave under her strong fingers, the sash moved easily, without noise, and, as quietly as the cat she had watched that evening, the girl dropped in the frozen grass outside. Skirting the wall she moved quickly to the very spot where the cat had crossed it, from a kind of superstition that she must climb over at no other place; and there mounted it with an effortless spring just as the other wandering thing had done.

With a laugh she slipped to the ground and put on the shoes she carried. For the cat had been a good pilot. She stood on a road that she knew led to London, and she stretched out her arms in a kind of rapture.

She was free from Mother Felicitas at last!

But a waving shadow that came suddenly before her eyes killed her hasty joy. It was only the shadow of a bare, crooked tree, but its outline was like an arm outstretched to catch her. “Beryl, you fool!” she thought. “By morning you will be caught again unless there are miles between you and the convent.”

She began to run, and not a girl in the school could run like her. Yard by yard she got over the hard road, till by daylight she found herself in the suburbs of the great city, though where she did not know. She walked on soberly till she came to a baker’s shop, and there bought a roll. There were early risers about, but no one looked at her, for her plain hat and coat were ordinary enough. Presently she grew bold enough to stop at a street coffee-stall.

The hot, strong stuff did her good, and as she paid for it she began to think coherently for the first time since she had gone to bed.

“I must have a place, and I haven’t one!” she pondered as she walked on refreshed. “If I could get to Andria I should be all right, but----” Her face grew too grim and bitter for her years. Andria had long ago forgotten her, and more pertinently still the child of five years ago had never known where the grown-up girl had gone. There was no hope in Andria. Without a friend in the world the girl walked quietly on her aimless way. Long before her absence was discovered--for her stout roommate merely thought stolidly that Beryl Corselas had got up early, and said nothing about her empty bed till breakfast-time--she was adrift like many another waif in the interminable streets of London.