CHAPTER XXX.

MOTHER FELICITAS.

“Ah!”

It was an indescribable sound, and it stopped sweet-faced Sister De Sales in the serious business of laying out her neat little account-books.

Mother Felicitas sat in her straight-backed chair in her own parlor and gripped the table in front of her, as if only by holding fast to something could she keep from drifting out on the great sea of death.

She had not been herself since that strange disappearance of Beryl Corselas. A constant, agonized fear that ate at her heart had made even her agonized nerves give way, her step that had been noiseless, heavy and uncertain, her pale skin like parchment stretched over bone. And this morning she had heard that which wrung a cry from her stiff lips, though she was not alone to bear her terror.

“Dear mother, what is it?” cried Sister De Sales, flurriedly rising. “You are ill--suffering?”

For the reverend mother’s face was more grayish-white than the whitewashed plaster of the parlor walls.

Mother Felicitas nodded speechlessly. But for all that sudden pang at her heart, she moved her hand jerkily, so that it covered an open letter on the table.

“Water--a faintness!” she managed to say. But when Sister De Sales got back with water and wine the reverend mother was lying back in her chair.

The sister was a simple soul, and saw only that the Mother Superior’s ill turn was over; not--what the dead Mother Benedicta would have seen--that a certain pale-blue, gold-embossed note that had been conspicuous enough among a batch of business-letters had disappeared from sight.

It was the day for going over the week’s accounts, and Sister De Sales was wont to dread it, in spite of possessing a good head for figures, so sharp were the reverend mother’s sunken eyes and so keen her instant detection of a penny out in the balance-sheet. But to-day she would willingly have seen her books all proved wrong if only the superior could have strength to do it.

“You are not well, dear mother; you would see the doctor if I sent for him?” she said timidly, looking at the gray pallor of the hard face.

Mother Felicitas roused herself.

“No, sister, no!” she said, with a sort of panic, and forced her manner to its old authority. “It is nothing. I am not so young as I was, and I forget it, perhaps. But we will leave the accounts till to-morrow. I--I will rest now.”

She made no demur as the anxious sister placed a stool under her feet, but at the gentle coaxing to drink some wine she frowned harshly.

“No, no! Go,” she said, “and let me rest. Those things, as I said, can wait.”

Sister De Sales withdrew, softly, aghast. Never in all her convent-life had she known any duty postponed “till to-morrow.” The reverend mother must be very ill, indeed. She would see Sister Agnes; between them they might make Mother Felicitas see reason and a doctor. The excuse for her sudden faintness was but the unselfish desire to spare others pain. “Not so young as I was,” she had said, and Sister De Sales, stout and forty-five, knew that she was the elder of the two by a year or more.

Yet behind that closed door it was an old, old woman who dragged herself to it and shot the bolt. It had taken all her self-control not to scream at Sister De Sales to be silent with her foolish talk about a doctor. She would have no doctor to speak learnedly to the next in rank of an overworked body and a troubled mind.

“I won’t have any doctor,” she said to herself, as she sank on her hard chair again. “I’m not dying--not yet! I can’t die,” she whispered with a shudder. “I should see them all standing round my coffin, I should hear their astonishment. Sister De Sales, who thinks I am a saint; Father Maurice, the new chaplain, almost crying because I had withheld my sins from him in the confessional.” Her face grew strong again as she thought where they would bury her--in unconsecrated ground.

She was a clever woman; she knew even in her wretchedness now that of all the convent not one nun had a personal ambition but herself. She had felt the gentle piety round her stifling often enough, though she had managed never to show it. There had been reasons for her to leave the world, but even here in seclusion she had worked and strained for the power she had reached--worked half for safety, that there might be no one over her, half to find peace for her miserable mind.

Well, she had had her way! She ruled the convent as no one before her had ever done. The community had never been so rich, so respected; the nuns, if they did not love her, held her in awe for her saintly austerity, her ceaseless industry--and here was what it had all come to. Every one of those good and gentle women, who were saints, indeed, would shrink from the holy mother raised above them if her secret history were revealed. Alive, she would be excommunicated; dead, she writhed in her chair as she thought of the hushed astonishment, the shocked amazement of the little world she ruled.

“No, no, no!” she said to herself. “As I have lived I will die and be buried; no one shall ever know. But I can’t die yet.”

She stretched out her hand for the wine she had refused, and drank it eagerly. No woman in the world had lived a harder, more self-denying life than she. Was it all to count for nothing now, just for the want of a little resource, a little more courage?

“No one shall know,” she said again, as the wine brought some warmth to her slow blood. As she lifted her eyes they caught the inscription of a picture on the wall.

“‘Death and the Judgment.’” The words struck her like an actual blow, but she never lowered her startled eyes.

What she had done she had done. She was willing to bear the brunt of it, but not the shame of humiliation before the nuns, who revered her in their pure and gentle hearts.

“‘Death and the Judgment,’” she thought, but she dared not say it aloud, when, for all she knew, Death might be at her very elbow, and for the Judgment she was unprepared.

Yet no idea of a tardy repentance, a confession at the eleventh hour, entered her fevered mind, as she drew that terrible letter out of the folds of her habit. She had fought her own battles; she would fight them once more, and then die, if she must, in the odor of sanctity. She thrust away the thought that this strange horror at her heart was the beginning of repentance. Almost she felt her own strong self again, as she deliberately opened and reread the letter that had shaken her nerve till she cried out.

Yet it was only a civil, well-meaning letter from one woman to another.

“Mrs. Fuller presents her compliments to the superioress of St. Mary’s Convent, and begs to inform her that she knows nothing of the missing pupil of that institution who was supposed to be traveling on the Continent in her care. Mrs. Fuller was both surprised and horrified to find that unscrupulous persons had made use of her name to deceive the matron and guardians of St. Anne’s Workhouse. The unknown woman who carried off the girl under Mrs. Fuller’s name must have been fully cognizant of her movements, as she had certainly spent the winter abroad with an invalid niece. Mrs. Fuller begged to assure the superioress of her deep sympathy in her anxiety for the young girl who was lost, and also to inform her that she had set a detective to work to trace out the wretches who have made so wicked and cruel a use of her name. As yet no clue had been found to their identity.”

A second note was enclosed in another hand, and it was this that had brought the reverend mother low, though it was but a rather disconcerted epistle from a well-known detective to his employer, regretting that so far he had discovered nothing.

“I may mention as a curious coincidence,” ran that paragraph that had wrung a cry from the wretched woman, “that if the missing girl’s name is really Beryl Corselas, her discovery is a matter of importance, as it may throw light on an unexplained case of murder and abduction which puzzled the whole force years ago, and, incidentally, may deprive a certain noble family of their estates. But that, of course, is between you and me.”

It struck Mother Felicitas that the detective’s letter was not especially businesslike; but it would have put fresh terror in her soul had she known why. The man was under a deep obligation to Mrs. Fuller, had thorough trust--this time misplaced--in her discretion, and was ready to turn the world upside down to find out the person who had dared to take such liberties with her name. But as it was, Mother Felicitas had read enough. She thought of that note written to the guardians in which she had said that it was on her authority Mrs. Fuller had taken the girl from the workhouse.

“I can explain that if I am obliged to,” she thought heavily. “My lawyer will bear me out that I sent him to make inquiries,” but her brain went swiftly as she wondered if the workhouse authorities had that letter--or Erceldonne.

If he had it, her foolhardiness alone had put it in his hands.

“He would not dare to use it,” she thought, and wiped her upper lip, that was wet. “It must be he who has the girl; no one else would be bold enough. And if he has her, he would not keep her. The money that I meant----” The pain struck her heart again, and more dizzily than ever she caught at the table for support. When it passed she could no longer force herself to think.

Dim visions passed before her eyes of a boy she had loved; of another, a half-grown lad, whom she had not known existed till he was brought home from Eton and coolly introduced to her as Erceldonne’s eldest son; of a baby girl she had loathed because she was what a fair-haired boy could never be; of a thing she had done to make a man stand in terror of her, and for hatred of a woman who had never wronged her. It had been in that man’s interest to keep Mother Felicitas quiet--if he knew her secret--all of it!--or not.

If he knew!

She groaned aloud. He must have found out something or he would never have burdened himself with a homeless girl, long ago thought dead and gone. He must know about the money, and meant it and the girl to go to his son with the hard, brown eyes, for whose sake another lad had been turned out on the world to sink or swim as he liked.

Hand in hand, the miserable woman seemed to see that brown-eyed boy and that baby girl, though the years had long since made them man and woman. If they stood so, indeed, Erceldonne could defy her, could afford to stand aside in silence and let her old sins come to light.

Looking back, Mother Felicitas could see with what a devilish cleverness he had always stood aside, trusting to chance and the hour to do what he dared not put his hand to. Only once had she known him to show any trace of human feeling--when he took that fair-haired boy, who had no other real name but Guy, from the third-rate school, where he was a half-starved teacher, and gave him five hundred pounds to start for himself in sugar-planting in Jamaica. She knew that was true, for she had seen the boy’s grateful letters to the man he only knew as a distant friend of his father. It had been sent to her, she knew very well by whom, as the easiest way of telling a professed nun. It began: “My dear Mr. Egerton,” but Mother Felicitas knew that Lord Erceldonne’s conscience would not require him to tell the truth when he did a kindness. That memory had softened her heart a little to the man she hated; it was as well for him that she did not know the bloody fragments of that uncashed check had lain on a sunny hillside till they blew away, instead of being cashed at Lord Erceldonne’s bankers.

“I can’t remember that; it wouldn’t save me,” she thought restlessly. “I must think of myself.”

While there was life in her she would make one struggle more; once more, perhaps, feel the joy of power stir in her and bring a hard man to terms.

Some one knocked at the door. To the reverend mother it sounded like the hand of fate that will not be denied. It seemed to her racked nerves that it must be Erceldonne himself who stood outside, ready to cry her shame aloud. It took all her strength to open the bolted door, and as it swung back the two nuns who waited there stood petrified.

The reverend mother towered over them, clutching the door-handle and glaring at them with the eyes of a wild beast. At the sight of their startled faces she broke into a loud, hysterical laugh that nearly made Sister De Sales, the timid, turn and run.

Holding the door-handle, the superior laughed and laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks.

“I’m better--quite well!” she cried, that strange laughter ending as abruptly as it began. “But Sister De Sales is right. I’m not myself. Next week I will go to the retreat at the convent in Blackpool for a change.”

The waters of terror were up to her very chin, but she would wade through them as she had always done, and get back to firm ground.