Part 19

Rosamund felt a sense of utter impotence invading her as she listened to the childish voice, made resolutely steady and matter-of-fact.

“But Cousin Bertie will be back the day after to-morrow.”

“I know. So I’m going to-morrow.”

“Francie!”

“Don’t,” said Frances, her voice quivering for the first time. “It’s the only way I can ever do it, I’m such a moral coward. And it’s far better to do it all quickly than to have a long waiting first--that would be much harder for both of us, Rosamund. At first I thought I wouldn’t even tell you, so that you wouldn’t have to say good-bye or anything sad--but then I couldn’t help it. I knew you’d understand.”

“I understand,” said Rosamund drearily, conscious only that she must not make it harder for Frances. “But have you thought at all how you’re going to do it?”

A sense of unreality rushed upon her.

“To-morrow! It’s impossible--you can’t do it.”

“I’ve looked up the trains and everything,” said Frances literally. “I can take the one o’clock train, and you must send my box after me. I can’t take it because the servants would know--but by the time Cousin Bertie is back, everybody will know, and it won’t matter.”

“You can’t arrive there with nothing at all,” said Rosamund, her mind refusing to take in any but the immediate practical issues of the case.

“I shall carry my little tiny attaché case, and if I start early I’m certain to meet someone or other who will give me a lift to the station. It’s market day, you know.”

“You’ve never even travelled alone,” began Rosamund conscious of futility.

“But I can’t possibly make any mistake. It’s a through train to London, and then I shall take a cab to Liverpool Street Station and go on from there. It’s not a very long journey if I get a good train.”

“Will they know you’re coming?”

“I shall telegraph from London.”

“Francie, you say you’re a moral coward, and yet you’ve planned everything out like this! What would you do supposing you met Cousin Bertie on your way to the station? It might quite easily happen.”

Frances whitened instantly.

“I’d thought of that, but her meeting is at two o’clock, and they’re sure to go early. Cousin Bertie always does. So they’ll be having luncheon at one o’clock, and you know Mrs. Severing hardly ever has the motor out in the mornings. So I don’t think there’s any real chance of it.”

“I suppose not,” said Rosamund drearily. “What on earth will she say when she comes back and finds you’ve gone?”

“Oh, Rosamund, it will be so dreadful for you! I’ll leave a letter for her, and then you won’t have to tell her.”

“What about Cousin Frederick and Miss Blandflower?”

“Cousin Frederick hardly ever comes in to luncheon, and he’s quite likely not to notice that I’m not at dinner. Even if he does, he’ll probably think I’ve just gone to bed or something--you know he never bothers. I’m afraid Miss Blandflower will have to know at dinner-time, but she won’t be in herself for luncheon.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s going to the Rectory. She told me, quite by chance. Oh, Rosamund,” said Frances with an awe-struck face, “it does seem as though I were meant to do this. All sorts of little things seem to have happened together, to make it possible. You know Cousin Bertie never goes away as a rule--I might have had to wait for months for this opportunity, and yet it’s happened now--just the very time that Mère Pauline wrote to say she would receive me in the novitiate. It’s all too wonderful.”

“Do you mean to say you’re really happy about it all?”

“Yes, oh yes! If only it wasn’t for the leaving of you.”

Rosamund marvelled miserably.

It seemed to her that the evening went by in a dream.

She could not believe that it was Frances’ last night at Porthlew.

But even if she came back, it would be only after an experience that would stretch like a gulf between all that had been before and all that might come after. She went to Frances’ room and they packed her box, locking the bedroom door carefully, and Rosamund wrote out a label and affixed it to the small trunk.

“I’ll put the things in the attaché case to-morrow morning,” said Frances, looking rather wistfully round the room. “It seems so funny to be leaving all my frocks behind. I wish you could wear them, Rosamund, but you’re too tall.”

“You aren’t leaving them for good. You’ll want them when you come out,” cried Rosamund, and hurried on lest Frances should contradict her: “You’ll remember that you’ve promised--_promised_--to come away if you find you’ve made a mistake.”

“Yes,” said Frances faithfully. “I’ll remember.”

That night they slept together.

The morning pierced through a soaking white mist, a day typical of Cornwall in the autumn.

Miss Blandflower came down looking harassed and haggard, and announced that she had toothache. Breakfast proceeded as usual, and Rosamund found it quite impossible to realize that in a few hours Frances would be gone.

But the morning sped by, swift and yet leaden. At midday Miss Blandflower put on galoshes and a mackintosh and set off for the Rectory, valiantly suppressing a hinted inclination to “give in” to her increasing toothache, and remain seated over the fire, and as she went down the drive Frances said gently:

“I shall want a waterproof. I’ve only got my blue serge coat and skirt and my brown hat to travel in.”

“Put on thick shoes,” said Rosamund urgently, as though she had no other preoccupation.

When Frances stood ready, looking pale and childish, and grasping her little leather case, Rosamund pulled down a thick Irish frieze cape from the hall and flung it round her own shoulders.

“I’m coming as far as the road with you,” she said in an inward voice.

Dumbly they went together down the steps and across the gravelled court. The thick mist seemed to swallow them up, and Frances put her hand into Rosamund’s.

Outside the drive gate they stopped. It was the high-road which lay outside, and down which the farm carts and pony traps would pass on their way to market.

“I will write to-night in the train, after I’ve left London.”

“So will I, darling.”

They stood in silence.

“If something doesn’t come soon, I ought to begin to walk,” said Frances nervously. “I can’t miss the train.”

The sound of wheels, muffled in the fog but unmistakable, came to them both almost as she spoke.

“I don’t know if they’ll see us, the mist is so bad just here. Come a little on to the road, Francie.”

“I think it’s Mrs. Westaway’s cart. I can see the white horse.”

They hailed the cart and Frances called out her request.

The farmer’s wife acceded to it cheerfully, begging Miss Frances not to keep the mare standing, but to jump up quickly.

So Rosamund kissed her once, almost threw the little case in after her, and in another instant the high dog-cart and jolly, fat Mrs. Westaway on the driving-seat with her great baskets of market produce, and Frances clinging to the back seat, and the impatient white mare, had all disappeared into the mist, and even the sound of wheels had become inaudible.

She went back to the house, the laurels and rhododendron bushes on either side of the drive dripping on to the sodden ground.

All the afternoon she tried to tell herself that Frances was gone, and found herself repeating the words over and over again, but still they carried no conviction to her. She thought that perhaps at dinner-time, when she would inevitably have to explain Frances’ absence to Miss Blandflower, it might help her to understand what had happened. But Miss Blandflower sent a message downstairs to say that her tooth was much worse, and she had gone to bed, and did not wish to have any dinner.

So Rosamund and Frederick Tregaskis dined together in almost unbroken silence, and he did not appear to notice the absence of Frances. At nine o’clock a telegram was brought to Rosamund, and she tore it open with a vague, sick sense of apprehension, and read:

“_Arrived safely--kindest possible welcome here--best love._ --FRANCIE.”

That night Rosamund cried and sobbed herself to sleep as she had done in the days of her childhood after her mother’s death.

She woke to the realization that Mrs. Tregaskis would return that day.

At breakfast Frederick asked her suddenly:

“Is Frances upstairs?”

“No. Miss Blandflower is upstairs with toothache.”

“I know that. Where’s your sister?”

Rosamund looked at him dumbly, searching less for words in which to clothe her meaning than for the power to speak at all.

“H’m!” Frederick looked at her significantly. “You can make your own explanations to your Cousin Bertha, then.”

Rosamund instantly felt convinced that he knew perfectly well what those explanations were to be.

Earlier than Rosamund had expected, she heard the hoot of Mrs. Severing’s motor in the drive, and then sounds indicating that Mrs. Tregaskis had descended and entered the house.

Without the slightest idea of what she was about to do or say, Rosamund went into the hall.

The mist of the day before had cleared altogether, and sunlight streamed into the hall and over the ample form of Mrs. Tregaskis, rapidly unwinding her motor-veil before the glass, her back to the door against which Rosamund leant heavily, from sheer physical inability to advance further.

Miss Blandflower, a pallid and grotesque figure with one side of her face swollen beneath the small grey shawl that draped her head and shoulders, was hurrying feebly down the stairs.

“My dear old Minnie! What _have_ you been doing to yourself? An abscess?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing. A bad tooth, and I foolishly went out in the wet yesterday and caught cold. There’s no luck about the house--you know the old song, dear Mrs. Tregaskis. It’s a sight for sore eyes to see you back, as they say.”

“Where are my girls?”

Rosamund tried to speak, and made an inarticulate sound.

Bertha whirled round.

“Hallo, hallo! Why, my dear, what’s wrong?”

Her voice changed.

“Rosamund, what’s happened? Where’s Frances?”

Miss Blandflower gazed from one to the other, a puzzled smile further distorting her swollen face.

Quicker than Rosamund could find words Mrs. Tregaskis’ quick perceptions had leapt at the truth.

“Frances has gone? She’s gone to that convent?”

“Yes,” said Rosamund at last, and felt as though an immense weight had suddenly been taken from her.

“Oh, she couldn’t have been so wicked--oh, I knew _nothing_ about it,” screamed Minnie, and collapsed on to the stairs.

Bertha sank heavily on to a chair.

XXI

Frances gazed at her hands. Their appearance was the greatest amongst the minor trials of convent life. She wondered wistfully what Rosamund would think of them. They were small hands, with long, nervous fingers, and now each knuckle was swelled and purple from the cold and unaccustomed manual work, and the chilblains on the back of almost every one had broken and exposed raw cracks and fissures to the chill morning air.

The novice with her serge habit tucked up so as to expose the stout black underskirt below, the coarse cotton stockings and heavy, ill-made shoes, bore small resemblance to Frances Grantham in her blue coat and skirt and brown velvet hat, arriving at the convent door some few months before.

Her face was fuller, and had more colour in it, but there was a deep black shadow under each eye denoting lack of sufficient sleep.

This question of sleep had assumed for Frances, as for her companions, a prominence that seemed strange and unnatural.

Hitherto Frances had slept for eight hours every night, sometimes for longer, and had never thought of the amount of rest she took in any but the most cursory and matter-of-fact fashion. In the first days of her convent life, the novice-mistress spoke to her of the early rising as a trial which might perhaps prove severe. Frances thought: “Getting up at five in cold weather must be an effort, until one gets used to it.”

She heard the bell clang out its one hundred strokes every morning, at the first stroke of which the novice in the cubicle on either side of her sprang from her straw mattress to the thin strip of carpet that lay beside each bed. For the first six weeks she had fallen asleep again instantly, and only been roused by the small alarm clock set for six o’clock which her novice-mistress had made her use. Then she asked for permission to rise with the others and follow the full routine of the day, and it was granted her. The first stroke of the “cloche à cent coups” was now the signal for her also to leave her pallet and begin the day with the ritual of mental prayer prescribed for each religious during her robing. Heavy and sodden with sleep though her eyelids felt, Frances found that the mere physical anticipation of the inexorable clang that heralded five o’clock, would very often wake her even earlier, and keep her awake, tense and nervous with the fear that she might lack courage enough to rise on the very instant that the first sound of the bell should clash into the air.

But she always found that the physical effort, in some mysterious way, was overcome, and that accomplished, she lost the sense of mental stress, and was only conscious of the overpowering need of sleep. Through the winter months, when even a liberal application of ice-cold water failed to rouse her more than momentarily, she seldom knew by what mechanical process she had dressed, and found her way down the dark stone corridor and steep stairway only lighted by a flickering little oil-lamp, until she was on her knees in the as-yet-unwarmed chapel, waiting for the stroke of half-past five to proclaim the hour for meditation.

Kneeling upright upon the boards, her hands clasped upon the back of a _prie-dieu_ too high to support her elbows, the struggle with her atrophied senses gradually began. Conscious effort was succeeded by the spasmodic violent starts that proclaimed her will to be alive, and gaining dominion over her relaxed muscles.

From the stall where the novice-mistress knelt, invariably upright, her wide-open gaze fixed upon the High Altar, came the slow unemphatic announcements of the Points of Meditation, cutting across the cold, still atmosphere of the chapel.

Frances forced her mind to receive the words, then gradually to attach to them a meaning. After that, in spite of cold and the cramp that almost invariably seized her from the effort to remain motionless upon her knees, her mind was awake, and her battle with sleep was over until the evening. Through the recital of the Office, and the early Mass, attention was seldom an effort to Frances. Afterwards, the rapid, efficient sweeping and dusting of her cubicle and the struggle to turn the heavy _paillasse_ on the wooden planks which formed the bed, left her heated and glowing, only anxious lest she should be late in taking her place in the long refectory for breakfast.

Instructions and religious exercises filled the morning, and the midday recreation succeeded dinner.

“The test of a good novice is her attitude towards the community recreation,” was a favourite axiom of the novice-mistress.

Frances had been told that this recreation might prove to be a great trial, and sometimes wondered whether there was anything abnormal in her extreme and childlike enjoyment of this part of her religious life.

The ten or twelve novices, most of whom were Irish or English, one American, two Spanish and the rest French, spent the allotted forty-five minutes in company of the novice-mistress, and of one another. The conversation was general, usually gay, and always impersonal.

Up and down the small garden the little group paced slowly on fine days, carefully avoiding the larger gathering of “la grande communautée,” also assembled in recreation round the Superior. Little or no intercourse was permitted between the novices and the professed religious.

On wet days, and not infrequently on days which Frances regretfully thought delightfully fresh and moist, but at which the novice-mistress raised protesting hands and exclamations of “Ce climat anglais!” the perambulations of the novitiate took place in a long corridor some six or seven feet broad, the length of which it was possible to traverse slowly, in little groups of three or four, always with the novice-mistress as central point. Many of the novices walked backwards, so as to face her continually. Most of them held knitting, or wool which could be wound on to cards whilst still walking, but as soon as she made a move into the small community room, mending and darning baskets were produced and set upon the floor beside each low wooden stool ranged against the wall. The novice-mistress sat also upon a stool, placed on a low, wooden dais at the end of the room. She thus dominated the room as naturally as she did the conversation. In her early days at the convent it was a continual cause of wonder to Frances that this conversation, general as it was, could remain so animated and yet so singularly impersonal.

The welfare of the Order in general was often discussed, the old days when its headquarters had been in Paris tenderly recalled by the novice-mistress, and her varied reminiscences of those times and of the expulsion which ensued, eagerly listened to by the little assembly. Sometimes there was talk of such small technicalities as the origin of some point of Rubric, or a broader question of Church ruling, but for the most part the conversation ran cheerfully upon trivial lines. It was always conducted in French, and the famous Gallicanism--“Moi, je”--was apt to provoke a general burst of merry laughter and a humorous glance or word of rebuke from the novice-mistress. But pronouns relating to the first person singular were seldom much in evidence.

The knowledge that she must not seek to place herself beside any one companion, that she must not move from her low stool during recreation without asking and obtaining leave to do so, and that any form of personality beyond the most trivial allusion must be excluded from her conversation, failed to disturb Frances’ calm enjoyment of the three-quarters of an hour which always seemed to her so quickly over.

Rising from her little stool on the first stroke of the bell which proclaimed renewed silence, she was generally conscious of distinct exhilaration, resulting from the interval of talk and laughter. In virtue of her English nationality, Frances was often allowed to make her half-hour’s spiritual reading out of doors. This she did after the midday recreation, gravely kilting her serge habit above the stiff woollen underskirt, and pacing the round of the garden with steady, measured footsteps, her head bent over some devotional volume bound in stout brown paper with a little gummed blue label on the back.

The afternoon’s routine of instructions, choir-practices, and the like was unbroken till supper at seven o’clock. The institution of afternoon tea held no place in the convent curriculum, and Frances, who had been told that this might at first present itself to her in the light of a deprivation, found herself, on the contrary, thankful that no additional meal should intervene between the substantial dinner and supper.

The amount of coarse but nourishing food which she found herself expected to assimilate was a continual source of wonder and at first of distress, to the novice. Where were the ascetic fasts and austerities of the religious life, if one was required to make two such meals every day? Even on the regular days of fasting and abstinence decreed by the Church, Frances found that she was only allowed to indulge in a modified form of abstention.

Even after six months’ novitiate, she still looked doubtfully at the brown platter heaped with butter beans, the hunk of bread, and the huge slab of cold meat that so often constituted her midday portion. She knew that she might not leave anything unfinished, and the half-hour allotted to dinner was apt to hurry past her and bring her to her feet at the recital of Grace with half of her allowance still untouched.

“_Ma mère, puis-je aller finir au réfectoire?_” was the formula which was oftenest on her lips in those early days. And on the permission being given, Frances would valiantly return to the attack.

Supper presented fewer difficulties. A religious or biographical work was read aloud, and whilst giving her full attention to that, Frances found it easier to dispose of the pudding-basin full of soup and the mighty wedge of pudding or the vegetable stew which might form the repast.

But the ethics of the case still troubled her.

Finally she brought her difficulty to Mère Thérèse.

“You must eat in order to work, my child. Remember that you have entered an order where there is much manual labour to be done, and also the instruction of our poor people, our _dames pensionnaires_ to attend to. Had you entered an order where physical austerity is the first object, then indeed you would not complain of having too much.

“But tell me, my little Sister, is it not a greater hardship to you to follow the holy rule of obedience and eat all that is set before you, than it would be to deprive yourself of all but the bare necessities?”

She laughed shrewdly at Frances’ conscious expression, and indeed no argument could have prevailed more strongly with the little novice. She learnt to look upon the completion of her meals as a task to be performed conscientiously, and felt a glow of triumph when she was able to wash the wooden fork and spoon and the blunt knife in her little pewter bowl of water, and place them in due order upon the table before the signal for rising was given.

The evening recreation which succeeded supper was a repetition of the morning one, and did not terminate until the clanging bell at eight o’clock proclaimed that the convent world had entered into “_le grand silence_,” which would remain unbroken save for the most urgent necessity, until after Mass the following morning.

Collecting the manuals containing the office for the day from her tiny pigeon-hole, Frances would join the noiseless, softly hurrying throng of novices and descend to the chapel. On her knees at the high _prie-dieu_, which she would presently leave for a carved stall when the general recital of the office began, she embarked nightly upon the hardest struggle of her present existence--that against an overpowering need of sleep. Again and again Frances fell asleep while kneeling, only to wake instantly with a violent start, and force her eyelids, heavy as lead, to remain open over her filmed, unseeing eyes.

The novice in the stall next her, a Spanish child not yet nineteen, slumbered uneasily as unwillingly every night through the recital of Matins and Lauds, and one of Frances’ most effective devices for keeping herself awake was that of gently pushing her neighbour into position when the nuns rose for the _Gloria Patri_ that concluded every psalm.