Part 20

She half envied little Sister Encarnaçion that uncomfortable three-quarters of an hour’s sleep. For her own part, Frances never quite lost consciousness, although the curious intermittent buzzing in her head often prevented her from hearing her own voice joining in the psalms and hymns. But it was always with intense, though most involuntary, thankfulness, that she sank on to her knees for the last time, for the two or three moments silent devotion that preceded the final signal at which the novices rose and filed slowly, two by two, from the chapel. It was then generally some few minutes before half-past nine, but if the big clock on the stairs, which she passed every night, its ticking loud and portentous in the absolute silence, showed the hour to be even a very little later than usual, Frances was conscious of a purely physical sensation of sick dismay and resentment at the abridgement of her night.

In her cubicle she undressed as rapidly and silently as possible, and fell asleep almost as she lay down on her _paillasse_. To its iron hardness and the absence of any support but the smallest and stiffest of bolsters, she had never given a thought, since the first week when her arms and sides for a little while had shown the faint discoloration of bruises.

The days, regular and incessantly occupied, flew by with a rapidity that she had never known before, and it was always with a sort of shock of surprise that Frances greeted the arrival of each Saturday morning, the day which was marked for her by the unfailing arrival of Rosamund’s weekly letter.

She had long ago, with tears, asked her sister to conform to the convent regulation, which did not extend its approval to more than one weekly letter from home for its novices, although no definite commands were issued except in the matter of the letters sent out. These might not exceed one every Sunday to a parent or guardian, and one a fortnight to a sister or brother. Frances, however, was permitted to reverse the custom, and it was to Rosamund that her Sunday letter was always addressed.

One of the strangest and hardest pangs that her torn and divided loyalty was to suffer, lay in the knowledge that no restriction was placed upon the correspondence of a nun or novice and any other member of the Order, domiciled in “one of our houses abroad.”

That this tie, strong and sacred although she believed it to be, should be held closer than that of blood, remained to Frances an incomprehensible and rather heartrending convention of which she shunned the thought as a temptation to disloyalty.

Her sense of proportion, like that of all those who lead the cloistered life altered strangely and rapidly.

Her letters to Rosamund, the aching dread lest the new life should separate her irrevocably from Rosamund, the little tender recollections of their life together, of Lady Argent’s kindness, of Hazel and her two babies, that had thronged her mind at first, had given place imperceptibly but with the strangest rapidity, to other preoccupations and other aspirations.

Nowadays, the things which mattered most were naturally those which filled the atmosphere into which she found herself transplanted.

The field of her external interests was naturally an extremely narrow one. The novice-mistress, the small society of her fellow-novices, and an occasional one or two of the older nuns, were the only human beings with whom she ever came into contact, and this intercourse, extremely limited as it was, took place either in one of the few rooms where speech was permitted, or in the narrow confines of the convent garden. It was as brief as possible, and was always, except when receiving direct spiritual guidance from Mère Thérèse, as impersonal as the sense of discipline on either part could make it.

Her small duties, for the faithful accomplishment of which she would receive no commendation, loomed enormous to Frances. She took a joyful pride in the thorough sweeping of the only long corridor which the house contained, and which had been given into her charge, and she looked forward anxiously to her bi-weekly mornings in the kitchen, where the lay-sisters laughed furtively and good-naturedly at her utter ignorance of those primary laws of _le ménage_ which never seemed to present any difficulties to her French and Spanish contemporaries. On two evenings a week she taught in an elementary class of the poor school attached to the convent, and was gradually learning not to tremble at the apprehension that the six or seven-year-old urchins would decline to be instructed in the multiplication table by anyone so young and so frightened.

The novices, as a rule, were never sent amongst the lady boarders, but when she had been at the convent some four months, Frances was told that she was to work regularly under the Mère Econome. She thus found herself deputed occasionally to take an interview on behalf of the much-occupied Mère Caroline, so that she was not without fugitive intercourse with those whom she had soon learned to designate, in all due charity and perfectly unconscious arrogance, as “_les personnes du dehors_.”

During these brief interviews the little novice was always highly conscious of the gulf which should lie between the manners of ordinary social intercourse and the demeanour of a young religious obliged through obedience to hold a needful conversation with an inhabitant of the outer world.

She was careful to say the prescribed _Ave Maria_ to herself on the threshold of the small parlour where these conversations took place, and would enter holding herself unconsciously more upright than usual, her eyes downcast, and her hands tucked away under her wide sleeves. It had frequently been impressed upon her that a religious “_ne s’affaise pas sur sa chaise comme si elle avait l’habitude des fauteuils_,” and consequently she sat on the extreme edge of her chair, very much erect, and with her feet carefully concealed beneath the ample folds of her habit.

The business in hand she disposed of as rapidly as the extreme eloquence with which most of the lady boarders were afflicted, permitted.

It was no temptation to Frances to prolong the conversations in the parlour. She was naturally shy, and had, all her life, more or less unconsciously, preferred silence to speech.

She also became aware, as must all those who pursue a way of spiritual endeavour, that silence is the preliminary to concentration.

The atmosphere of the convent, which Frances had heard spoken of outside its walls as “peaceful” and “gentle” was, to her awakened perceptions, mainly one of intense concentration. The whole place, silent and monotonous, and even trivial in detail, was instinct with a force that seemed to vibrate through the stillness. Frances could discern this force in the chapel, in the refectory, most of all perhaps in the cold, narrow dormitory. The words which came oftenest to her mind were the “_Ego dormio: et cor meum vigilat_,” painted in red letters a foot high on the whitewashed wall just above the narrow window.

She could not have spoken of this impression of tense unceasing life which for her lay behind all the convent routine, but she felt a new sensation as of being mentally at rest, as though she were at last able to share and recognize the scale of relative values prevailing in her surroundings.

Of the progress of her spiritual life she was scarcely aware. Frances was not introspective, and possessed that curious detachment from herself sometimes observable in extremely and fundamentally innocent personalities.

She listened to the instructions given, both general and particular, with the careful attention of a conscientious child, noted her failures to observe good resolutions in a tiny paper notebook kept in her pocket, and made it a matter of habit to observe scrupulously the more minute details of her daily duties.

She was naturally careful, and had been taught order by Mrs. Tregaskis, but her tendency to sit and dream was a source of much heart-searching to Frances.

“Vous êtes dans la lune, ma petite sœur,” was a brisk reminder often uttered by Mère Thérèse, and Frances would return to earth with a guilty start and a few words of fervent contrition and resolution in her heart.

When the winter was drawing to a close, and Frances had been at the Convent nearly six months, Mère Thérèse spoke to her of her _prise d’habit_. The ceremony, goal of every novice’s thoughts, was the first stage of the religious life proper. The novice exchanged her own name for a religious one bestowed upon her by the Superior, her hair was cut off, and the white Cross of her Order fastened upon the front of her habit. It was the preliminary step to the vows which she would take later on.

“Oh, ma Mère!” stammered Frances, her face one flush of joy.

“I think so, little one. I have spoken to Notre Mère Supérieure, and the ceremony will probably be for Easter Monday ... you must be very, very fervent....”

Frances lay awake till dawn, heavy with sleep, yet too much excited to sleep, and thanking God with all the fervour of her innocent heart.

XXII

“Ma Mère, may one ask if any of Sister Frances’ family are coming for the ceremony to-morrow?” inquired the American novice at the evening recreation on Easter Sunday.

“Her sister is coming for the day, and perhaps a friend. The poor child has no parents.”

“Perhaps that is as well,” said a little French novice calmly. “It is such a sacrifice for the parents, however pious, and the thought of their grief must be a distraction.”

Her neighbour, a placid Spanish girl, looked surprised. In Andalusia the parents of the Lola or Pepita who had “la vocacion” would let her go with pride and joy, although they could not, like these rich Americans, hope to see her for the yearly visit permitted by the regulations, when, as would probably happen at the end of her novitiate, she should be sent away to some house of the Order overseas. She herself had only left home some few months ago, but even her little sister Conchita, who was only ten, had been too glad of the great honour and joy of seeing Maria a nun, to cry at losing her. But she kept her thoughts to herself and remained silent.

The American novice, with a sudden recollection that hurt like a physical pang, of a lonely, bewildered old couple in New England, as unrelenting, as uncomprehending in their condemnation of their only daughter’s lapse into an alien and idolatrous creed, quickly changed the conversation by asking another question of Mère Thérèse.

“What name is she to receive, ma Mère?”

“Supposing you try to guess?”

The novice-mistress looked cheerfully at one smiling face after another, as the novices vied with one another in childish enjoyment.

“Sœur Aimé, ma Mère! We have no one of that name.”

“‘Innocente’ would suit her, I think,” said the American.

“Is it a double name, ma Mère?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, then one of them is Mary!”

Mère Thérèse nodded.

“Mary Emmanuel!”

“Elizabeth Mary.”

The old nun shook her head, still laughing heartily.

“Lolita Maria,” exclaimed the little Spanish novice of eighteen who was Frances’ neighbour in the chapel, selecting the names she thought the prettiest.

There was a fresh burst of merriment.

“_Pour une novice anglaise, ah, par example!_”

“_Voilà bien Sœur Encarnaçion! une de ses idées à elle. Une religieuse qui s’appelerait Lolita! Ce serait gentil!_”

Sœur Encarnaçion looked self-conscious, and the novice-mistress said at once:

“Come, my children, you are not very wide awake. We have only five minutes more--I see that I must help you. What do we call our little _retraitante_ at present?”

“Sister Frances!”

“She is keeping her own name, then?”

“Could she have a better one? St. Francis of Assisi--dear St. Francis of Sales--what a collection of patrons to choose from.”

“Is it Frances Mary or Mary Frances, ma Mère?” inquired the American, whose baptismal names were Belinda Oriane, and upon whom had been bestowed the appellation of Sister Perpetua.

“Frances Mary,” replied the novice-mistress, rising from her seat, at which signal work was instantly folded into baskets and silence resumed.

Frances was making the five days’ Retreat which preceded the ceremony of her _prise d’habit_.

She was serenely happy.

There was no doubt in her mind with regard to the step which she was about to take. It was merely a longed-for milestone on the road to the attainment of her heart’s desire. Although more conscious than ever before, during these few days’ pause in the activity of her daily life, of an intense physical fatigue, she felt strangely uplifted in spirit, and as though newly inspired with a spiritual energy which might overcome that rock in the way of salvation, her physical frailty.

Strangely mingled with her exaltation of mind, was a trivial, childish feeling of dread lest Rosamund might find her altered. She assured herself in vain that she had not changed in any way that could strike her sister with a sense of alteration. But she knew that her whole perspective had changed, and that what was to her the reality of life would seem no more to Rosamund than a mysterious, and rather futile, phase.

She found herself wondering, wistfully and rather nervously, what the regulations would be as to conduct in the parlour.

That her interview with Rosamund, brief though it was to be, would be fraught with these, Frances could not doubt. In letters to her sister, she had again and again to consider the injunctions laid upon every nun or novice of the Order. Terms of excessive endearment, exaggerated expressions of affection or solicitude, were alike unbecoming to a religious, and of all the many details of her daily life that Rosamund longed to know and Frances to impart, only a very few, and those of the least personal character, did not come under the ban of convent secrecy. The letters were always signed by the writer’s full “name in religion.”

Frances, during the hour allotted to letter-writing on Sundays, had often seen her American neighbour, in the unavoidable proximity of the small, closely-ranged desks, crying silently over those difficult letters, which in her case were never answered. Frances surmised involuntarily that the changed handwriting, forced to conform to a sloping, pointed, French model, the stilted phraseology which was the inevitable outcome of that enforced reserve, the strange signature, with its orthodox preface, “Your loving child in Christ,” were so many additional pangs to those who understood no conventual shibboleths and resented with a resentment that was the more bitter for its utter lack of comprehension, being robbed of child or sister.

Rosamund would understand, Frances had told herself passionately, inditing those first strange little letters, that made her heart ache for the disappointment they must carry with them. And that Rosamund _had_ understood she knew from her replies, guarded and restrained enough, but breathing no hint of doubt or perplexity.

All letters to or from the members of the novitiate were, of course, examined by the novice-mistress, as were those of the professed nuns by the Superior. Nor was this censorship a nominal one. Mère Thérèse understood Spanish as well as French, and had a fair knowledge of English, but twice already Frances had been told to translate various unintelligible portions of her correspondence. Once, only a few weeks ago, she had heard the calm habitual silence of the little room where the novices’ desks were ranged against the wall violently broken by the noise of sudden uncontrollable sobbing. Frances blamed herself that she had not had the presence of mind to keep that custody of the eyes enjoined by every precept and practice of the religious life, but she had raised her head quickly and instinctively, and had seen Sœur Marie-Edmée crying hysterically over the torn pieces of a letter lying on her desk.

It was not difficult to guess that her letter to the anxious, waiting mother or little sister in the South of France had been found unsuitably restrained or full of indiscreet detail, and would not be sent that week.

But Sœur Marie-Edmée was from Marseilles, impulsive and emotional, and very soon afterwards she had disappeared from the novitiate.

The novices were told, as was customary in such cases, that her health was not equal to the strain of the religious life.

Frances thought again how terrible a breakdown of health which should necessitate leaving the convent would be. She was sincerely convinced that to one who had tried the cloistered life, existence “in the world” must be unendurable.

She remembered how often Mère Thérèse had said briskly: “Où Dieu donne la vocation, il donne la santé,” and reflected with perfect simplicity that it would really only be necessary for her health to hold out until after her final vows, which she hoped to take in three years’ time. She knew that many of the older professed nuns suffered almost permanently from disease, mostly of the digestive system, and almost all had to endure the nightly torture of senses atrophied and nerves strained by the want of sufficient sleep, but very few of them ever broke down, even for a day or two.

After all, thought Frances, what did it matter once the earthly goal attained? One entered the religious life in order to give oneself to God. Should He not take toll of the life dedicated to Him as best He pleased?

She waited for this first ceremony which should mark her entrance into the road of self-immolation with no shadow of apprehension.

Easter Monday dawned clear and cloudless.

Immediately after the first Mass, Frances was summoned to Mère Thérèse’s room and told that the ceremony was to take place at midday.

“Your sister will arrive, with Lady Argent, very soon after ten, so you must go to them in the parlour for a few moments,” she said considerately. “Then, of course, after the ceremony, you can return to them again.”

Frances, far more overwrought than she knew, found it impossible to command her thoughts that morning. She went about her work with her mind in a tumult, often referring to the tiny notebook in her pocket, in which she had written down various things that she wanted to say to Rosamund. When Advent came, and Lent, now that she was really a novice, Frances would not be able to write or receive any letters during these seasons, so Rosamund must not expect to hear from her. Rosamund was to ask to see Mère Thérèse, and be very, very nice to her, because Mère Thérèse had been so good to Frances. Would Rosamund send some fern-roots from Porthlew as soon as she got back? They would be so nice in the garden, where no flowers would ever grow. Frances was allowed an extra half-hour in the garden almost every day, because she was used to fresh air. It would please Rosamund to hear that.

Then Frances heard the sound of a motor in the street below. She might not look out of the window, but her heart beat violently, and she could not but strain her ears for the sound of the front-door bell.

It came.

She wondered whether she ought to go on sweeping the corridor, and if the lay-sister in charge of the parlour would know where to find her. But when old Sister Louise finally creaked slowly upstairs, she only smiled and nodded at the little novice with her long-handled broom, and went to knock at Mère Thérèse’s door.

Frances heard “Entrez!” and then through the open door the clear incisive accents of her novice-mistress.

“Un petit moment, ma sœur! Je vous appellerai tout-de-suite.”

Evidently she was engaged in the direction of one of her flock.

Old Sister Louise retired submissively, closing the door again. She leant her tired old body against the wall, and then suddenly straightened it again with an effort and stood wearily, her weight leaning on one foot, fingering the brown rosary that hung from her girdle and slowly praying with moving lips and closed eyes.

Frances finished the last few yards of corridor.

“Sœur Louise!” came from the novice-mistress’s room.

This time Sister Louise shut the door behind her as she went in to deliver the message.

Frances, her heart beating violently and a mist before her eyes, went and put her broom away in its accustomed corner.

She dawdled unconsciously, to delay the moment when she must return to the more remote community room belonging to the novitiate. Then the door of Mère Thérèse’s room opened, and Frances heard her say:

“Très bien, très bien. Cherchez-moi cette petite.”

“Elle est là, Mère Thérèse.”

Frances came forward quickly.

“You are needed in the parlour,” said her novice-mistress smiling. “Go with Sister Louise, my child.”

Frances turned, still blindly, to follow the old lay-sister.

“Your apron--your sleeves,” muttered Sister Louise in a scandalized whisper.

With fingers that shook, Frances took off the black apron and sleeves that protected her habit. She folded them and laid them in the accustomed pigeon-hole.

How slowly Sister Louise creaked downstairs! With what deliberation she turned, in the hall, to make mysterious signs that should not infringe the rule of silence, and should yet convey a communication.

Frances gazed at her in an agony. What further delay was this?

Suddenly she understood that her habit was still tucked up over her petticoat as it had been while she swept the corridor.

She caught at the folds round her waist and pulled them down, her hands shaking uncontrollably.

Sœur Louise’s hand was actually on the parlour-door now.

Suddenly she turned to the novice and whispered huskily:

“_N’oubliez pas votre Ave Maria._”

Frances stared at her for an instant and then put her hand across her eyes.

She never knew what it was that she said.

The next moment the door was open and she was in the parlour, with Rosamund.

Neither of them knew how long that first eager clasp endured, neither was in the least conscious of the presence of Lady Argent, gazing, already tearful, out of the window.

When at last she turned from her lengthy contemplation, Frances was seated, flushed and trembling a little, but sedate in her ample white habit, and Rosamund was kneeling on the floor beside her, their hands tightly locked together.

It always struck Frances afterwards with a curious sense of incongruity that her first words, after that prolonged gaze, should have been uttered in a strangely shaking little voice:

“Oh, Rosamund, you’ve got on new clothes that I’ve never seen before!”

It was the odd, trivial expression of the enormous interval that lay between their life together and the new evolution of Frances.

Then Lady Argent kissed them both and said:

“My dearest child, you look just exactly the same, and yet so utterly different, and the habit and everything--so absolutely natural to see you in it, and so very strange, dear--you know what I mean. I never was so glad of anything in my life, only, of course, one knows there is no joy without sacrifice, and, my dear, you really look better than I’ve ever seen you. Are you quite well?”

“Are you happy?” asked Rosamund.

“Oh, yes,” Frances replied fervently to both questions. “I’m _so_ happy--it’s everything I ever thought it would be--only better. And I’m very, very well. I haven’t seen myself in a looking-glass, but they all say I’m fatter than when I came.”

“So you are,” said Rosamund doubtfully. “Your face is much rounder, but you’re very black under your eyes, darling.”

“Am I?” replied Frances laughing a little, and instinctively putting up her hand to the tell-tale eyes.

Lady Argent fumbled in her satin bag.