Part 22

It was almost the first suggestion that she had made, and Frances divined in her an intense anxiety lest she should unwittingly distress the novice by proposals or requests contrary to the mysterious rule of which she knew so little.

“No, of course not,” she added almost immediately, her eyes on her sister’s face. “I expect you’re not allowed to have visitors up to your cell.”

There was only the faintest sound of hope underlying the suggestion now.

“I’m afraid not,” said Frances rather mournfully. “But there’s nothing to see, really. It’s only a little cubicle in a long dormitory.”

She wondered rather nervously immediately afterwards whether she ought to have given even that information. There was so much that might not be discussed outside the community, and it was so strange to feel such restriction in her intercourse with Rosamund.

At four o’clock Frances was called away to Vespers, and tea was brought to the visitors, and at five Lady Argent said gently:

“My dears, I am going to make a little visit to the chapel, and in about twenty minutes’ time I am afraid our cab will be here. Will you come and fetch me?”

“Let’s go into the chapel together for a minute,” whispered Frances, when the last quarter of an hour had sped past them.

They knelt at the back of the little chapel, Frances still conscious of exultation in the joint sacrifice that both were making. She prayed ardently for her sister and for herself.

The door opened behind them, and the ubiquitous Mrs. Mulholland sank heavily upon her knees beside Frances.

“The cab is here,” she whispered hoarsely; “and Mère Pauline and Mère Thérèse are in the hall. You’d better come, my dear.”

Frances bent her head, the crown of white roses still on her veil, and an instant later she rose, and left the chapel with Rosamund and Lady Argent.

The Superior herself had come to bid her guests farewell, and she spoke kindly to Rosamund, and said that she must come and pay her sister a visit again next year.

But Mère Thérèse drew Rosamund aside and gave her a little silver medal. “Comme souvenir de ce beau jour, de la part de Sœur Françoise Marie,” she said.

Rosamund thanked her, and Frances heard her ask the novice-mistress in strangled accents if her sister seemed really happy.

“Mais oui, mais oui. Voyez comme elle a bonne mine. La santé, c’est un signe de vocation,” asseverated Mère Thérèse.

“I am really happy--I am in the right place,” Frances said softly.

She was tense with the determination that no sign of distress at parting should add to Rosamund’s sense of loss.

The novice-mistress looked at both small, set faces, alike in spite of Frances’ coiffe and veil, and said approvingly:

“Voilà un sacrifice fait avec courage, n’est ce pas?”

Then Lady Argent kissed Frances, with murmured blessings and endearments, and went down the steps to the waiting cab.

The Superior had already hastened away in obedience to another call.

Mère Thérèse embraced Rosamund, assured her that she would pray for her, and turned aside for a moment while the sisters exchanged their speechless farewell.

Frances stood on the steps, with the novice-mistress immediately behind her, and watched the cab move slowly away from the convent door, Rosamund still gazing at her from the window.

Both faces, tense and colourless, were smiling until the cab was lost to sight.

The novice-mistress looked at Frances kindly, but she did not say anything except:

“Go and put on your apron, Sister, and help Sœur Léonide in the refectory. She has been delayed and requires assistance.”

Frances went.

She made little acts of resignation in her own mind as she went, and said “Fiat voluntas tua,” but tears, such as she had not shed since the first strange days of her novitiate, were choking her, and fell thick and blinding as she donned her black apron and went into the refectory.

Old Sœur Léonide said “Pauvre chou!” when she saw her, and immediately stuck a pin into her sleeve in order to remind herself that she must do penance for having spoken unnecessarily.

Then she showed Frances what had to be done, and they worked quickly and in silence until the bell rang.

At the evening recreation the novices all congratulated Frances, and called her “Sœur Françoise Marie,” and she was ashamed of the tears that she could not stop, although no one made any comment on them.

The evening recital of the office calmed her at last, and she again renewed her offering of herself and of all that she held dear.

That night, in the dormitory, she had occasion to go to the can of luke-warm water that stood beside the uncurtained window at the end of the long room. Forgetful for a moment of her surroundings, Frances looked out on the still patch of garden lying below, bathed in a white flood of moonlight.

Just so had she seen the garden at Porthlew on summer evenings, just so would it be flooded now. The same white light would stream now, strong and peaceful, over that smaller garden, on a hill above the Wye Valley. It was perhaps visible from the surroundings, unknown to Frances, amidst which Rosamund now was.

The thought, which was a sufficiently obvious one, suddenly struck Frances, in her overwrought state, as strange and piteous.

She looked out at the moonlit garden with a rush of longing and sorrow for Rosamund.

A great clock outside struck the half-hour with a loud clang, making her start violently.

Half-past nine--and it was the evening of her _prise d’habit_.

Sister Frances Mary turned from the window and went into her cell.

XXIV

“Iphigenia,” said Ludovic Argent in London that evening.

His mother looked distressed.

“My dearest boy, I do wish you wouldn’t call her that. It would make Rosamund more unhappy than she is already, if she heard you, and, besides, dear little Frances isn’t in the least like any heathen goddess of that sort. Not that I quite know what Iphigenia ever did, but I’m sure from your tone that it was something dreadful, and enough to expel her from any decent religious order.”

“She was only very young--and innocent--and sacrificed,” said Ludovic.

“Just as I say!” untruly remarked Lady Argent, in a tone of triumph. “_Most_ unlike Frances, who is as happy as she can be, and made her sacrifice entirely of her own free will, as you perfectly well know. Unless, Ludovic, you want to make me think that you still believe in those shocking old myths of nuns being walled up alive and lured into convents because of their fortunes, which one knows perfectly well never happened at all, even in the Middle Ages, let alone nowadays with Government inspections and sanitary improvements and everything.”

“No, I don’t think they’re walling her up, mother,” Ludovic allowed, with the shadow of a smile crossing his habitually melancholy face. “But when you say she’s made her sacrifice of her own free will--well, she doesn’t yet know what it is that she’s giving up, does she?”

“Perhaps,” said Lady Argent with a sort of wistful decision that gave unwonted lucidity to her utterance, “perhaps she knows what she’s gaining, better than what she’s giving up, Ludovic.”

Ludovic found no reply.

Presently he asked: “Where is Miss Grantham?”

“I sent her upstairs as soon as we got back. Ludovic, I wish I knew what to do for her. She minds this dreadfully, poor child, and it’s so difficult to make her see it from a Catholic point of view. She was very, very good and brave, for fear of distressing her sister, but she kept on getting whiter and whiter, and in a way it was really a relief when we got away from the convent, and she could relax that dreadful strain.”

“It’s hard on her.”

“Dreadfully,” said Lady Argent, with tears in her eyes. “You see, what can one say to comfort her? Talking about the Will of God seems such a mockery, when she isn’t a Catholic.”

“My dear mother! Catholics haven’t got a monopoly of the Will of God.”

“I never for a moment said they had, Ludovic!” cried his mother agitatedly. “The rain falleth upon the just and the unjust, and all that, as I _perfectly_ well know, but all I meant was that poor dear Rosamund can’t be expected to look upon it as being the Will of God at all. It just seems to her a sort of fanatical idea of making oneself as miserable as possible.”

“Unfortunately,” said her son dryly, “the misery isn’t confined to the fanatic. Other people suffer for his act, and have, as you may say, no compensating belief in the reward to follow.”

“That,” said Lady Argent very earnestly, “is the worst part of it. I mean, knowing that one is making the people one loves suffer. If there’s one thing absolutely certain, Ludovic, it is that Frances minds infinitely more for Rosamund’s sake than for her own--in fact, of course, she doesn’t mind at all, as far as she herself is concerned, since she’s deliberately chosen it. But you know what a little tender-hearted thing she is, and how devoted they’ve always been--and then you talk about her making Rosamund suffer! which, of course, she’s doing, poor little dear, but you may be sure it’s every bit as bad for her.”

“It seems to be a vicious circle,” remarked Ludovic grimly.

He began to limp up and down the length of the room, slowly.

The relation between Rosamund and Frances had always been a thought that could move him profoundly, for reasons which he had never sought to analyze. Perhaps it was the memory of the two children who had been brought across the valley to see his mother by Mrs. Tregaskis. At all events he could recall at will, and always with that sensation of acute and impotent compassion, the child Rosamund who had crouched on the ground to listen outside a closed door.

He thought of her now.

“Mother,” he demanded abruptly, “let me know how it stands. Has she taken any vows yet?”

“Oh no. This was only her _prise d’habit_. She gets her religious name, you know, and all her hair is cut off--not that the Prior really did cut it with those blunt old scissors under her veil--quite impossible. It must have been properly done afterwards.”

“Then she could still change her mind?”

“Yes, if she wanted to. She won’t take even her first vows for another year, and then they’ll only be temporary ones. The Church is very prudent in these matters, Ludovic.”

“I dare say,” said Ludovic, with no marked conviction in his tones.

“Well, at all events, she’s not bound herself down yet, and she’s very young. Would there be any difficulty about her coming away if she wanted to?”

“Of course not, my dear boy. Don’t suggest anything so preposterous. Anybody would think,” said Lady Argent plaintively, “that you were like Sir Walter Scott or somebody dreadful of that kind, who always wrote as though the Church was a most barbarous institution, and convents and monasteries only good for extermination. Of course they would let Frances go in a minute if she wasn’t happy. It’s a question of _vocation_.”

“Well,” said Ludovic hopefully, “there’s still a chance, then, that she may find she’s mistaken her vocation.”

“Yes,” said Lady Argent reluctantly, “and I’m afraid that Rosamund is building on that. She keeps saying: ‘It can’t last--it’s only a phase. Francie will come away again.’ But, indeed, Ludovic, I don’t think she will.”

“If it’s any comfort to her sister, mother, I should let her think it. Anyhow, it gives her time to become more reconciled to the idea, before the whole thing is made irrevocable.”

Lady Argent shook her head, and said that dear Ludovic knew nothing about it, and what was the use of living in a fool’s paradise, though of course one couldn’t exactly say that poor Rosamund was in any sort of paradise just now, but she ended by following her son’s advice and allowing Rosamund to dwell on the thought that sooner or later Frances would relinquish her convent life.

Ludovic, however, observant and speculative, came to the conclusion, during the few days she spent with them in London, that there was no conviction in Rosamund’s assertion that sooner or later her sister would return to her.

He would have liked to talk to Rosamund, the instinct of compassion within him reminding him strangely of their first meeting in the Wye Valley days.

But she hardly appeared to be conscious of his existence, and Ludovic was too intuitive not to be aware that her every faculty was still absorbed in Frances, and Frances only.

On the evening before she left London, however, Ludovic obtained a few words with Rosamund.

He found her in the hall, looking wistfully at the letters which had just come in by the last post.

She looked up with a faint smile at the sound of his crutch upon the tiles.

“It’s very foolish, but I keep thinking that I shall have a letter from Frances,” she said. “And all the time I know quite well she isn’t allowed to write more than once a week--and even that is only supposed to be a very special concession.”

“In Heaven’s name, why? What _is_ the object of it all?”

She looked at him with a shade more colour in her face as though she was grateful for his vehemence.

“I can’t really see any object in it, myself, but from their point of view it’s--it’s self-sacrifice, and so it becomes desirable.”

“To propitiate a Being whom they call the God of Love?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. You see,” said Rosamund, “it’s only the personal application that matters to me. Cousin Bertha says I am very egotistical, and I think it’s true. Nothing seems to matter to me _at all_, except just Frances and me, now. Nothing else seems in the least real. Once I thought something else was, but it was only a mistake. It didn’t really get down to bedrock at all--not half so much as with one little-finger-ache of Frances.’ I suppose everyone has something which is realest in the world, besides which other things simply don’t count.”

“That’s quite true,” said Ludovic, wondering if it was a relief to her to talk. “The true secret of life has always seemed to me to lie in the focussing of that one especial thing which is the most real to each of us. So many people don’t know what it is, or they may know, and wilfully blind themselves because it is contrary to a conventional ideal.”

“I would much rather have thought that Morris had broken my heart and spoilt my whole life, than that he was merely an incident,” murmured Rosamund, as though to herself. “That was a conventional ideal.”

Ludovic was struck by the fundamental sincerity of her outlook. He looked at her tired, downcast face and said nothing.

“But now,” she told him, gazing straight at him, “I know that nothing in my life has mattered at all, so far except just Frances and the ordinary primitive facts of our being sisters, and having been children together.”

“I think,” said Ludovic gently, “that the ordinary primitive facts are the ones that one does come back to in the long run, always, as the things that matter most.”

“Frances hasn’t.”

“She is very young,” said Ludovic pitifully. “Don’t you think she may change her mind?”

“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Rosamund. “If I didn’t think that, day and night, I should go mad. If I thought it would go on like this always--I couldn’t bear it.”

Ludovic knew that nothing goes on always, that the strongest, swiftest tide knows but its ebb and flow, but he would not tell her so then.

“Don’t you think she will come away?” she asked him urgently, as though she could not bear the thought that his silence might imply a dissent.

“I hope with all my heart that she may, for her sake and for yours,” he said gravely. “But--if you knew she was happy there, and wanted to stay?”

“I don’t know what would happen then,” she said. “It’s as though my mind stopped, when I think of that. I just can’t imagine any further.”

She covered her eyes with her hand, and then turned slowly to go upstairs.

Ludovic saw that she had forgotten his presence.

He stood looking after her rather wistfully, and suddenly she turned and came back to him.

“Good-night,” she said rather breathlessly. “You are the only person who has seemed to understand at all.”

He was left with a strange sense of having found the child Rosamund again, and with an absolute conviction that, in spite of all her assertions as to Frances’ return to the world, she yet knew them to be vain.

Nevertheless, Rosamund clung passionately to those assertions, both then and on her return to Porthlew. They seemed in some strange, inadequate way, to protect her from Bertha’s regretful philosophy and resignation, and from Minnie’s bland assumptions and consolations.

“After all, we live and learn, and it takes all sorts to make a world. That’s why it’s such a queer one, I suppose. At least, it’s not the world, so much as the people in it.”

Thus Miss Blandflower, surpassing herself. And adding, with regretful shakings of the head:

“Poor dear little Frances! But I suppose it’s as it will be, you know.”

“Minnie, my dear woman, you’re a fool,” said Mrs. Tregaskis bluntly. “What on earth can you possibly mean by ‘it’s as it will be’? And if you _do_ mean anything, of what consolation is it to this poor little _mater dolorosa_ here?”

She laid her hand kindly on Rosamund’s shoulder.

Miss Blandflower had lived with Mrs. Tregaskis for a number of years, had a whole-hearted adoration for her, and was not at all sensitive. Neither was this the first time that her dear Mrs. Tregaskis, with playful candour, had called her a fool. She therefore smiled with great placidity, and said deprecatingly:

“Dear Mrs. Tregaskis! I always say you’re such a purist--always catching one up. I’m afraid I’m dreadfully slipshod in my way of speaking sometimes--but while there’s life there’s hope. You may yet cure me, in my old age.”

“I doubt it very much, Minnie,” said Bertha briskly, to which Miss Blandflower thoughtfully rejoined:

“I doubt it, said the carpenter, and shed a bitter tear,” which saying Bertha had so long regarded as part of Minnie’s stock equipment that she scarcely heard it, and addressed herself to Rosamund again.

“Well now, daughter mine, I want to hear all about the child.”

Mrs. Tregaskis had sometimes employed this proprietary form of address in speaking to Rosamund since Hazel’s marriage. She seldom used the words lightly, however, but as though to denote some deeper sympathy or kindness.

Rosamund looked at her unintelligently.

Her head felt stupefied from the tears she had shed, violently and uncontrollably, during the few days she had spent with Lady Argent, and she was far more physically shaken by the strength of her undisciplined emotions than she realized.

On the night of her return to Porthlew, Cousin Bertie had said very kindly: “I see how it is, my child,” and had sent her to bed at once, and come up twice to see that Rosamund had all she wanted, and was really going to sleep. She had asked no questions, only saying: “You shall tell me all about it to-morrow.”

And now to-morrow had come, and Rosamund, who had slept heavily and dreamlessly until after nine o’clock, was to tell them all that had happened during her brief stay at the convent, all the details about Frances that her little circle wanted to know, give them all the loving messages that Frances had sent.

She wished dully that she could apply some kind of spur to her brain, which felt oddly and inexplicably incapable of transmitting into images any impression of the convent she had visited. Even her tongue felt curiously weighted, as though speech were an almost impossible effort.

“Come,” said her guardian encouragingly, “how does the little thing like it? Her letters don’t tell one very much, but perhaps that isn’t altogether her fault.”

“No, I don’t think it is.”

“Ah,” said Miss Bandflower, shaking her head, “I always thought those letters of hers were not what I call _spontaneous_. Like being in prison for her, isn’t it--practically?”

Rosamund whitened, and Frederick Tregaskis remarked in a detached tone:

“I suppose that by ‘practically’ you merely mean, like every other woman, ‘theoretically.’”

“He! he! he!” giggled Minnie nervously, as she invariably did when addressed by Frederick, thereby causing him to cast upon her an infuriated glance of contempt, as he relapsed into his habitual silence.

“Do you think she’s happy?” asked Bertha, looking sharply up from her knitting.

“She said she was, and that she felt in the right place.”

“A place for everything and everything in its place,” muttered Minnie. “Ah well!”

“H’m! She evidently knows better than the Almighty then, since the place _He_ put her into was Porthlew, in my opinion. However, she’s like so many of her generation--finding it easier to serve abroad than to be served at home. Poor little girl! Did she look well, Rosamund?”

“Fairly.”

“Only fairly?”

“She’s less thin than she used to be, but her eyes looked tired, I thought.”

“That sounds like nerves,” said Miss Blandflower, shaking her head with a sapient expression.

She had persisted in looking upon Frances as a victim to “nerves” ever since she had first heard of her wishing to leave Porthlew for the convent.

“Want of sleep, probably,” said Frederick.

A dull pang went through Rosamund at the words, though they only confirmed her own sick apprehensions and surmises, and she said apathetically:

“Yes. They get up at five every morning, always.”

“Yes, my dear, but they go to bed early, don’t they?” sensibly remarked Mrs. Tregaskis.

“About half-past nine, I think. That’s when they all leave the chapel.”

“Oh, well, there you are. It doesn’t hurt anyone to get up early if they go to bed early enough. It’s the sleep that you get before midnight that counts, you know,” said Mrs. Tregaskis comfortably.

“‘Early to bed and early to rise Makes little folks healthy, wealthy, and wise,’”

added Miss Blandflower encouragingly. She was generally late for breakfast herself, but more from innate unpunctuality than because she failed to rise between seven and eight o’clock every morning.

“Well, Rosamund, dear, can’t you tell us a little something about the ceremony? Was it pretty?”

“Yes, I think it was, Cousin Bertie.”

Rosamund racked her brains. If only she did not feel utter inability to speak!

Once or twice before in her life this same sensation, which she could only translate into physical terms by telling herself that her tongue felt as though it were weighted, had assailed her.

She thought of it as a sort of partial paralysis, and something of the blankness of her sensations was reflected in her speechless fixity of gaze. Her guardian looked at her.