Part 21

And it was undoubtedly Mrs. Mulholland who was whisking about the leaves of the little books on either side of her, and guiding her neighbours with an explanatory forefinger.

The little procession of acolytes, preceding the tall tonsured figure of the Prior of Twickenham, came into the Sanctuary, and Frances sank upon her knees on the red velvet cushion before the steps.

And it was only a few moments later, when the customary prayers had been recited, that she felt a pull at the back of her dress, and heard the ubiquitous voice of Mrs. Mulholland behind her.

“Sit down, sit down. He’s going to give the address now.”

Frances sat down, and Mrs. Mulholland leant forward at an angle that suffused her large old face with crimson, and arranged the train of her dress under the chair.

Father Anselm’s address was very short and simple. There was much that was practical in it, and Frances felt vaguely relieved that it should contain no mystical allusions that might vex or distress Rosamund. This our sister, said the Prior, was about to take a step which, though to the outward eye might seem more striking, with its symbolical dress, than the more simple ceremony of a Profession, was nevertheless only a preliminary step. The goal of our sister’s religious life was still before her--those vows which should bind her irrevocably to the life to which she had been called.

Poverty, Chastity, Obedience. The vow of Poverty, which would not only mean the relinquishment of worldly goods and possessions, but also that poverty of spirit which should claim no rights and no belongings in this world, not even the rights of personal judgment, the disposal of self.... Then the vow of Chastity, which would discipline our sister’s earthly affections, rendering them indeed not less ardent, but more supernatural--a wide and universal charity which should include all ... our sister had given up her earthly family ties: good and sacred as they were, the relinquishment of them was better still--but her family now would be the poor, the sick, the friendless--in all and each she would see and love God Himself. Finally, the vow of Obedience. Our sister would see the Will of God in the will of her Superior, and would gladly submit to it in greater as in smaller things. In the Order which our sister had joined, a nun might be sent at a moment’s notice to some far-off country, there to live and work and perhaps die, with no return to the land of her birth. But her home was not here--it was in the Heaven, towards which every step of the way was leading her ... where, as the Scriptures themselves had promised, she would receive again a hundredfold all that she had given up for Christ’s sake.

The Prior’s voice ceased, and he turned again towards the Altar.

The time had come for Frances to reply to the few formal questions that would be put to her. She did so quite steadily, although her voice sounded strange in her own ears.

Then the habit which she was shortly to don was blessed, and Prior Anselm fumbled with the scissors and somehow cut from her head the symbolical lock of hair.

Mère Thérèse held back her veil as he did so, but Frances was conscious of Mrs. Mulholland hovering over her officiously.

Then she turned and slowly followed the Superior and Mère Thérèse into the little adjoining Sacristy where Sœur Eugénie was waiting to divest her of her white satin dress and lace veil, and help her into the garb which would henceforth be hers for life.

The white Cross, distinguishing mark of the Order, gleamed upon her breast now.

She lifted the linen _coiffe_, ingeniously pinned together, that bound her head under the veil, but Sœur Eugénie, laughing a little, pointed to her late handiwork, still erect upon the head of the novice.

“Allons,” said Mère Thérèse, and began to take out hairpins, careful to let none fall on the floor, where it might possibly be overlooked or swept away.

Then the lay-sister put a dustsheet over Frances’ shoulders and quickly cropped off the lengths of her brown hair.

The feeling of coolness and comfort was pleasant when the veil was again put on her head, but Frances gave one curious fleeting pang to the memory of that soft mass, lying strewn about the dustsheet.

The little Superior, who had been busying herself with the white artificial wreath of roses that lay ready, turned round.

“Sister Frances Mary”--she greeted the novice by her new name--“God bless you, my dear daughter.”

Frances knelt for a moment to receive her Superior’s embrace, and then turned to Mère Thérèse.

“Et maintenant,” said that practical woman, as ever consecrating the briefest possible time to emotion, however permissible,--“le baiser le paix aux sœurs.”

This exercise was one which Frances had always viewed with some slight apprehension.

The newly invested novice, bearing a lighted candle, made the round of the community, each nun and lay-sister standing at her stall in the chapel, also the bearer of a lighted candle, and exchanged with each the symbolical kiss of peace.

A nervous dread of the effect of so many lighted wax candles on inflammable veils and music scores sent the blood to Frances’ head and made her slow progress round the chapel a painful one, but the older nuns proved expert at holding veils out of possible contact with candle-grease, and moreover to her great relief, the draught of these repeated salutations extinguished several tapers, including her own.

As she returned thankfully to her _prie-dieu_, Mrs. Mulholland, who had mysteriously become possessed of a full-sized candle, leant forward and determinedly applied its flame to Frances’ cold and extinguished taper.

Frances smiled at her gently, and Mrs. Mulholland subsided into her seat again and blew her nose with a vigorous, trumpet-like sound denoting considerable emotion. Then the Prior read the concluding prayers and placed upon Frances’ head the wreath of artificial white roses, where it balanced insecurely until Mrs. Mulholland again sprang from her seat and affixed it to the novice’s veil with a couple of safety-pins apparently produced by miraculous means from her person.

The _Te Deum_ pealed through the chapel in conclusion, and then, as the community filed out in the customary order, two by two, Frances was left for a few moments to the solitude and quiet which her whole soul craved.

Her head bent and her hands tightly clasped, she made her earnest ardent thanksgiving, her simple, fervent resolution to try and be worthy of all that she had received, her tender, childlike petitions for those whom she loved, for all those for whom she had promised to pray, for that religious order which she was hereafter to count, in all its scattered branches, as her earthly home.

She lost herself in a dreamy contentment that was half contemplation and half the mental inertia following on prolonged physical and emotional strain. It was almost as though rousing herself from sleep that she heard a whispered summons to the parlour, and rose obediently to follow the lay-sister out of the chapel.

Scarcely less dreamlike was the afternoon spent in Rosamund’s company, when Frances took her once or twice round the tiny garden, showed her, in obedience to Mère Pauline’s recommendations, the poor school and the portion of the house reserved for lady boarders, and returned with her to the parlour, where Lady Argent, serenely voluble, was entertained by such of the nuns as could spare quarter of an hour.

“I can’t see your part of the house, and where you sleep, can I?” asked Rosamund.

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.