At half past six in the morning I was awakened by the loud ringing of
the getting-up bell, and as soon as I could rouse myself from the deep
sleep of childhood I saw that a middle-aged nun with a severe face was
saying a prayer, and that all the girls in the dormitory were kneeling
in their beds while they made the responses.
A few minutes later, when the girls were chattering and laughing as they
dressed, making the room tingle with twittering sounds like a tree full
of linnets in the spring, a big girl came up to me and said:
"I am Mildred Bankes and Sister Angela says I am to look after you
to-day."
She was about fifteen years of age, and had a long plain-featured face
which reminded me of one of my father's horses that was badly used by
the farm boys; but there was something sweet in her smile that made me
like her instantly.
She helped me to dress in my brown velvet frock, but said that one of
her first duties would be to take me to the lay sisters who made the
black habits which all the girls in the convent wore.
It was still so early that the darkness of the room was just broken by
pale shafts of light from the windows, but I could see that the children
of my own age were only seven or eight altogether, while the majority of
the girls were several years older, and Mildred explained this by
telling me that the children of the Infant Jesus, like myself, were so
few that they had been put into the dormitory of the children of the
Sacred Heart.
In a quarter of an hour everybody was washed and dressed, and then, at a
word from Sister Angela, the girls went leaping and laughing downstairs
to the Meeting Room, which was a large hail, with a platform at the
farther end of it and another picture of the Sacred Heart, pierced with
sharp thorns, on the wall.
The Reverend Mother was there with the other nuns of the Convent, all
pale-faced and slow eyed women wearing rosaries, and she said a long
prayer, to which the scholars (there were seventy or eighty altogether)
made responses, and then there was silence for five minutes, which were
supposed to be devoted to meditation, although I could not help seeing
that some of the big girls were whispering to each other while their
heads were down.
After that, and Mass in the Church, we went scurrying away to the
Refectory, which was now warm with the steam from our breakfast and
bubbling with cheerful voices, making a noise that was like water
boiling in a saucepan.
I was so absorbed by all I saw that I forgot to eat until Mildred nudged
me to do so, and even when my spoon was half way to my mouth something
happened which brought it down again.
At the tinkle of a hand-bell one of the big girls had stepped up to the
reading-desk and begun to read from a book which I afterwards knew to be
"The Imitation of Christ." She was about sixteen years of age, and her
face was so vivid that I could not take my eyes off it.
Her complexion was fair and her hair was auburn, but her eyes were so
dark and searching that when she raised her head, as she often did, they
seemed to look through and through you.
"Who is she?" I whispered.
"Alma Lier," Mildred whispered back, and when breakfast was over, and we
were trooping off to lessons, she told me something about her.
Alma was an American. Her father was very rich and his home was in New
York. But her mother lived in Paris, though she was staying at an hotel
in Rome at present, and sometimes she came in a carriage to take her
daughter for a drive.
Alma was the cleverest girl in the school too, and sometimes at the end
of terms, when parents and friends came to the Convent and one of the
Cardinals distributed the prizes, she had so many books to take away
that she could hardly carry them down from the platform.
I listened to this with admiring awe, thinking Alma the most wonderful
and worshipful of all creatures, and when I remember it now, after all
these years, and the bitter experiences which have come with them, I
hardly know whether to laugh or cry at the thought that such was the
impression she first made on me.
My class was with the youngest of the children, and Sister Angela was my
teacher. She was so sweet to me that her encouragement was like a kiss
and her reproof like a caress; but I could think of nothing but Alma,
and at noon, when the bell rang for lunch and Mildred took me back to
the Refectory, I wondered if the same girl would read again.
She did, but this time in a foreign language, French as Mildred
whispered--from the letters of the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque--and
my admiration for Alma went up tenfold. I wondered if it could possibly
occur that I should ever come to know her.
There is no worship like that of a child, and life for me, which had
seemed so cold and dark the day before, became warm and bright with a
new splendour.
I was impatient of everything that took me away from the opportunity of
meeting with Alma--the visit to the lay-sisters to be measured for my
new black clothes, the three o'clock "rosary," when the nuns walked with
their classes in the sunshine and, above all, the voluntary visit to the
Blessed Sacrament in the Church of the Convent, which seemed to me
large and gorgeous, though divided across the middle by an open bronze
screen, called a Cancello--the inner half, as Mildred whispered, being
for the inmates of the school, while the outer half was for the
congregation which came on Sunday to Benediction.
But at four o'clock we had dinner, when Alma read again--this time in
Italian--from the writings of Saint Francis of Sales--and then, to my
infinite delight, came a long recreation, when all the girls scampered
out into the Convent garden, which was still bright with afternoon
sunshine and as merry with laughter and shouts as the seashore on a
windy summer morning.
The garden was a large bare enclosure, bounded on two sides by the
convent buildings and on the other two by a yellow wall and an avenue
made by a line of stone pines with heads like open umbrellas, but it had
no other foliage except an old tree which reminded me of Tommy the Mate,
having gnarled and sprawling limbs, and standing like a weather-beaten
old sailor, four-square in the middle.
A number of the girls were singing and dancing around this tree, and I
felt so happy just then that I should have loved to join them, but I was
consumed by a desire to come to close quarters with the object of my
devotion, so I looked eagerly about me and asked Mildred if Alma was
likely to be there.
"Sure to be," said Mildred, and hardly were the words out of her mouth
when Alma herself came straight down in our direction, surrounded by a
group of admiring girls, who were hanging on to her and laughing at
everything she said.
My heart began to thump, and without knowing what I was doing I stopped
dead short, while Mildred went on a pace or two ahead of me.
Then I noticed that Alma had stopped too, and that her great searching
eyes were looking down at me. In my nervousness, I tried to smile, but
Alma continued to stare, and at length, in the tone of one who had
accidentally turned up something with her toe that was little and
ridiculous, she said:
"Goodness, girls, what's this?"
Then she burst into a fit of laughter, in which the other girls joined,
and looking me up and down they all laughed together.
I knew what they were laughing at--the clothes my mother had made for me
and I had felt so proud of. That burnt me like iron, and I think my lip
must have dropped, but Alma showed no mercy.
"Dare say the little doll thinks herself pretty, though," she said. And
then she passed on, and the girls with her, and as they went off they
looked back over their shoulders and laughed again.
Never since has any human creature--not even Alma herself--made me
suffer more than I suffered at that moment. My throat felt tight, tears
leapt to my eyes, disappointment, humiliation, and shame swept over me
like a flood, and I stood squeezing my little handkerchief in my hand
and feeling as if I could have died.
At the next moment Mildred stepped back to me, and putting her arm about
my waist she said:
"Never mind, Mary. She's a heartless thing. Don't have anything to do
with her."
But all the sunshine had gone out of the day for me now and I cried for
hours. I was still crying, silently but bitterly, when, at eight
o'clock, we were saying the night prayers, and I saw Alma, who was in
the opposite benches, whispering to one of the girls who sat next to her
and then looking straight across at me.
And at nine o'clock when we went to bed I was crying more than ever, so
that after the good-night-bell had been rung and the lights had been put
down, Sister Angela, not knowing the cause of my sorrow, stepped up to
my bed before going down stairs for her own studies, and whispered:
"You mustn't fret for home, Mary. You will soon get used to it."
But hardly had I been left alone, with the dull pain I could find no
ease for, when somebody touched me on the shoulder, and, looking up, I
saw a girl in her nightdress standing beside me. It was Alma and she
said:
"Say, little girl, is your name O'Neill?"
Trembling with nervousness I answered that it was.
"Do you belong to the O'Neills of Ellan?"
Still trembling I told her that I did.
"My!" she said in quite another tone, and then I saw that by some means
I had begun to look different in her eyes.
After a moment she sat on the side of my bed and asked questions about
my home--if it was not large and very old, with big stone staircases,
and great open fireplaces, and broad terraces, and beautiful walks going
down to the sea.
I was so filled with the joy of finding myself looking grand in Alma's
eyes that I answered "yes" and "yes" without thinking too closely about
her questions, and my tears were all brushed away when she said:
"I knew somebody who lived in your house once, and I'll tell her all
about you."
She stayed a few moments longer, and when going off she whispered:
"Hope you don't feel badly about my laughing in the garden to-day. I
didn't mean a thing. But if any of the girls laugh again just say you're
Alma Lier's friend and she's going to take care of you."
I could hardly believe my ears. Some great new splendour had suddenly
dawned upon me and I was very happy.
I did not know then that the house which Alma had been talking of was
not my father's house, but Castle Raa. I did not know then that the
person who had lived there was her mother, and that in her comely and
reckless youth she had been something to the bad Lord Raa who had lashed
my father and sworn at my grandmother.
I did not know anything that was dead and buried in the past, or
shrouded and veiled in the future. I only knew that Alma had called
herself my friend and promised to take care of me. So with a glad heart
I went to sleep.