Sister Josepha told her beads mechanically, her fingers numb with the
accustomed exercise. The little organ creaked a dismal "O Salutaris,"
and she still knelt on the floor, her white-bonneted head nodding
suspiciously. The Mother Superior gave a sharp glance at the tired
figure; then, as a sudden lurch forward brought the little sister back
to consciousness, Mother's eyes relaxed into a genuine smile.
The bell tolled the end of vespers, and the sombre-robed nuns filed out
of the chapel to go about their evening duties. Little Sister Josepha's
work was to attend to the household lamps, but there must have been as
much oil spilled upon the table to-night as was put in the vessels.
The small brown hands trembled so that most of the wicks were trimmed
with points at one corner which caused them to smoke that night.
"Oh, cher Seigneur," she sighed, giving an impatient polish to a
refractory chimney, "it is wicked and sinful, I know, but I am so
tired. I can't be happy and sing any more. It doesn't seem right for
le bon Dieu to have me all cooped up here with nothing to see but stray
visitors, and always the same old work, teaching those mean little
girls to sew, and washing and filling the same old lamps. Pah!" And
she polished the chimney with a sudden vigorous jerk which threatened
destruction.
They were rebellious prayers that the red mouth murmured that night,
and a restless figure that tossed on the hard dormitory bed. Sister
Dominica called from her couch to know if Sister Josepha were ill.
"No," was the somewhat short response; then a muttered, "Why can't they
let me alone for a minute? That pale-eyed Sister Dominica never
sleeps; that's why she is so ugly."
About fifteen years before this night some one had brought to the
orphan asylum connected with this convent, du Sacre Coeur, a round,
dimpled bit of three-year-old humanity, who regarded the world from a
pair of gravely twinkling black eyes, and only took a chubby thumb out
of a rosy mouth long enough to answer in monosyllabic French. It was a
child without an identity; there was but one name that any one seemed
to know, and that, too, was vague,--Camille.
She grew up with the rest of the waifs; scraps of French and American
civilization thrown together to develop a seemingly inconsistent
miniature world. Mademoiselle Camille was a queen among them, a pretty
little tyrant who ruled the children and dominated the more timid
sisters in charge.
One day an awakening came. When she was fifteen, and almost fully
ripened into a glorious tropical beauty of the type that matures early,
some visitors to the convent were fascinated by her and asked the
Mother Superior to give the girl into their keeping.
Camille fled like a frightened fawn into the yard, and was only
unearthed with some difficulty from behind a group of palms. Sulky and
pouting, she was led into the parlour, picking at her blue pinafore
like a spoiled infant.
"The lady and gentleman wish you to go home with them, Camille," said
the Mother Superior, in the language of the convent. Her voice was
kind and gentle apparently; but the child, accustomed to its various
inflections, detected a steely ring behind its softness, like the
proverbial iron hand in the velvet glove.
"You must understand, madame," continued Mother, in stilted English,
"that we never force children from us. We are ever glad to place them
in comfortable--how you say that?--quarters--maisons--homes--bien! But
we will not make them go if they do not wish."
Camille stole a glance at her would-be guardians, and decided
instantly, impulsively, finally. The woman suited her; but the man!
It was doubtless intuition of the quick, vivacious sort which belonged
to her blood that served her. Untutored in worldly knowledge, she
could not divine the meaning of the pronounced leers and admiration of
her physical charms which gleamed in the man's face, but she knew it
made her feel creepy, and stoutly refused to go. Next day Camille was
summoned from a task to the Mother Superior's parlour. The other girls
gazed with envy upon her as she dashed down the courtyard with
impetuous movement. Camille, they decided crossly, received too much
notice. It was Camille this, Camille that; she was pretty, it was to
be expected. Even Father Ray lingered longer in his blessing when his
hands pressed her silky black hair.
As she entered the parlour, a strange chill swept over the girl. The
room was not an unaccustomed one, for she had swept it many times, but
to-day the stiff black chairs, the dismal crucifixes, the gleaming
whiteness of the walls, even the cheap lithograph of the Madonna which
Camille had always regarded as a perfect specimen of art, seemed cold
and mean.
"Camille, ma chere," said Mother, "I am extremely displeased with you.
Why did you not wish to go with Monsieur and Madame Lafaye yesterday?"
The girl uncrossed her hands from her bosom, and spread them out in a
deprecating gesture.
"Mais, ma mere, I was afraid."
Mother's face grew stern. "No foolishness now," she exclaimed.
"It is not foolishness, ma mere; I could not help it, but that man
looked at me so funny, I felt all cold chills down my back. Oh, dear
Mother, I love the convent and the sisters so, I just want to stay and
be a sister too, may I?"
And thus it was that Camille took the white veil at sixteen years. Now
that the period of novitiate was over, it was just beginning to dawn
upon her that she had made a mistake.
"Maybe it would have been better had I gone with the funny-looking lady
and gentleman," she mused bitterly one night. "Oh, Seigneur, I 'm so
tired and impatient; it's so dull here, and, dear God, I'm so young."
There was no help for it. One must arise in the morning, and help in
the refectory with the stupid Sister Francesca, and go about one's
duties with a prayerful mien, and not even let a sigh escape when one's
head ached with the eternal telling of beads.
A great fete day was coming, and an atmosphere of preparation and mild
excitement pervaded the brown walls of the convent like a delicate
aroma. The old Cathedral around the corner had stood a hundred years,
and all the city was rising to do honour to its age and time-softened
beauty. There would be a service, oh, but such a one! with two
Cardinals, and Archbishops and Bishops, and all the accompanying
glitter of soldiers and orchestras. The little sisters of the Convent
du Sacre Coeur clasped their hands in anticipation of the holy joy.
Sister Josepha curled her lip, she was so tired of churchly pleasures.
The day came, a gold and blue spring day, when the air hung heavy with
the scent of roses and magnolias, and the sunbeams fairly laughed as
they kissed the houses. The old Cathedral stood gray and solemn, and
the flowers in Jackson Square smiled cheery birthday greetings across
the way. The crowd around the door surged and pressed and pushed in
its eagerness to get within. Ribbons stretched across the banquette
were of no avail to repress it, and important ushers with cardinal
colours could do little more.
The Sacred Heart sisters filed slowly in at the side door, creating a
momentary flutter as they paced reverently to their seats, guarding the
blue-bonneted orphans. Sister Josepha, determined to see as much of
the world as she could, kept her big black eyes opened wide, as the
church rapidly filled with the fashionably dressed, perfumed, rustling,
and self-conscious throng.
Her heart beat quickly. The rebellious thoughts that will arise in the
most philosophical of us surged in her small heavily gowned bosom. For
her were the gray things, the neutral tinted skies, the ugly garb, the
coarse meats; for them the rainbow, the ethereal airiness of earthly
joys, the bonbons and glaces of the world. Sister Josepha did not know
that the rainbow is elusive, and its colours but the illumination of
tears; she had never been told that earthly ethereality is necessarily
ephemeral, nor that bonbons and glaces, whether of the palate or of the
soul, nauseate and pall upon the taste. Dear God, forgive her, for she
bent with contrite tears over her worn rosary, and glanced no more at
the worldly glitter of femininity.
The sunbeams streamed through the high windows in purple and crimson
lights upon a veritable fugue of colour. Within the seats, crush upon
crush of spring millinery; within the aisles erect lines of
gold-braided, gold-buttoned military. Upon the altar, broad sweeps of
golden robes, great dashes of crimson skirts, mitres and gleaming
crosses, the soft neutral hue of rich lace vestments; the tender heads
of childhood in picturesque attire; the proud, golden magnificence of
the domed altar with its weighting mass of lilies and wide-eyed roses,
and the long candles that sparkled their yellow star points above the
reverent throng within the altar rails.
The soft baritone of the Cardinal intoned a single phrase in the
suspended silence. The censer took up the note in its delicate clink
clink, as it swung to and fro in the hands of a fair-haired child.
Then the organ, pausing an instant in a deep, mellow, long-drawn note,
burst suddenly into a magnificent strain, and the choir sang forth,
"Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison." One voice, flute-like, piercing,
sweet, rang high over the rest. Sister Josepha heard and trembled, as
she buried her face in her hands, and let her tears fall, like other
beads, through her rosary.
It was when the final word of the service had been intoned, the last
peal of the exit march had died away, that she looked up meekly, to
encounter a pair of youthful brown eyes gazing pityingly upon her.
That was all she remembered for a moment, that the eyes were youthful
and handsome and tender. Later, she saw that they were placed in a
rather beautiful boyish face, surmounted by waves of brown hair,
curling and soft, and that the head was set on a pair of shoulders
decked in military uniform. Then the brown eyes marched away with the
rest of the rear guard, and the white-bonneted sisters filed out the
side door, through the narrow court, back into the brown convent.
That night Sister Josepha tossed more than usual on her hard bed, and
clasped her fingers often in prayer to quell the wickedness in her
heart. Turn where she would, pray as she might, there was ever a pair
of tender, pitying brown eyes, haunting her persistently. The squeaky
organ at vespers intoned the clank of military accoutrements to her
ears, the white bonnets of the sisters about her faded into mists of
curling brown hair. Briefly, Sister Josepha was in love.
The days went on pretty much as before, save for the one little heart
that beat rebelliously now and then, though it tried so hard to be
submissive. There was the morning work in the refectory, the stupid
little girls to teach sewing, and the insatiable lamps that were so
greedy for oil. And always the tender, boyish brown eyes, that looked
so sorrowfully at the fragile, beautiful little sister, haunting,
following, pleading.
Perchance, had Sister Josepha been in the world, the eyes would have
been an incident. But in this home of self-repression and
retrospection, it was a life-story. The eyes had gone their way,
doubtless forgetting the little sister they pitied; but the little
sister?
The days glided into weeks, the weeks into months. Thoughts of escape
had come to Sister Josepha, to flee into the world, to merge in the
great city where recognition was impossible, and, working her way like
the rest of humanity, perchance encounter the eyes again.
It was all planned and ready. She would wait until some morning when
the little band of black-robed sisters wended their way to mass at the
Cathedral. When it was time to file out the side-door into the
courtway, she would linger at prayers, then slip out another door, and
unseen glide up Chartres Street to Canal, and once there, mingle in the
throng that filled the wide thoroughfare. Beyond this first plan she
could think no further.
Penniless, garbed, and shaven though she would be, other difficulties
never presented themselves to her. She would rely on the mercies of
the world to help her escape from this torturing life of inertia. It
seemed easy now that the first step of decision had been taken.
The Saturday night before the final day had come, and she lay
feverishly nervous in her narrow little bed, wondering with wide-eyed
fear at the morrow. Pale-eyed Sister Dominica and Sister Francesca
were whispering together in the dark silence, and Sister Josepha's ears
pricked up as she heard her name.
"She is not well, poor child," said Francesca. "I fear the life is too
confining."
"It is best for her," was the reply. "You know, sister, how hard it
would be for her in the world, with no name but Camille, no friends,
and her beauty; and then--"
Sister Josepha heard no more, for her heart beating tumultuously in her
bosom drowned the rest. Like the rush of the bitter salt tide over a
drowning man clinging to a spar, came the complete submerging of her
hopes of another life. No name but Camille, that was true; no
nationality, for she could never tell from whom or whence she came; no
friends, and a beauty that not even an ungainly bonnet and shaven head
could hide. In a flash she realised the deception of the life she
would lead, and the cruel self-torture of wonder at her own identity.
Already, as if in anticipation of the world's questionings, she was
asking herself, "Who am I? What am I?"
The next morning the sisters du Sacre Coeur filed into the Cathedral at
High Mass, and bent devout knees at the general confession. "Confiteor
Deo omnipotenti," murmured the priest; and tremblingly one little
sister followed the words, "Je confesse a Dieu, tout puissant--que j'ai
beaucoup peche par pensees--c'est ma faute--c'est ma faute--c'est ma
tres grande faute."
The organ pealed forth as mass ended, the throng slowly filed out, and
the sisters paced through the courtway back into the brown convent
walls. One paused at the entrance, and gazed with swift longing eyes
in the direction of narrow, squalid Chartres Street, then, with a
gulping sob, followed the rest, and vanished behind the heavy door.