Where strength and valour deathless deeds perform.
Not ours to bind the blood-stained laurel wreath
In mocking triumph round the brow of death.
No! 'tis our lot to save the failing breath,
'Tis ours to heal each wound, and hush each moan,
To take from other hearts the pain into our own."
"It seems to me," said Tony, "that we are expected to do all the work,
and have none of the fun."
"It seems to _me_," said Marie, "that by the time we have filled
ourselves up with other people's pains, we won't care much about fun.
Did Reverend Mother, I wonder, heal wounds and hush up moans?"
"St. Elizabeth did," explained Elizabeth. "Her husband went to the
Holy Land, and was killed, and then she became a nun. There are some
lines at the end, that I don't know yet, about Reverend Mother,--
'Seeking the shelter of the cloister gate,
Like the dear Saint whose name we venerate.'
Madame Rayburn wants me to make an act, and learn the rest of it at
recreation this afternoon. That horrid old geography takes up all my
study time."
"I've made three acts to-day," observed Lilly complacently, "and said a
whole pair of beads this morning at Mass for the spiritual bouquet."
"I haven't made one act," I cried aghast. "I haven't done anything at
all, and I don't know what to do."
"You might make one now," said Elizabeth thoughtfully, "and go talk to
Adelaide Harrison."
I glanced at Adelaide, who was sitting on the edge of her desk,
absorbed in a book. "Oh, I don't want to," I wailed.
"If you wanted to, it wouldn't be an act," said Elizabeth.
"But she doesn't want me to," I urged. "She is reading 'Fabiola.'"
"Then you'll give her the chance to make an act, too," said the
relentless Elizabeth.
Argued into a corner, I turned at bay. "I won't," I said resolutely; to
which Elizabeth replied: "Well, I wouldn't either, in your place," and
the painful subject was dropped.
Four days before the feast the excitement had reached fever point,
though the routine of school life went on with the same smooth
precision. Every penny had been hoarded up for the candy fair. It was
with the utmost reluctance that we bought even the stamps for our
home letters, those weekly letters we were compelled to write, and
which were such pale reflections of our eager and vehement selves.
Perhaps this was because we knew that every line was read by Madame
Bouron before it left the convent; perhaps the discipline of those
days discouraged familiarity with our parents; perhaps the barrier
which nature builds between the adult and the normal child was alone
responsible for our lack of spontaneity. Certain it is that the stiffly
written pages despatched to father or to mother every Sunday night gave
no hint of our abundant and restless vitality, our zest for the little
feast of life, our exaltations, our resentments, our thrice-blessed
absurdities. Entrenched in the citadel of childhood, with laws of our
own making, and passwords of our own devising, our souls bade defiance
to the world.
If all our hopes centred in the _congé_, the candy fair, and
the operetta,--which was to be produced on a scale of unwonted
magnificence,--our time was sternly devoted to the unpitying exactions
of geography. Every night we took our atlases to bed with us, under
the impression that sleeping on a book would help us to remember its
contents. As the atlases were big, and our pillows very small, this
device was pregnant with discomfort. On the fourth night before the
feast, something wonderful happened. It was the evening study hour,
and I was wrestling sleepily with the mountains of Asia,--hideous
excrescences with unpronounceable and unrememberable names,--when
Madame Rayburn entered the room. As we rose to our feet, we saw that
she looked very grave, and our minds took a backward leap over the
day. Had we done anything unusually bad, anything that could call down
upon us a public indictment, and was Madame Rayburn for once filling
Madame Bouron's office? We could think of nothing; but life was full of
pitfalls, and there was no sense of security in our souls. We waited
anxiously.
"Children," said Madame Rayburn, "I have sorrowful news for you.
Reverend Mother has been summoned to France. She sails on her feast
day, and leaves for New York to-morrow."
We stared open-mouthed and aghast. The ground seemed sinking from under
our feet, the walls crumbling about us. Reverend Mother sailing for
France! And on her feast day, too,--the feast for which so many ardent
preparations had been made. The _congé_, the competition, the address,
the operetta, the spiritual bouquet, the candy fair,--were they, too,
sailing away into the land of lost things? To have asked one of the
questions that trembled on our lips would have been an unheard-of
liberty. We listened in respectful silence, our eyes riveted on Madame
Rayburn's face.
"You will all go to the chapel now," she said. "To-night we begin
a novena to _Mater Admirabilis_ for Reverend Mother's safe voyage.
She dreads it very much, and she is sad at leaving you. Pray for her
devoutly. Madame Dane will bring you down to the chapel."
She turned to go. Our hearts beat violently. She knew, she could not
fail to know, the thought that was uppermost in every mind. She was
too experienced and too sympathetic to miss the significance of our
strained and wistful gaze. A shadowy smile crossed her face. "Madame
Bouron would have told you to-morrow," she said, "what I think I shall
tell you to-night. It is Reverend Mother's express desire that you
should have your _congé_ on her feast, though she will not be here to
enjoy it with you."
A sigh of relief, a sigh which we could not help permitting to be
audible, shivered softly around the room. The day was saved; yet, as we
marched to the chapel, there was a turmoil of agitation in our hearts.
We knew that from far-away France--from a mysterious and all-powerful
person who dwelt there, and who was called Mother General--came the
mandates which governed our community. This was not the first sudden
departure we had witnessed; but Reverend Mother seemed so august,
so permanent, so immobile. Her very size protested mutely against
upheaval. Should we never again see that familiar figure sitting in
her stall, peering through her glass into a massive prayer-book, a
leviathan of prayer-books, as imposing in its way as she was, or
blinking sleepily at us as we filed by? Why, if somebody were needed
in France, had it not pleased Mother General to send for Madame Bouron?
Many a dry eye would have seen _her_ go. But then, as Lilly whispered
to me, suppose it had been Madame Rayburn. There was a tightening of
my heart-strings at the thought, a sudden suffocating pang, dimly
foreboding the grief of another year.
The consensus of opinion, as gathered that evening in the dormitory,
was not unlike the old Jacobite epitaph on Frederick, Prince of Wales.
Every one of us was sincerely sorry that Madame Bouron had not been
summoned,--
"Had it been his father,
We had much rather;"
but glad that Madame Dane, or Madame Rayburn, or Madame Duncan, or some
other favourite nun had escaped.
"Since it's only Fred
Who was alive, and is dead,
There is no more to be said."
The loss of our Superioress was bewildering, but not, for us, a thing
of deep concern. We should sleep as sweetly as usual that night.
The next morning we were all gathered into the big First Cours
classroom, where Reverend Mother came to bid us good-by. It was a
solemn leave-taking. The address was no longer in order; but the
spiritual bouquet had been made up the night before, and was presented
in our name by Madame Bouron, who read out the generous sum-total of
prayers, and acts, and offered-up trials, and resisted temptations,
which constituted our feast-day gift. As Reverend Mother listened,
I saw a large tear roll slowly down her cheek, and my heart smote
me--my heart was always smiting me when it was too late--that I had
contributed so meagrely to the donation. I remembered the chocolate
custard, and thought--for one mistaken moment--that I should never
want to taste of that beloved dish again. Perhaps if I had offered it
up, Reverend Mother would cross the sea in safety. Perhaps, because I
ate it, she would have storms, and be drowned. The doubtful justice of
this arrangement was no more apparent to me than its unlikelihood. We
were accustomed to think that the wide universe was planned and run for
our reward and punishment. A rainy Sunday following the misdeeds of
Saturday was to us a logical sequence of events.
When the bouquet had been presented, Reverend Mother said a few
words of farewell. She said them as if she were sad at heart, not
only at crossing the ocean, not only at parting from her community,
but at leaving us, as well. I suppose she loved us collectively.
She couldn't have loved us individually, knowing us only as two long
rows of uniformed, curtsying schoolgirls, whose features she was too
near-sighted to distinguish. On the other hand, if our charms and our
virtues were lost to her, so were our less engaging qualities. Perhaps,
taken collectively, we were rather lovable. Our uniforms were spotless,
our hair superlatively smooth,--no blowsy, tossing locks, as in these
days of libertinism, and our curtsies as graceful as hours of practice
could make them. We sank and rose like the crest of a wave. On the
whole, Reverend Mother had the best of us. Madame Bouron might have
been pardoned for taking a less sentimental view of the situation.
That afternoon, while we were at French class, Reverend Mother
departed. We heard the carriage roll away, but were not permitted to
rush to the windows and look at it, which would have been a welcome
distraction from our verbs. An hour later, at recreation, Madame
Rayburn sent for Elizabeth. She was gone fifteen minutes, and came
back, tense with suppressed excitement.
"Oh, what is it?" we cried. "The _congé_ is all right?"
"All right," said Elizabeth.
"And the candy fair?" asked Lilly, whose father had given her a dollar
to squander upon sweets.
"Oh, it's all right, too. The candy is here now; and Ella Holrook and
Mary Denniston and Isabel Summers are to have charge of the tables.
Madame Dane told me that yesterday."
Our faces lightened, and then fell. "Is it the competition?" I asked
apprehensively.
Elizabeth looked disconcerted. It was plain she knew nothing about
the competition, and hated to avow her ignorance. We always felt so
important when we had news to tell. "Of course, after studying all that
geography, we'll have to say it sooner or later," she said. "But"--a
triumphant pause--"a new Reverend Mother is coming to-morrow."
"_Ciel!_" murmured Marie, relapsing into agitated French; while Tony
whistled softly, and Emily and I stared at each other in silence. The
speed with which things were happening took our breath away.
"Coming to-morrow," repeated Elizabeth; "and I'm going to say the
address as a welcome to her, on the night of the _congé_, before the
operetta."
"Is her name Elizabeth, too?" I asked, bewildered.
"No, her name is Catherine. Madame Rayburn is going to leave out the
lines about St. Elizabeth, and put in something about St. Catherine
of Siena instead. That's why she wanted the address. And she is going
to change the part about not sharing the Senate's stern debate, nor
guiding with faltering hand the helm of state, because St. Catherine
did guide the helm of state. At least, she went to Avignon, and argued
with the Pope."
"Argued with the Pope!" echoed Marie, scandalized.
"She was a saint, Marie," said Elizabeth impatiently, and driving
home an argument with which Marie herself had familiarized us. "She
persuaded the Pope to go back to Rome. Madame Rayburn would like Kate
Shaw to make the address; but she says there isn't time for another
girl to study it."
"When is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena?" cried Tony, fired
suddenly by a happy thought. "Maybe we'll have another _congé_ then."
She rushed off to consult her prayer-book. Lilly followed her, and in a
moment their two heads were pressed close together, as they scanned the
Roman calendar hopefully. But before my eyes rose the image of Reverend
Mother, our lost Reverend Mother, with the slow teardrop rolling down
her cheek. Her operetta was to be sung to another. Her address was
to be made to another. Her very saint was pushed aside in honour of
another holy patroness. "The King is dead. Long live the King."
The Game of Love
It was an ancient and honourable convent custom for the little girls in
the Second Cours to cultivate an ardent passion for certain carefully
selected big girls in the First Cours, to hold a court of love, and vie
with one another in extravagant demonstrations of affection. We were
called "satellites," and our homage was understood to be of that noble
and exalted nature which is content with self-immolation. No response
of any kind was ever vouchsafed us. No favours of any kind were ever
granted us. The objects of our devotion--ripe scholars sixteen and
seventeen years old--regarded us either with good-humoured indifference
or unqualified contempt. Any other line of action on their part would
have been unprecedented and disconcerting. We did not want petting. We
were not the lap-dog variety of children. We wanted to play the game
of love according to set rules,--rules which we found in force when we
came to school, and which we had no mind to alter.
Yet one of these unwritten laws--which set a limit to inconstancy--I
had already broken; and Elizabeth, who was an authority on the code,
offered a grave remonstrance. "We really don't change that quickly,"
she said with concern.
I made no answer. I had "changed" very quickly, and, though incapable
of self-analysis, I was not without a dim foreboding that I would
change again.
"You were wild about Isabel Summers," went on Elizabeth accusingly.
"No, I wasn't," I confessed.
"But you said you were."
Again I was silent. The one thing a child cannot do is explain a
complicated situation, even to another child. How could I hope to
make Elizabeth understand that, eager to worship at some shrine, I
had chosen Isabel Summers with a deliberation that boded ill for my
fidelity. She was a thin, blue-eyed girl, with a delicate purity of
outline, and heavy braids of beautiful fair hair. Her loveliness, her
sensitive temperament, her early and tragic death (she was drowned
the following summer), enshrined her sweetly in our memories. She
became one of the traditions of the school, and we told her tale--as
of another Virginia--to all new-comers. But in the early days when I
laid my heart at her feet, I knew only that she had hair like pale
sunshine, and that, for a First Cours girl, she was strangely tolerant
of my attentions. If I ventured to offer her the dozen chestnuts that
had rewarded an hour's diligent search, she thanked me for them with
a smile. If I darned her stockings with painstaking neatness,--a
privilege solicited from Sister O'Neil, who had the care of our
clothes,--she sometimes went so far as to commend my work. I felt
that I was blessed beyond my comrades (Ella Holrook snubbed Tony, and
Antoinette Mayo ignored Lilly's existence), yet there were moments
when I detected a certain insipidity in the situation. It lacked the
incentive of impediment.
Then in November, Julia Reynolds, who had been absent, I know not why,
returned to school; and I realized the difference between cherishing
a tender passion and being consumed by one, between fanning a flame
and being burned. To make all this clear to Elizabeth, who was passion
proof, lay far beyond my power. When she said,--
"Holy Saint Francis! what a change is here,"
--or words to that effect,--I had not even Romeo's feeble excuses to
offer, though I was as obstinate as Romeo in clinging to my new love.
Tony supported me, having a roving fancy of her own, and being constant
to Ella Holrook, only because that imperious graduate regarded her as
an intolerable nuisance.
Julia's views on the subject of satellites were even more pronounced.
She enjoyed a painful popularity in the Second Cours, and there were
always half a dozen children abjectly and irritatingly in love with
her. She was held to be the cleverest girl in the school, a reputation
skilfully maintained by an unbroken superciliousness of demeanour.
Her handsome mouth was set in scornful lines; her words, except to
chosen friends, were few and cold. She carried on an internecine
warfare with Madame Bouron, fighting that redoubtable nun with her
own weapons,--icy composure, a mock humility, and polite phrases that
carried a hidden sting. It was for this, for her arrogance,--she was
as contemptuous as a cat,--and for a certain elusiveness, suggestive
even to my untrained mind of new and strange developments, that I
surrendered to her for a season all of my heart,--all of it, at least,
that was not the permanent possession of Madame Rayburn and Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was not playing the game. She was nobody's satellite just
then, being occupied with a new cult for a new nun, whom it pleased
her to have us all adore. The new nun, Madame Dane, was a formidable
person, whom, left to myself, I should have timorously avoided; but
for whom, following Elizabeth's example, I acquired in time a very
creditable enthusiasm. She was tall and high-shouldered, and she
had what Colly Cibber felicitously describes as a "poking head."
We, who had yet to hear of Colly Cibber, admired this peculiar
carriage,--Elizabeth said it was aristocratic,--and we imitated it
as far as we dared, which was not very far, our shoulders being as
rigorously supervised as our souls. Any indication of a stoop on
_my_ part was checked by an hour's painful promenade up and down the
corridor, with a walking-stick held between my elbows and my back, and
a heavy book balanced on my head. The treatment was efficacious. Rather
than be so wearisomely ridiculous, I held myself straight as a dart.
Madame Dane, for all her lack of deportment, was the stiffest and
sternest of martinets. She had a passion for order, for precision, for
symmetry. It was, I am sure, a lasting grievance to her that we were of
different heights, and that we could never acquire the sameness and
immobility of chessmen. She did her best by arranging and rearranging
us in the line of procession when we marched down to the chapel,
unable to decide whether Elizabeth was a hair's breadth taller than
Tony, whether Mary Aylmer and Eloise Didier matched exactly, whether
Viola had better walk before Maggie McCullah, or behind her. She
never permitted us to open our desks during study hours, or when we
were writing our exercises. This was a general rule, but Madame Dane
alone enforced it absolutely. If I forgot to take my grammar or my
natural philosophy out of my desk when I sat down to work (and I was an
addlepated child who forgot everything), I had to go to class with my
grammar or my natural philosophy unstudied, and bear the consequences.
To have borrowed my neighbour's book would have been as great a breach
of discipline as to have hunted for my own. At night and morning
prayers we were obliged to lay our folded hands in exactly the same
position on the second rung of our chair backs. If we lifted them
unconsciously to the top rung, Madame Dane swooped down upon us like
a falcon upon errant doves,--which was dreadfully distracting to our
devotions.
"I don't see how she stands our hair being of different lengths," said
Tony. "It must worry her dreadfully. I caught her the other night
eyeing Eloise Didier's long plats and my little pigtails in a most
uneasy manner. Some day she'll insist on our all having it cut short,
like Elizabeth and Agnes."
"That would be sensible," said Elizabeth stoutly, while Lilly put up
her hands with a quick, instinctive gesture, as if to save her curly
locks from destruction.
"_You_ needn't talk," went on Tony with impolite emphasis, "after
what you made her go through last Sunday. You and Agnes in your old
black veils. I don't believe she was able to read her Mass prayers for
looking at you."
Elizabeth grinned. She was not without a humorous enjoyment of the
situation. Our black veils, which throughout the week were considered
decorous and devotional, indicated on Sundays--when white veils were in
order--a depth of unpardoned and unpardonable depravity. When Elizabeth
and I were condemned to wear ours to Sunday Mass and Vespers,--two
little black sheep in that vast snowy flock,--we were understood to
be, for the time, moral lepers, to be cut off from spiritual communion
with the elect. We were like those eminent sinners who, in the good old
days when people had an eye to effect, did penance in sheets and with
lighted tapers at cathedral doors,--thus adding immeasurably to the
interest of church-going, and to the general picturesqueness of life.
The ordeal was not for us the harrowing thing it seemed. Elizabeth's
practical mind had but a feeble grasp of symbols. Burne-Jones and
Maeterlinck would have conveyed no message to her, and a black veil
amid the Sunday whiteness failed to disturb her equanimity. As for
me, I was content to wear what Elizabeth wore. Where MacGregor sat
was always the head of the table. The one real sufferer was the
innocent Madame Dane, whose Sabbath was embittered by the sight of two
sable spots staining the argent field, and by the knowledge that the
culprits were her own Second Cours children, for whom she held herself
responsible.
"She told me," said Elizabeth, "that if ever I let such a thing happen
to me again, I shouldn't walk by her side all winter."
Lilly lifted her eyebrows, and Tony gave a grunt of deep significance.
It meant that this would be an endurable misfortune. A cult was all
very well, and Tony, like the rest of us, was prepared to play an
honourable part. But Elizabeth's persistent fancy for walking by our
idol's side at recreation had become a good deal of a nuisance. We
considered that Madame Dane was, for a grown-up person, singularly
vivacious and agreeable. She told us some of Poe's stories--notably
"The Pit and the Pendulum"--in a manner which nearly stopped the
beating of our hearts. We were well disposed even to her rigours. There
was a straightforwardness about her methods which commended itself to
our sense of justice no less than to our sense of humour. She dealt
with us after fashions of her own; and, if she were constitutionally
incapable of distinguishing between wilful murder and crossing one's
legs in class, she would have scorned to carry any of our misdemeanours
to Madame Bouron's tribunal. We felt that she had companionable
qualities, rendered in some measure worthless by her advanced years;
for, after all, adults have but a narrow field in which to exercise
their gifts. There was a pleasant distinction in walking by Madame
Dane's side up and down Mulberry Avenue, even in the unfamiliar society
of Adelaide Harrison, and Mary Rawdon, who was a green ribbon, and
Ellie Plunkett, who was head of the roll of honour; but it would have
been much better fun to have held aloof, and have played that we
were English gypsies, and that Madame Dane was Ulrica of the Banded
Brow,--just then our favourite character in fiction.