A FRIENDLESS FUGITIVE.
Mother Benedicta, careful of many things, had meant to add the mystery
of Beryl Corselas to her burden, but fate was stronger than she, who
had been for so many years the capable head of the community.
Two days after Andria’s departure, death had called her very quietly.
Unanointed, unshriven, and with the questions she had meant to ask
Sister Felicitas yet unspoken, the good mother had followed the beaten
pathway the saints have left toward heaven.
It was Sister Felicitas who found her dead in her bed, but it was not
prayer for the superior’s soul that sent the sister to her knees, but
utter thankfulness that a stumbling-block was gone from her path. Beryl
Corselas heard the news in stony silence. Only once had the reverend
mother ever noticed her; and yet she felt alone. Andria, though the
weeks went by, never wrote, just as the child had prophesied; for
with all her unchildlike wisdom she never thought that it was Sister
Felicitas who opened the letters now, and that Andria’s promise was
well kept for a year.
After that year perhaps she dared not write to the convent--who shall
say? But her letters ceased. And Sister Felicitas rose steadily in the
community, till five years after Mother Benedicta’s death she had been
made Mother Superior.
Only Beryl Corselas knew what the story of those five years had been.
Years of injustice, of petty tortures--Mother Benedicta was not cold
in her grave before the rabbits were killed by the cook before the
very eyes of their shrieking, fainting owner--years of slow warping of
a child’s spirit till, now a girl of sixteen, she was deceitful from
fear, silent from sullen hopelessness, and almost ugly from misery.
She sat alone in an empty class-room, where her face was but a white
spot in the growing dusk of evening. The heavy lids drooped over her
tearless eyes; she was past crying now, as she was past all childish
things. Mother Benedicta would have turned in her grave had she seen
how those years of pain had changed the child’s looks, how tall
and ill-nourished she was in her out-grown convent uniform. Sister
Felicitas punished by depriving the growing girl of proper food; she
was under sentence now where she sat in the empty class-room, and heard
the clatter of other hungry girls in the refectory. And hunger--and
something else--was making her as dangerous as a wild beast.
“If I don’t get out of this I’ll kill her!” she thought, clasping
and unclasping her strong young hands. “And I know she doesn’t mean
me ever to get out. She means to make me a nun, and it’s no use my
telling Father Parker I’ve no vocation, for he’s deaf, and never hears
what I say. She can take her time and yell at him. If I shout in the
confessional I only get punished. The other nuns would stand up for
me--some of them. But, though this might keep me from being made a
novice, they couldn’t keep me from being made a lay sister; for it’s
in the charter that charity girls must pay the convent back for their
keep, somehow. And she’ll never let me go out into the world to do it.
I--I’d be willing to starve if I could only get away!”
She got up and went to the window, heedless of bumps against the empty
forms. But outside there was nothing to see but a November garden, cold
and barren, and a homeless cat, crossing it furtively.
The girl watched the miserable creature with the painful sympathy she
felt for all animals. In the dusk she saw it leap nimbly to the top of
the high wall and disappear. The convent rebel did not even know what
was on the other side of that wall; but she knew too well what was on
this side. A lay sister’s life, spent in the kitchens; in scrubbing and
killing fowls. She shuddered. And Mother Felicitas’ eye was always on
her; always with the same threat, the same malice.
She peered into the twilight. The stray cat was gone. Beryl Corselas
stretched her young body, stiff with long sitting, just as the cat
itself might have done before it started on its furtive journey. But
when a sad-eyed nun came and let her out of the locked class-room her
face was as sullenly vacant as usual. There was no one, not even Mother
Felicitas, full of self-conceit at her realized ambition, to know that
the girl’s pulses were playing a wild tune that night, and that the
childhood that had sat so strangely on her had fallen from her like a
garment.
Unnoticed, Beryl slipped up to bed before the other charity pupil; and
undressed in their joint alcove. Pale and too slender in her white
cotton nightgown, she passed under the white sheet that separated her
cubicle from the next. It belonged to a rich West Indian girl, and in
a box on the table were sovereigns, as she had known there would be.
Without a pang of hesitation Beryl Corselas took two in the glimmer
of the floating night-light. Then she lifted the sheet and slipped
under it, back to her own alcove, just in time. As she put the coins
noiselessly into her bed, the stout girl who shared the alcove came
in. She whispered sharply, though talking was forbidden: “You’re to be
moved to-morrow; sent to the kitchen with Sister Agnes. I wish I was
you; you’ll get enough to eat. Sister Agnes is just sweet.”
Beryl raised her eyebrows significantly. The sister in charge was
clapping her hands as a signal for the girls to say their evening
prayers. But there were no prayers on the lips of one girl on her knees.
Would it ever be quiet? Would the tossing of the girls never cease as
they twisted on their narrow beds? It seemed years to Beryl, lying
motionless in hers, longing for the dead middle of the night to bring
quiet breathing to the hundred sleepers round her. A wakeful devil
seemed to be making his rounds among them; girl after girl turned,
tossed, and coughed; not till long after midnight was the hush settled
and complete, and not till then did Beryl Corselas, whose blood was
thumping with suspense and determination, stir on her hard bed.
Absolutely without sound she sat upright and looked about her.
Her business would have been more easily done in the dark, but in
every alcove there floated a wick in an inch of oil buoyed up in a jar
full of water. In the glimmering, unearthly light the white sheets
separating the alcoves seemed to stir, but she was used to that; and to
have put out the dull light would have waked the heavy sleeper in the
next bed.
Barefooted, Beryl slipped to the cold floor, dressed, put her stolen
money in her pocket, and, shoes in hand, crept through the wide
corridor between the double row of alcoves.
Even the sister in charge heard no sounds as the light step passed,
and not a soul stirred in the convent as the girl stole down the wide,
polished stairs in her stocking feet. In the lower flat it was dark;
she was forced to keep one hand stretched out at arm’s length before
her as she crept inch by inch through the silent house.
The schoolroom door creaked as she opened it, but once inside floods of
moonlight made her way clear. She looked round the room, where she had
sat a hungry prisoner from afternoon school till bedtime, and in her
fierce exultation at leaving it forgot she was still hungry.
The window-fastening gave under her strong fingers, the sash moved
easily, without noise, and, as quietly as the cat she had watched
that evening, the girl dropped in the frozen grass outside. Skirting
the wall she moved quickly to the very spot where the cat had crossed
it, from a kind of superstition that she must climb over at no other
place; and there mounted it with an effortless spring just as the other
wandering thing had done.
With a laugh she slipped to the ground and put on the shoes she
carried. For the cat had been a good pilot. She stood on a road that
she knew led to London, and she stretched out her arms in a kind of
rapture.
She was free from Mother Felicitas at last!
But a waving shadow that came suddenly before her eyes killed her hasty
joy. It was only the shadow of a bare, crooked tree, but its outline
was like an arm outstretched to catch her. “Beryl, you fool!” she
thought. “By morning you will be caught again unless there are miles
between you and the convent.”
She began to run, and not a girl in the school could run like her. Yard
by yard she got over the hard road, till by daylight she found herself
in the suburbs of the great city, though where she did not know. She
walked on soberly till she came to a baker’s shop, and there bought a
roll. There were early risers about, but no one looked at her, for her
plain hat and coat were ordinary enough. Presently she grew bold enough
to stop at a street coffee-stall.
The hot, strong stuff did her good, and as she paid for it she began to
think coherently for the first time since she had gone to bed.
“I must have a place, and I haven’t one!” she pondered as she walked on
refreshed. “If I could get to Andria I should be all right, but----”
Her face grew too grim and bitter for her years. Andria had long ago
forgotten her, and more pertinently still the child of five years ago
had never known where the grown-up girl had gone. There was no hope
in Andria. Without a friend in the world the girl walked quietly on
her aimless way. Long before her absence was discovered--for her stout
roommate merely thought stolidly that Beryl Corselas had got up early,
and said nothing about her empty bed till breakfast-time--she was
adrift like many another waif in the interminable streets of London.