MOTHER FELICITAS.
“Ah!”
It was an indescribable sound, and it stopped sweet-faced Sister
De Sales in the serious business of laying out her neat little
account-books.
Mother Felicitas sat in her straight-backed chair in her own parlor
and gripped the table in front of her, as if only by holding fast to
something could she keep from drifting out on the great sea of death.
She had not been herself since that strange disappearance of Beryl
Corselas. A constant, agonized fear that ate at her heart had made even
her agonized nerves give way, her step that had been noiseless, heavy
and uncertain, her pale skin like parchment stretched over bone. And
this morning she had heard that which wrung a cry from her stiff lips,
though she was not alone to bear her terror.
“Dear mother, what is it?” cried Sister De Sales, flurriedly rising.
“You are ill--suffering?”
For the reverend mother’s face was more grayish-white than the
whitewashed plaster of the parlor walls.
Mother Felicitas nodded speechlessly. But for all that sudden pang
at her heart, she moved her hand jerkily, so that it covered an open
letter on the table.
“Water--a faintness!” she managed to say. But when Sister De Sales got
back with water and wine the reverend mother was lying back in her
chair.
The sister was a simple soul, and saw only that the Mother Superior’s
ill turn was over; not--what the dead Mother Benedicta would have
seen--that a certain pale-blue, gold-embossed note that had been
conspicuous enough among a batch of business-letters had disappeared
from sight.
It was the day for going over the week’s accounts, and Sister De Sales
was wont to dread it, in spite of possessing a good head for figures,
so sharp were the reverend mother’s sunken eyes and so keen her instant
detection of a penny out in the balance-sheet. But to-day she would
willingly have seen her books all proved wrong if only the superior
could have strength to do it.
“You are not well, dear mother; you would see the doctor if I sent for
him?” she said timidly, looking at the gray pallor of the hard face.
Mother Felicitas roused herself.
“No, sister, no!” she said, with a sort of panic, and forced her manner
to its old authority. “It is nothing. I am not so young as I was, and I
forget it, perhaps. But we will leave the accounts till to-morrow. I--I
will rest now.”
She made no demur as the anxious sister placed a stool under her feet,
but at the gentle coaxing to drink some wine she frowned harshly.
“No, no! Go,” she said, “and let me rest. Those things, as I said, can
wait.”
Sister De Sales withdrew, softly, aghast. Never in all her convent-life
had she known any duty postponed “till to-morrow.” The reverend mother
must be very ill, indeed. She would see Sister Agnes; between them they
might make Mother Felicitas see reason and a doctor. The excuse for her
sudden faintness was but the unselfish desire to spare others pain.
“Not so young as I was,” she had said, and Sister De Sales, stout and
forty-five, knew that she was the elder of the two by a year or more.
Yet behind that closed door it was an old, old woman who dragged
herself to it and shot the bolt. It had taken all her self-control not
to scream at Sister De Sales to be silent with her foolish talk about a
doctor. She would have no doctor to speak learnedly to the next in rank
of an overworked body and a troubled mind.
“I won’t have any doctor,” she said to herself, as she sank on her hard
chair again. “I’m not dying--not yet! I can’t die,” she whispered with
a shudder. “I should see them all standing round my coffin, I should
hear their astonishment. Sister De Sales, who thinks I am a saint;
Father Maurice, the new chaplain, almost crying because I had withheld
my sins from him in the confessional.” Her face grew strong again as
she thought where they would bury her--in unconsecrated ground.
She was a clever woman; she knew even in her wretchedness now that of
all the convent not one nun had a personal ambition but herself. She
had felt the gentle piety round her stifling often enough, though she
had managed never to show it. There had been reasons for her to leave
the world, but even here in seclusion she had worked and strained for
the power she had reached--worked half for safety, that there might be
no one over her, half to find peace for her miserable mind.
Well, she had had her way! She ruled the convent as no one before her
had ever done. The community had never been so rich, so respected;
the nuns, if they did not love her, held her in awe for her saintly
austerity, her ceaseless industry--and here was what it had all come
to. Every one of those good and gentle women, who were saints, indeed,
would shrink from the holy mother raised above them if her secret
history were revealed. Alive, she would be excommunicated; dead, she
writhed in her chair as she thought of the hushed astonishment, the
shocked amazement of the little world she ruled.
“No, no, no!” she said to herself. “As I have lived I will die and be
buried; no one shall ever know. But I can’t die yet.”
She stretched out her hand for the wine she had refused, and drank it
eagerly. No woman in the world had lived a harder, more self-denying
life than she. Was it all to count for nothing now, just for the want
of a little resource, a little more courage?
“No one shall know,” she said again, as the wine brought some warmth to
her slow blood. As she lifted her eyes they caught the inscription of a
picture on the wall.
“‘Death and the Judgment.’” The words struck her like an actual blow,
but she never lowered her startled eyes.
What she had done she had done. She was willing to bear the brunt of
it, but not the shame of humiliation before the nuns, who revered her
in their pure and gentle hearts.
“‘Death and the Judgment,’” she thought, but she dared not say it
aloud, when, for all she knew, Death might be at her very elbow, and
for the Judgment she was unprepared.
Yet no idea of a tardy repentance, a confession at the eleventh hour,
entered her fevered mind, as she drew that terrible letter out of the
folds of her habit. She had fought her own battles; she would fight
them once more, and then die, if she must, in the odor of sanctity. She
thrust away the thought that this strange horror at her heart was the
beginning of repentance. Almost she felt her own strong self again, as
she deliberately opened and reread the letter that had shaken her nerve
till she cried out.
Yet it was only a civil, well-meaning letter from one woman to another.
“Mrs. Fuller presents her compliments to the superioress of St. Mary’s
Convent, and begs to inform her that she knows nothing of the missing
pupil of that institution who was supposed to be traveling on the
Continent in her care. Mrs. Fuller was both surprised and horrified
to find that unscrupulous persons had made use of her name to deceive
the matron and guardians of St. Anne’s Workhouse. The unknown woman
who carried off the girl under Mrs. Fuller’s name must have been
fully cognizant of her movements, as she had certainly spent the
winter abroad with an invalid niece. Mrs. Fuller begged to assure the
superioress of her deep sympathy in her anxiety for the young girl who
was lost, and also to inform her that she had set a detective to work
to trace out the wretches who have made so wicked and cruel a use of
her name. As yet no clue had been found to their identity.”
A second note was enclosed in another hand, and it was this that
had brought the reverend mother low, though it was but a rather
disconcerted epistle from a well-known detective to his employer,
regretting that so far he had discovered nothing.
“I may mention as a curious coincidence,” ran that paragraph that had
wrung a cry from the wretched woman, “that if the missing girl’s name
is really Beryl Corselas, her discovery is a matter of importance,
as it may throw light on an unexplained case of murder and abduction
which puzzled the whole force years ago, and, incidentally, may
deprive a certain noble family of their estates. But that, of course,
is between you and me.”
It struck Mother Felicitas that the detective’s letter was not
especially businesslike; but it would have put fresh terror in her
soul had she known why. The man was under a deep obligation to Mrs.
Fuller, had thorough trust--this time misplaced--in her discretion,
and was ready to turn the world upside down to find out the person
who had dared to take such liberties with her name. But as it was,
Mother Felicitas had read enough. She thought of that note written to
the guardians in which she had said that it was on her authority Mrs.
Fuller had taken the girl from the workhouse.
“I can explain that if I am obliged to,” she thought heavily. “My
lawyer will bear me out that I sent him to make inquiries,” but her
brain went swiftly as she wondered if the workhouse authorities had
that letter--or Erceldonne.
If he had it, her foolhardiness alone had put it in his hands.
“He would not dare to use it,” she thought, and wiped her upper lip,
that was wet. “It must be he who has the girl; no one else would be
bold enough. And if he has her, he would not keep her. The money that I
meant----” The pain struck her heart again, and more dizzily than ever
she caught at the table for support. When it passed she could no longer
force herself to think.
Dim visions passed before her eyes of a boy she had loved; of another,
a half-grown lad, whom she had not known existed till he was brought
home from Eton and coolly introduced to her as Erceldonne’s eldest son;
of a baby girl she had loathed because she was what a fair-haired boy
could never be; of a thing she had done to make a man stand in terror
of her, and for hatred of a woman who had never wronged her. It had
been in that man’s interest to keep Mother Felicitas quiet--if he knew
her secret--all of it!--or not.
If he knew!
She groaned aloud. He must have found out something or he would never
have burdened himself with a homeless girl, long ago thought dead and
gone. He must know about the money, and meant it and the girl to go to
his son with the hard, brown eyes, for whose sake another lad had been
turned out on the world to sink or swim as he liked.
Hand in hand, the miserable woman seemed to see that brown-eyed boy
and that baby girl, though the years had long since made them man and
woman. If they stood so, indeed, Erceldonne could defy her, could
afford to stand aside in silence and let her old sins come to light.
Looking back, Mother Felicitas could see with what a devilish
cleverness he had always stood aside, trusting to chance and the hour
to do what he dared not put his hand to. Only once had she known him
to show any trace of human feeling--when he took that fair-haired
boy, who had no other real name but Guy, from the third-rate school,
where he was a half-starved teacher, and gave him five hundred pounds
to start for himself in sugar-planting in Jamaica. She knew that was
true, for she had seen the boy’s grateful letters to the man he only
knew as a distant friend of his father. It had been sent to her, she
knew very well by whom, as the easiest way of telling a professed nun.
It began: “My dear Mr. Egerton,” but Mother Felicitas knew that Lord
Erceldonne’s conscience would not require him to tell the truth when
he did a kindness. That memory had softened her heart a little to the
man she hated; it was as well for him that she did not know the bloody
fragments of that uncashed check had lain on a sunny hillside till they
blew away, instead of being cashed at Lord Erceldonne’s bankers.
“I can’t remember that; it wouldn’t save me,” she thought restlessly.
“I must think of myself.”
While there was life in her she would make one struggle more; once
more, perhaps, feel the joy of power stir in her and bring a hard man
to terms.
Some one knocked at the door. To the reverend mother it sounded like
the hand of fate that will not be denied. It seemed to her racked
nerves that it must be Erceldonne himself who stood outside, ready to
cry her shame aloud. It took all her strength to open the bolted door,
and as it swung back the two nuns who waited there stood petrified.
The reverend mother towered over them, clutching the door-handle and
glaring at them with the eyes of a wild beast. At the sight of their
startled faces she broke into a loud, hysterical laugh that nearly made
Sister De Sales, the timid, turn and run.
Holding the door-handle, the superior laughed and laughed till the
tears ran down her cheeks.
“I’m better--quite well!” she cried, that strange laughter ending as
abruptly as it began. “But Sister De Sales is right. I’m not myself.
Next week I will go to the retreat at the convent in Blackpool for a
change.”
The waters of terror were up to her very chin, but she would wade
through them as she had always done, and get back to firm ground.