There is a religious house in Rome, beyond the Tiber and not far from
Porta Portese, which I will call the Convent of the White Sisters of
Santa Giovanna d'Aza. Their order is a branch of a great and ancient
one, though it has not had a separate existence a very long time. The
convent contains one of the best private hospitals in Italy, and the
Sisters also go out as trained nurses, like those of several other
orders. But they do something more, which the others do not; for
almost every year two or three, or even four of them go out to the Far
East to work in the leper hospitals which missionaries have
established in Rangoon and elsewhere; and a good many have gone in the
last ten years, but few will ever return.
The convent is much larger than any one would suppose who judged
merely from the uninteresting stuccoed wall which faces the quiet
street, and in which there are a few plain windows without shutters
and a large wooden door, painted a dull green. This door, which is the
main entrance, is opened and shut by the portress as often as a
hundred times a day and more; but when it is open there is nothing to
be seen within but a dark vestibule paved with flagstones; and the
portress's wooden face is no more prepossessing than the wall itself.
If any one asks her a question, she answers civilly in a businesslike
tone, with a hard foreign accent, for she is the widow of one of the
Swiss Guards at the Vatican; but she is naturally silent, stolid,
mechanical, and trustworthy. She is a lay sister and is called Sister
Anna, and she lives in a small room on the left of the vestibule, as
you go in, five steps above the stone pavement. She is very rarely
relieved from her duties for a few hours at a time, and all the
patients must pass her when they enter or leave the house, as well as
the doctors, and the visitors whose smart carriages and motor cars
often stand waiting in the narrow street. Fifty times a day, perhaps,
the door-bell rings and Sister Anna deliberately flaps down the five
steps in her heavily-soled slippers to admit one person or another,
and fifty times, again, she flaps down to let them out again. The
reason why she does not go mad or become an imbecile is that she is
Swiss. That, at least, is how it strikes the celebrated surgeon,
Professor Pieri, who is at the convent very often because he has many
of his patients brought there to be operated on and nursed.
The truth is that the hospital is a thoroughly modern one, which has
been built as an extension of buildings that date from the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. It is managed on soundly scientific
principles, without the least fuss, or any 'board of trustees' or
'committee of management,' or any of that cumbrous administration
which makes so many public hospitals as intricate as labyrinths, only
to be threaded with a clue of red tape, and proportionately
unpractical.
There is a still and sunny garden within, surrounded by a wide and dry
cloister, above which the ancient building rises only one story on the
three sides of the square; but on the fourth side, which looks towards
the sun at noon, there are three stories, which have been built
lately, and the hospital wards are in that wing, one above the other.
On the opposite side, a door opens from the cloister to the choir of
the church, which has also an outer entrance from the street, now
rarely used; for the chaplain comes and goes through the cloister, the
vestibule, and the green door where the portress is.
Beyond her lodge there is a wide hall, with clerestory windows and
glass doors opening to the cloister and the garden; and from this hall
the hospital itself is reached by a passage through which all the
patients are taken. The Mother Superior's rooms are those above the
cloister on the further side of the garden, and have three beautiful
thirteenth century windows divided by pairs of slender columns, so
that each window has two little arches.
In the middle of the garden there is an old well with three arches of
carved stone that spring from three pillars and meet above the centre
of the well-head, and the double iron chain runs over a wheel, and has
two wrought copper buckets, one at each end of it; but the water is
now used only for watering the flowers. There are stone seats round
the well, too, on which three old nuns often sit and sun themselves on
fine days. They are the last of the Sisters of the old time, when
there was no hospital and no training school, and the nuns used to do
anything in the way of nursing that was asked of them by rich or poor,
with a good heart and a laudable intention, but without even the
simplest elements of modern prophylaxis, because it had not been
invented then. For that has all been discovered quite recently, as we
older men can remember only too well.
There are many roses in the garden, and where there is most sun there
is a large bed of carnations, but not of the finer sorts; they are
just plain red and white ones, that fill the air with a scent of warm
cloves on still mornings in the late spring, when it is beginning to
be hot. But if this description has seemed tedious, you must know that
Angela lived in the convent and worked there for five whole years
after Giovanni was lost in Africa; so that it was needful to say
something about her surroundings.
An accomplished psychologist would easily fill a volume with the
history of Angela's soul from the day on which she learned the bad
news till the morning when she made her profession and took the final
vows of her order in the little convent church. But one great
objection to psychological analysis in novels seems to be that the
writer never gets beyond analysing what he believes that he himself
would have felt if placed in the 'situation' he has invented for his
hero or heroine. Thus analysed, Angela Chiaromonte would not have
known herself, any more than those who knew her best, such as Madame
Bernard and her aunt the Princess, would have recognised her. I shall
not try to 'factorise' the result represented by her state of mind
from time to time; still less shall I employ a mathematical process to
prove that the ratio of _dx_ to _dy_ is twice _x_, the change in
Angela at any moment of her moral growth.
What has happened must be logical, just because it has happened; if we
do not understand the logic, that may or may not be the worse for us,
but the facts remain.
It is easy, too, to talk of a 'vocation' and to lay down the law
regarding it, in order to say that such and such a woman acted wisely
in entering a religious order, or that such another made a mistake.
The fact that there is no such law is itself the reason why neither a
man nor a woman is permitted nowadays to take permanent vows until
after a considerable period of probation, first as a 'postulant' and
then as a novice.
For my own part, when Angela Chiaromonte left Madame Bernard's
pleasant rooms in Trastevere and went into the convent hospital of
Santa Giovanna d'Aza through the green door, I do not believe that she
had the very smallest intention of becoming a nun, nor that she felt
anything like what devout persons call a 'vocation.' It was not to
disappear from the world for ever that she went there, and it was not
in order to be alone with her sorrow, though that would have been a
natural and human impulse; nor was it because she felt herself drawn
to an existence of asceticism and mystic meditation.
The prospect of work was what attracted her. She was a perfectly
healthy-minded girl, and though she might never cease to mourn the man
she had loved, it was to be foreseen that in all other respects she
might recover entirely from the terrible shock and live out a normal
life. Under ordinary circumstances that is what would have happened;
she would have gone back to the world after a time, outwardly the
same, though inwardly changed in so far as all possibilities of love
and marriage were concerned; she would have lived in society, year
after year, growing old gracefully and tenderly, as some unmarried
women do whose stories we never knew or have forgotten, but whose
hearts are far away, watching for the great To-morrow, beside a dead
man's grave, or praying before an altar whence the god has departed.
They are women whom we never call 'old maids,' perhaps because we feel
that in memory they are sharing their lives with a well-loved
companion whom we cannot see. That might have been Angela's future.
But a brutal fact put such a possibility out of the question. She was
a destitute orphan, living on the charity of her former governess,
whereas her nature was independent, brave, and self-reliant. When she
rose above the wave that had overwhelmed her, and opened her eyes and
found her senses again, her instinct was to strike out for herself,
and though she talked with Monsignor Saracinesca again and again, she
had really made up her mind after her first conversation with him. She
saw that she must work for her living, but at the same time she longed
to devote her life to some good work for Giovanni's sake. The
churchman told her that if she could learn to nurse the sick, she
might accomplish both ends.
He never suggested that she should become a nun, or take upon herself
any permanent obligation. He had seen much of human nature; the girl
was very young, and perhaps he underrated the strength of her love for
the dead man, and thought that she might yet marry happily and live a
normal woman's life. But there was no reason why she should not become
a trained nurse in the meantime, and there was room for her in the
nuns' hospital of Saint Joan of Aza, an institution which owes its
first beginnings and much of its present success to the protection of
the Saracinesca family, and more particularly to the Princess herself,
the beautiful Donna Corona of other days, and to her second son,
Monsignor Ippolito. The hospital was always in need of young nurses,
especially since a good many of the older ones were going to the Far
East, and when there was a choice the Mother Superior gave the
preference to applicants from the better classes.
The matter was therefore settled without difficulty, and Angela was
soon installed in the tiny room which remained her cell for years
afterwards. It contained a narrow iron bedstead, and during the day a
small brass cross always lay on the white coverlet; there was a chest
of drawers, a minute table on which stood an American nickeled alarum
clock; there was one rush-bottomed chair, and the only window looked
westwards over the low city wall towards Monteverde, where the powder
magazine used to stand before it was blown up. The window was latticed
half-way up, which did not hinder Angela from seeing the view when she
had time to look at it.
She wore a plain grey frock at first, but when she was in the wards it
was quite covered by the wide white cotton garment which all the
nurses wore when on duty. Occasionally Madame Bernard came and took
her for a walk, and sometimes she went out on an errand with one of
the nuns; but she did not care very much for that, possibly because
she was not under any restraint. The beautiful enclosed garden was
wide and sunny, and she could generally be alone there; when the
weather was fine she could wander about between the beds of roses and
carnations or sit on a bench, and if it rained she could walk up and
down under the cloisters. The three old nuns who came out to sun
themselves paid no attention to her, beyond nodding rather shakily
when she bent her head to them in respectful salutation. They had seen
more than a hundred girls enter the convent, to work and grow old like
themselves, and one more neither made any difference to them nor
possessed for them the least interest. That strange petrifaction had
begun in them which overtakes all very old monks and nuns who have
never had very active minds. From doing the same things, with no
appreciable variation, at the same hours for fifty, sixty, and even
seventy years, they become so perfectly mechanical that their bodies
are always in one of a limited number of attitudes, less and less
pronounced as great age advances, till they at last cease to move at
all and die, as the hands of a clock stop when it has run down.
But the three old nuns belonged to a past generation, and it was not
probable that the younger Sisters would ever be like them. The Mother
Superior was a small and active woman, with quick black eyes, a
determined mouth, and a strangely pale face. She seemed to be
incapable of being tired. Among themselves the novices called her the
little white volcano. When the one who had invented the epithet
repeated it to Monsignor Saracinesca in confession, and he gently told
her that it was wrong to speak disrespectfully of her superior, she
rather pertly asked him whether any one who lived under a volcano
could fail to 'respect' it; whereat he shook his head gravely inside
the confessional, but his spiritual mouth twitched with amusement, in
spite of himself. The four novices were inclined to distrust Angela at
first, however, as she was not even a postulant, and it was not till
she became one of themselves that she was initiated into their
language.
It was not long before this took place, however. From the first, she
showed a most unusual aptitude in learning the mechanical part of her
profession, and her extraordinary memory made it easy for her to
remember the lectures which were given for the nurses three times a
week, generally by the house surgeon, but occasionally by the great
Doctor Pieri, who had been a pupil of Basini of Padua and was a
professor in the University of Rome. He showed especial interest in
Angela, and the pert little novice wickedly suggested that he was
falling in love with her; but the truth was that he at once
distinguished in her the natural gifts which were soon to make her the
most valuable nurse at his disposal.
The Mother Superior expected that she would become vain and gave her
some energetic lectures on the evils of conceit. There was a sort of
fury of good about the pale woman that carried everything before it.
She was just, but her righteous anger was a ready firebrand, and when
it burst into flame, as often happened, her eloquence was
extraordinary. Her face might have been carved out of white ice, but
her eyes glowed like coals and her words came low, quick, and clear,
and wonderfully to the point. As a girl, her temper had been terrific,
and had estranged her from her own family; but her unconquerable will
had forged it into a weapon that never failed her in a just cause and
was never drawn in an unjust one. Monsignor Saracinesca sometimes
thought that Saint Paul must have had the same kind of fiery and
fearless temperament.
It sometimes outran facts, if it always obeyed her intention, as
happened one day when she privately gave Angela a sermon on vanity
which would have made the other novices tremble at the time and feel
very uncomfortable for several days afterwards. When she had wound up
her peroration and finished, she drew two or three fierce little
breaths and scrutinised the young girl's face; but to her surprise it
had not changed in the least. The clear young eyes were as steady and
quiet as ever; if they expressed anything, it was a quiet admiration
which the older woman had not hitherto roused in the younger members
of her community.
'Pray for me, Mother,' Angela said, 'and I will try to be less vain.'
The other looked at her again very keenly, and then, instead of
answering, asked a question.
'Why do you wish to be a nun?'
Angela had lately asked herself the same thing, but she replied with
some diffidence:
'If I can do a little good, by working very hard all my life, I hope
that it may be allowed to help the soul of a person who died
suddenly.'
The Mother Superior's white face softened a little.
'That is a good intention,' she said. 'If it is sincere and lasting,
you will be a good nun. You may begin your noviciate on Sunday if you
have made up your mind.'
'I am ready.'
'Very well. I have only one piece of advice to give you, and perhaps I
shall remind you of it often, for it was given to me very late, and I
should have been the better for it. Try to remember what I tell you.'
'I will remember, Mother.'
'It is this. Count your failures but not your successes. You cannot
surprise God by the amount of good you do. There are girls who enter
upon the noviciate just as hard-working students go up for an
examination, hoping to astonish their examiners by the amount they
know. That is well enough at the university, but it is all wrong in
religion. Work how you will, you cannot be perfect, and, if you were,
you could only be what God made man before sin came. Each student is
trying to beat all the others, and one succeeds. We are not trying to
outdo each other; there are no marks in our examination and there is
no competition. We are working together to save life in a world where
millions die for want of care. To do less than the best we can is
failure, for each of us, and the best we can all do together is very
little compared with all there is to be done. Faith, Hope, and Charity
are all we have to help us, all we can ask of Heaven. Believe, hope,
and help others while you live, and all will go well hereafter, never
fear! Not to help, not to believe, not to hope, even during one
moment, is to fail in that moment. Where the sum is light, it is easy
to count the dark places, but not the light itself. That is what I
mean, my daughter, when I say, keep account of your failures but not
of your successes. Try to remember it.'
'Indeed I will,' Angela answered.
She went back to her work, and the Mother Superior's words thereafter
became the rule of her life; but she was not sent for again to listen
to a lecture on vanity, and the small White Volcano was inclined to
think that it had made a mistake in breaking out, and inwardly offered
a conditional apology.
Angela worked hard, and made such progress that before the two years
of her noviciate were over Doctor Pieri said openly that she was the
best surgical nurse in the hospital, and one of the best for ordinary
illnesses, considering how limited her experience had been. The
nursing of wounds is more mechanical than the nursing of a fever, for
instance, and can be sooner learned by a beginner, where the surgeon
himself is always at hand. On the other hand, the value of surgical
nursing depends on relative perfection of detail and rigorous
adherence to the set rules of prophylaxis, whereas other nursing often
requires that judgment which only experience can give. Surgery is a
fine art that has reached a high degree of development in the
treatment of facts, about which good surgeons are generally right. A
great deal of noise is made over surgeons' occasional mistakes, which
are advertised by their detractors, but we hear little of their steady
and almost constant success. Medicine, on the other hand, must very
often proceed by guesswork; but for that very reason it covers up its
defects more anxiously, and is more inclined to talk loudly of its
victories. Every great physician admits that a good deal of his
science is psychological; and psychology deals with the unknown, or
with what is only partially knowable. A mathematician may smile and
answer that 'infinity' is much more than partially 'unknowable,' but
that, by using it, the differential calculus gives results of most
amazing accuracy, and is such a simple affair that, if its mere name
did not inspire terror, any fourth-form schoolboy could easily be made
to understand it, and even taught to use it. What we call the soul may
be infinite or infinitesimal, or finite, or it may be the Hegelian
Nothing, which is Pure Being under another name; whatever it is, our
acquaintance with it is not knowledge of it, since whatever we can
find out about it is based on the Criticism exercised by Pure Reason
and not on experience; and the information which Pure Reason gives us
about the soul is not categorical but antinomial; and by the time
medicine gets into these transcendental regions, consciously or
unconsciously, it ceases to be of much practical use in curing
'pernicious anaemia' or any similarly obscure disease.
All this digression only explains why Angela was a better nurse in
surgical cases than in ordinary illnesses after she had been two years
in training; but that circumstance is connected with what happened to
her later, as will be clear in due time.
In most respects she changed very little, so far as any one could see.
No one in the convent knew how she hoped against all reason, during
those two years, that Giovanni might yet be heard of, though there was
not the least ground for supposing that he could have escaped when all
the others had perished; and indeed, while she still hoped, she felt
that it was very foolish, and when she had a long talk with Monsignor
Saracinesca before taking the veil, she did not even speak of such a
possibility.
She had long ago decided that she would take the veil at the
expiration of the two years, but she wished to define her position
clearly to the three persons whom she cared for and respected most.
These were Madame Bernard, Monsignor Saracinesca, and the Mother
Superior, whose three characters were as different as it would have
been possible to pick out amongst the acquaintance of a lifetime.
Angela asked permission to go with Madame Bernard to the cemetery of
San Lorenzo, where a monument marked the grave of those who had fallen
in the expedition. It was a large square pillar of dark marble,
surmounted by a simple bronze cross. On the four sides there were
bronze tablets, on which were engraved the names of the officers and
men, and that of Giovanni Severi was second, for he had been the
second in command.
No one was near and Angela knelt down upon the lowest of the three
steps that formed the base. After a moment Madame Bernard knelt beside
her. The novice's eyes were fixed on the bronze tablet and her lips
did not move. Her companion watched her furtively, expecting to see
some sign of profound emotion, or of grief controlled, or at least the
shadow of a quiet sadness. But there was nothing, and after two or
three minutes Angela rose deliberately, went up the remaining steps,
and pressed her lips upon the first letters of Giovanni's name. She
turned and descended the steps with a serene expression, as Madame
Bernard got up from her knees.
'Death was jealous of me,' Angela said.
She had never heard of Erinna; she did not know that a maiden poetess
had made almost those very words immortal in one lovely broken line
that has come down to us from five and twenty centuries ago. In the
Everlasting Return they fell again from a maiden's lips, but they
roused no response; Madame Bernard took them for a bit of girlish
sentiment, and scarcely heeded them, while she wondered at Angela's
strangely calm manner.
They walked back slowly along the straight way between the tombs.
'I loved him living and I love him dead,' said the young novice
slowly. 'He cannot come back to me, but some day I may go to him.'
'Yes,' answered Madame Bernard without conviction.
The next world had always seemed very vague to her; and besides, poor
Giovanni had been a soldier, and she knew something of military men,
and wondered where they went when they died.
'You are a very good woman,' Angela continued, following her own train
of thought; 'do you think it is wrong for a nun to love a dead man?'
'Dear me!' exclaimed the little Frenchwoman in some surprise. 'How can
one love a man who is dead? It is impossible; consequently it is not
wrong!'
Angela looked at her quickly and then walked on.
'There is no such thing as death,' she said.
It was Filmore Durand's odd speech that had come back to her often
during two years; when she repeated it to herself she saw his portrait
of Giovanni, which still hung in Madame Bernard's sitting-room, and
presently it was not a picture seen in memory, but Giovanni himself.
Madame Bernard shrugged her shoulders and smiled vaguely.
'Death is a fact,' she said prosaically. 'It is the reason why we
cannot live for ever!'
The reason was not convincing to Angela, but as she saw no chance of
being understood, she went back to the starting-point.
'Then you do not think it can possibly be wrong for a nun to love some
one who is dead?' she asked, her tone turning the statement into a
question.
'Of course not!' cried the governess almost impatiently. 'You might as
well think yourself in love with his tombstone and then fancy it a
sin!'
So one of Angela's three friends had answered her question very
definitely. The answer was not worthless, because Madame Bernard was a
very honest, matter-of-fact woman; on the contrary, it represented a
practical opinion, and that is always worth having, though the view it
defines may be limited. Angela did not try to explain further what she
had meant, and Madame Bernard always avoided subjects she could not
understand. The two chatted pleasantly about other things as they
returned to the convent, and the little Frenchwoman trotted
contentedly back to her lodgings, feeling that the person she loved
best in the world was certain to turn out a very good and happy nun.
Angela was not yet so sure of this, and she took the first opportunity
of consulting Monsignor Saracinesca. They sat and talked together on
one of the stone seats in the cloistered garden. He is a tall, thin
man, with a thoughtful face and a quiet manner. In his youth he was
once entangled in the quarrels of a Sicilian family, as I have
narrated elsewhere, and behaved with great heroism. After that, he
laboured for many years as a simple parish priest in a fever-plagued
district, and he only consented to return to Rome when he realised
that his health was gravely impaired.
Angela put her question with her usual directness and watched his
face. He knew her story, so that there was nothing to explain.
'Is it wrong to love him still?' she asked.
But Monsignor Ippolito did not speak until his silence had lasted so
long that Angela was a little frightened; not that he had any real
doubt as to her intention, but because it was his duty to examine such
a case of conscience in all its aspects.
'What does your own instinct tell you?' he asked at last.
'That it will not be wrong,' Angela answered with conviction. 'But I
may be mistaken. That is why I come to you for advice.'
Again the churchman mused in silence for a while.
'I will tell you what I think,' he said, when he had made up his mind.
'There is a condition, which depends only on yourself, and of which
you are the only judge. You ask my advice, but I can only show you how
to ask it of your own heart. If your love for the man who is gone
looks forward, prays and hopes, it will help you; if it looks back
with tears for what might have been and with longing for what can
never be, it will hinder you. More than that I cannot say.'
'I look forward,' Angela answered confidently. 'I pray and I hope.'
'If you are sure of that, you are safe,' said Monsignor Saracinesca.
'No one but yourself can know.'
'I began to work here hoping and praying that if I could do any good
at all it might help him, wherever he is,' Angela went on. 'That is
the only vocation I ever felt, and now I wish to take the veil because
I think that as a professed nun I may be able to use better what
little I have learned in two years and a half than if I stay on as a
lay sister. It is not for myself, except in so far as I know that the
only way to help him is to do my best here. As I hope that God may be
merciful to him, so I hope that God will accept my work, my prayers,
and my faith.'
The prelate looked at the delicate face and earnest eyes, and the
quietly spoken words satisfied him and a little more. There could be
nothing earthly in such love as that, he was sure, and such simple
faith would not be disappointed. It was not the first time in his
experience as a priest that he had known and talked with a woman from
whom sudden death had wrenched the man she loved, or whom inevitable
circumstances had divided from him beyond all hope of reunion; but he
had never heard one speak just as Angela spoke, nor seen that look in
another face. He was convinced, and felt that he could say nothing
against her intention.
But she herself was not absolutely sure even then, and she went to the
Mother Superior that evening to ask her question for the last time.
The Mother was seated at her writing-table, and one strong electric
lamp shed its vivid light from under a perfectly dark shade upon the
papers that lay under her hand and scattered before her--bills,
household accounts, doctors' and nurses' reports, opened telegrams,
humble-looking letters written on ruled paper and smart notes in
fashionable handwritings. People who imagine that the Mother Superior
of a nursing order which has branches in many parts of the world
spends her time in meditation and prayer are much mistaken.
'Sit down,' said the small white volcano, without looking up or
lifting her thin forefinger from the column of figures she was
checking.
The room would have been very dark but for the light which the white
paper reflected upwards upon the nun's whiter face, and into the dark
air. Angela sat down at a distance as she was bidden, and waited some
minutes, till the Mother Superior had set her initials at the foot of
the sheet with a blue pencil, and raised her face to peer into the
gloom.
'Who is it?' she asked in a businesslike tone, still dazzled by the
light.
'I am Angela, Mother. May I ask you a question?'
'Yes.'
The voice had changed even in that single word, and was kind and
encouraging.
'Two years ago, before I became a novice, you asked me why I wanted to
be a nun, Mother. You thought my intention was good. Now that there is
still time before I make my profession, I have come to ask you once
again what you think.'
'So far as I know, I think you can be a good nun,' answered the Mother
Superior without waiting to hear more, for she never wasted time if
she could possibly help it.
Angela understood her and told her story quickly and clearly, without
a quiver or an inflection of pain in her voice. It was necessary, for
the Mother did not know it all, and listened with concentrated
attention. But before it was ended she had made up her mind what to
say.
'My dear child,' said she, 'I am not your confessor! And besides, I am
prejudiced, for you are a good nurse and I need you and wish you to
stay. Do you feel that there is any reason why you should be less
conscientious than you have been so far, if you promise to go on
working with us as long as you live?'
'No,' Angela answered.
'Or that there is any reason why you should have less faith in God,
less hope of heaven, or less charity towards your fellow-creatures if
you promise to give your whole life to God, in nursing those who
suffer, with the hope of salvation hereafter?'
'No, I do not feel that there can be any reason.'
'Then do not torment yourself with any more questions, for life is too
short! To throw away time is to waste good, and save evil. Believe
always, and then work with all your might! Work, work, work! Work done
for God's sake is prayer to God, and a thousand hours on your knees
are not worth as much as one night spent in helping a man to live--or
to die--when you are so tired that you can hardly stand, and every bone
in your body aches, and you are half-starved too! Work for every one
who needs help, spare every one but yourself, think of every one
before yourself. It is easy to do less than your best, it is
impossible to do more, and yet you must try to do more, always more,
till the end! That should be a nun's life.'
The Mother Superior had led that life till it was little less than a
miracle that she was still alive herself, and altogether a wonder that
her fiery energy had not eaten up the small frail earthly part of her
long ago.
'But it must not be for the sake of the end,' she went on, before
Angela could speak, 'else you will be working only for the hope of
rest, and you will try to kill yourself with work, to rest the sooner!
You must think of what you are doing because it is for others, not for
what it will bring you by and by, God willing. Pray to live long and
to do much more before you die, if it be good; for there is no end of
the sickness and suffering and pain in this world; but few are willing
to help, and fewer still know how!'
She was silent, but her eyes were speaking still as Angela saw them
looking at her over the shaded light, her pale features illuminated
only by the soft reflection from the paper on the table.
The young girl felt a deep and affectionate admiration for her, and
resolved never to forget the brave words, but to treasure them with
those others spoken two years ago: 'Count your failures but not your
successes.'
She rose to take her leave, and, standing before the writing-table,
with each hand hidden in the opposite sleeve, she bent her head
respectfully.
'Thank you, Mother,' she said.
The nun nodded gravely, still looking at her, but said nothing more,
and Angela left the room, shutting the door without noise. The Mother
Superior did not go back to her accounts at once, though her hand
mechanically drew the next sheet from the pile, so that it lay ready
before her. She was thinking of her own beginnings, more than twenty
years ago, and comparing her own ardent nature with what she knew of
Angela's: and then, out of her great experience of character, a doubt
arose and troubled her strangely, though she opposed it as if it had
been a temptation to injustice, or at least to ungenerous thinking. It
was a suspicion that such marvellous calm as this novice showed could
not be all real; that there was something not quite explicable about
her perfect submission, humility, and obedience; that under the
saintly exterior a fire might be smouldering which would break out
irresistibly some day, and not for good.
The woman who had been tried doubted the untried novice. Perhaps it
was nothing more than that, and natural enough; but it was very
disturbing, because she also felt herself strongly attached to Angela,
and to suspect her seemed not only unfair, but disloyal. Yet it was
the bounden duty of the Mother to study the characters of all who
lived under her authority and direction, and to forestall their
possible shortcomings by a warning, an admonition, or an encouraging
word, as the case might be.
She had done what she could, but she was dissatisfied with herself;
and at the very moment when Angela was inwardly repeating her stirring
words and committing them to memory for her lifetime, the woman who
had spoken them was tormented by the thought that she had not said
half enough, or still worse, that she had perhaps made a mistake
altogether. For the first time since she had fought her first great
battle with herself, she had the sensation of being near a mysterious
force of nature which she did not understand; but she had been twenty
years younger then, and the present issue was not to depend on her own
strength but on another's, and it involved the salvation of another's
soul.
It was long before she bent over the columns of figures again, yet she
did not reproach herself with having wasted time. The first of all her
many duties, and the most arduous, was to think for others; to work
for them was a hundred times easier and was rest and refreshment by
contrast.
Angela would have been very much surprised if she could have known
what was passing in the Mother Superior's mind, while she herself felt
nothing but relief and satisfaction because her decision had now
become irrevocable. If she had been bidden to wait another year, she
would have waited patiently and without a murmur, because she could
not be satisfied with anything less than apparent certainty; but
instead, she had been encouraged to take the final step, after which
there could be no return.
That was the inevitable. Human destiny is most tragic when the men and
women concerned are doing their very utmost to act bravely and
uprightly, while each is in reality bringing calamity on the other.
Acting on the only evidence she had a right to trust, the Mother
Superior knew that she would not be justified in hindering Angela from
taking the veil. Few had ever done so well in the noviciate, none had
ever done better, and her natural talent for the profession of nursing
was altogether unusual. There had never been one like her in the
hospital. As for her character, she seemed to have no vanity, no
jealousy, no temper, no moodiness. The Mother had never known such an
even and well-balanced disposition as hers. Would it have been wise to
keep her back longer, because she seemed too perfect? Would it have been
just? Would it not, indeed, have been very wrong to risk discouraging
her, now that she was quite ready? She was almost twenty-one years old
and had taken no step hastily. More than two years and a half had passed
since she had entered the convent, and in all that time no one had been
able to detect the smallest fault in her, either of weakness or of
hastiness, still less of anything like the pride she might actually have
felt in her superiority. To keep her back now would be to accuse
perfection of being imperfect; it would be as irrational as to call
excellence a failing. More than that, it would have a bad effect on the
whole community, a danger which could not be overlooked.
Three years later, the Mother understood the warning doubt that had
assailed her; and when a precious life was in the balance she put
herself on trial before her judging conscience and the witness of her
memory. But though the judge was severe and the testimony unerring,
they acquitted her of all blame, and told her that she had acted for
the best, according to her light, on that memorable evening.
Within less than a month Angela took the veil in the convent church,
and thenceforth she was Sister Giovanna, for that was the name she
chose.