After a long time, Sister Giovanna lifted her head very slowly, sat
up, and passed her hand over her eyes, while the Mother Superior still
kept one arm round her, thinking that she might faint again at any
moment. But she did not.
'Thank you,' she said, with difficulty. 'You are very good to me,
Mother. I think I can walk now.'
'Not yet.'
The elder woman's hand was on her wrist, keeping her in her seat.
'I must go back to my work,' she said, but not much above a whisper.
'Not yet. When you are better, you must come to my room for a little
while and rest there.'
Sister Giovanna looked old then, for her face was grey and the deep
lines of suffering were like furrows of age; she seemed much older
than Mother Veronica, who was over forty. A minute or two passed and
she made another effort, and this time the Mother helped her. She was
weak but not exactly unsteady; her feet were like leaden weights that
she had to lift at every step.
When they were alone in the small room and the door was shut, the
Mother Superior closed the window, too; for the cloister was very
resonant and voices carried far. She made Sister Giovanna sit in the
old horse-hair easy-chair, leaning her head against the round black
and white worsted cushion that was hung across the back by a cotton
cord. She herself sat in the chair she used at her writing-table.
She did not know what had happened in the hall, but what she saw told
her that the Sister's fainting fit had not been due only to a passing
physical weakness. She herself seemed to be suffering when she spoke,
and not one of all the many Sisters and novices who had come to her in
distress, at one time or another, had ever seen her so much touched by
pity, so humane, forbearing, and kind.
'If you would like me to understand what has happened, my dear child,
you can trust me,' she said. 'If you would rather keep your secret,
tell me if I can help you.'
Sister Giovanna looked at her gratefully and tried to speak, but it
was hard; not that she was choking, or near to shedding tears, but her
lips felt stiff and cold, like a dying man's, and would not form
words. But presently they came at intervals, one by one, though not
distinctly, and so low that it was not easy to hear them.
Yet Mother Veronica understood. Giovanni Severi, the man Angela had
loved, the man who had been called dead for five years--he had come
back from death--she had seen him with his brother--he had known her.
She was not going to faint again, but she sank forward, bending almost
double, her hands on the arms of the chair, her young head bowed with
woe. There was something awful in her suffering, now that she was
silent.
The Mother Superior only said three words, but her voice broke as she
pronounced the last.
'My poor child----'
Her lips were livid, but she ruled the rising storm and sat quite
still, her fingers twisted together and straining on her knee. If
Sister Giovanna had looked up, she would have wondered how mere
sympathy could be so deep and stirring. But she could not; her own
struggle was too desperate. Minutes passed before she spoke again, and
then there was a change in her, for her voice was much more steady.
'It was so easy to be good when he was dead.'
She had been happy an hour ago, yesterday, last week, working and
waiting for the blessed end, believing that he had died to serve his
country and that God would let him meet her in heaven. Why had he come
back now, too late for earth, but a lifetime too soon for heaven? It
had been so easy to be strong and brave and faithful for his sake,
when he was dead. It was little enough that she had said, but each
word had meant a page of her life. Mother Veronica heard, and she
understood.
'Pray,' she said, after a long time; and her voice came as from very
far away, for she too had told her story in that one syllable.
Human nature turned upon her, rebellious, with a rending cry.
'I cannot! He is alive! He is here! Don't you understand? How can I
pray? For what? That he may die again? God of mercy! And if not that,
can I pray to be free? Free? Free from what? Free to do what? To die?
Not even that! Others will be taken, but I shall live--thirty, forty,
fifty years, knowing that he is alive--knowing that I may see him any
day!'
The elder woman's white fingers twined round each other more
desperately, for Sister Giovanna's face was turned full to her now,
and their eyes were meeting; the young nun's were fierce with pain,
but the Mother's were strangely lustreless and dull.
'No,' she said, mechanically answering the last words, 'you must not
see him.'
'Not see him once?'
Sister Giovanna leaned far forwards, grasping the arms of the
easy-chair, and her voice came thick and hoarse. Did the woman with the
marble face think that she, too, was made of stone? Not see the man she
had loved, who had been suddenly, violently dead, who was alive again,
and had come back to her? The Mother could not be in earnest! If she
was, why did she not answer now? Why was she sitting there, with that
strange look, silently wringing her hands?
Even in her cruel distress Sister Giovanna felt a sort of wonder.
Perhaps the Mother had not meant what she said, and would not speak
lest she should contradict herself. The mere thought was a hope;
whether for good or evil the tortured girl knew not, but it loosed her
tongue.
'He will come to me!' she cried. 'He will, I tell you! You do not know
him! Did you hear his voice as I did when he called me? Did you see
his face? Could walls or bars keep such a man from the woman he loves?
I must face him myself, and to face him I must kill something in
me--cut it out, tear it up from its roots--I am only a woman after all!
A nun can be a woman still, a weak woman, who has loved a man very,
very dearly----'
'Oh, Angela, hush! For the love of Heaven, my child, my child!'
To Sister Giovanna's unspeakable amazement, the unbending nature was
breaking down, the marble saint, with the still white face, who had
bidden her pray, and never see Giovanni again. She felt herself lifted
from her seat and clasped in a despairing embrace; she felt the small
nervous frame shaking in the storm of an emotion she could not
understand, though she knew it was as great as her own and as terrible
to bear, and that the heart that beat against hers was breaking, too.
Neither shed a tear; tears would have been heavenly refreshment, but
they would not come. Another moment and Angela felt herself sinking
back into her chair, and when she opened her eyes the Mother Superior
was at the table, half seated, half lying across it, on the heaps of
papers and account-books, and her outstretching hands clasped the foot
of the old crucifix beside the leaden inkstand.
'Miserere mei, Domine!'
The voice of her prayer broke the stillness like a silver bell. Then
she began to recite the greatest of the penitential psalms.
'Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my
voice.'
And by long habit, yet with some dim hope of peace, Sister Giovanna
responded:
'Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.'
They said it to the end, verse answering verse, and the prayer of the
King-Poet stilled the throbbing of hurts too deep to heal.
Two hours after she had fainted in the hall, Sister Giovanna was doing
her work in the hospital again as usual. A wonderful amount of
physical resistance can be got out of moral conviction, and there is
no such merciful shelter for mental distress as a uniform, from the
full dress of a field-marshal to a Sister of Charity's cornet.
Of the persons who had been witnesses of the scene, the Doctor and Ugo
Severi could be trusted, and Princess Chiaromonte was too much afraid of
Giovanni to brew gossip about his love-affair. There remained the two
orderlies, who could not be prevented from telling the story to their
wives and friends if they liked; but they were trusty, middle-aged men
of good character; they shared the affectionate admiration for Sister
Giovanna which almost every one in the Convent hospital felt for her,
and they would be the very last to say a word to her discredit. These
circumstances account well enough for the fact that the story did not
get into the newspapers at the time.
Sister Giovanna went back to her work, but she did not go near Ugo
Severi, and she gave strict orders that his brother, if he came to see
him again during the day, was to be accompanied to the door of the
room by an orderly. As Ugo had swallowed nothing but a cup of black
coffee before coming to the hospital, and was therefore in a condition
to take ether, Pieri had given notice that he would operate on the
injured foot at two o'clock. There would be no need for the presence
of the supervising nurse, who would have no difficulty in keeping out
of Giovanni's way for the present, as he would certainly not be
allowed to roam the hospital in search of her.
She meant to meet him once and alone, no matter how she might be
hindered, and nothing that the Mother Superior or Monsignor
Saracinesca could say should make it impossible. She knew that he
would try every means of seeing her, and when he succeeded in making
an opportunity which she could accept, she would take it, come what
might; till then, she must wait, and while she was waiting she would
find the strength she needed.
That was her plan, and it was simple enough. She might be mistaken
about many questions, but nothing could make that seem wrong which her
conscience told her was right. And it was right to see him once; she
was sure of it. The rest was confused and uncertain and she took no
thought what she should say; she only knew she must make him
understand, though it would be hard, and when that was done, she would
not see him again while she lived.
She meant to make that final parting a certainty by going to Rangoon
with the next mission; nothing should change her determination now.
Her feet were heavy that day, and her voice was dull and muffled when
she gave her orders; but she made no mistakes. Many a man has fought
more stubbornly and bravely after a wound and a fall than at the
outset, and few men could tell themselves that they were braver than
Sister Giovanna was when she recovered control of her actions after
the first stunning shock.
She stayed in her office as much of the time as possible. In due
course the assistant head-nurse came to report that Pieri had finished
his work and that Captain Ugo had recovered well from the ether; his
brother was with him and would stay till eight o'clock, the hour at
which all visitors were required to leave the hospital except in cases
of extreme danger. Sister Giovanna nodded and wrote a few lines in the
day-book.
It was then half-past three. Clearly Giovanni's plan was to spend as
many hours as possible under the roof, in the hope of seeing her; for
though the operation had been a long one, requiring the skill of a
great surgeon to perform it well, Ugo was in no danger from it, and it
might be supposed that a man who had just come back from such an
experience as Giovanni had lived through would wish to see a few old
friends on the first day of his return, or would be obliged, at the
very least, to attend to some necessary business. Sister Giovanna did
not know that his return was being purposely kept a secret from the
public press, and that he was far safer from reporters while he stayed
in the Convent hospital than he could be in his lodging.
At five o'clock the door of her office opened, and to her surprise she
saw Monsignor Saracinesca standing before her, hat in hand. She could
not remember that she had ever seen him there before, but it was an
office, after all, and there was no reason why he should not come to
it if he had business with her. She rose to receive him. He shut the
door, which was the only one, bowed gravely, and took one of the two
spare rush-bottomed chairs and seated himself, before he spoke.
'The Mother Superior sent for me,' he said, 'and I have been with her
an hour. She has asked me to come to you. Are you at leisure?'
'Unless I am called. I am on duty.'
He noticed the muffled tone and the slowness of her speech. She sat
facing him, on the other side of the plain table, her open report-book
before her.
'You will not blame the Mother Superior for sending me, Sister. She is
in the deepest distress for you. You must have seen that, when you
spoke with her this morning.'
'She was more than kind.'
Monsignor Saracinesca sighed, but the nun did not notice it. Now that
she knew why he had come, she needed all her strength and courage
again.
He went on quietly with his short explanation. Mother Veronica had
told him of what had happened in the hall; he had known the rest long
ago from Sister Giovanna herself. That was the substance, and he
wasted no words. Then he paused, and she knew what was coming next,
for he would speak of a possible meeting; but how he would regard that
she could not guess, and she waited steadily for the blow if it was to
be one.
'The Mother Superior thinks that you should not see him,' he said.
'I know. She told me so.'
'I do not agree with her,' said Monsignor Saracinesca slowly.
The nun turned her face from the afternoon light, but said nothing;
with the greatest sacrifice of her life before her she should not feel
joy rising like the dawn in her eyes, at the mere thought of seeing
the man whose love she must renounce.
'We are human,' said the churchman, 'and our victories must be human,
to be worth anything. It was in His humanity that Christ suffered and
overcame. It is not victory to slink from the fight and shut oneself
up in a fortress that is guarded by others. Men and women must be good
men and women in this world if they hope to be saints hereafter, and
there is no such thing as inactive goodness.'
Sister Giovanna looked at him again, but still she did not speak.
'Though I am a priest,' continued Monsignor Saracinesca, 'I am a man
of the world in the sense of having belonged to it, and I now live
less apart from it than I could wish, though it is not such a
thoroughly bad place as those say who do not know it. I do not feel
that I got rid of all obligations to those who still belong to it when
I was ordained, and I do not think that when you took the veil in a
working order, you dropped all obligation to the persons with whom you
had lived till then. In doing so, you might be depriving some one else
of a right.'
Sister Giovanna listened to this exposition in silence and tried to
follow it.
'In my opinion,' the prelate went on, 'Giovanni Severi has a just
claim to see you. I speak under authority and I may be wrong, but it
can only be a matter of judgment and of opinion, and since your Mother
Superior has asked for mine, I give it as well as I can. You are not a
cloistered nun, Sister. There is no reason why you should not receive
a friend whom you have believed to be dead for years and who has
unexpectedly come back to life.'
'Back to the life I left for his sake!'
Again she looked away from the light, but her face could not turn
whiter than it was.
'It was terribly sudden,' said Monsignor Saracinesca, after a moment's
pause. 'You will no doubt wait a few days before seeing him, till you
feel quite able to face what must be a very painful interview.'
'I am not afraid of it now. I was weak when we recognised each other.
I cannot quite remember--I heard him call me and I saw his eyes----'
'And you must have fainted. You were carried out to the well at once.'
'Who carried me?' asked the nun quickly.
'Doctor Pieri and Giovanni Severi.'
She made a slight movement.
'He carried me!'
She spoke almost unconsciously, and a very faint glow rose through her
paleness, as when white glass is warmed an instant in the mouth of the
furnace and then drawn back and quickly cooled again.
'Shall I talk with him before you meet?' asked the churchman
presently.
Sister Giovanna did not answer at once; she seemed to be thinking.
'You know better than any one what my life has been,' she said at
last. 'It was to you that I went for advice five years ago, and again
before I took the veil. If you had thought it even distantly possible
that he might be alive, you would not have let me take final vows.'
'Heaven forbid!' answered Monsignor Saracinesca very earnestly.
'Though I believed him dead, you knew that I loved him with all my
heart.'
'Yes. As dearly as when you had last seen him alive.'
'I love him still. Is that wrong?'
'No.'
He said the word without hesitation, in all sincerity and true
conviction, but the nun had expected another answer; a quick movement
of the head showed that she was surprised.
'Are you sure?' she asked in a low and wondering tone.
'Yes, because I am sure that your love for him is as innocent as it
ever was. The religious life is not meant to kill human affection.
Saint Benedict loved his sister Scholastica devotedly; Saint Francis
was probably more sincerely attached to Saint Clare than to any living
person.'
'I only know that I love him as dearly as ever,' said Sister Giovanna.
The churchman looked at her keenly for a moment, and she did not avoid
his eyes.
'Would you break your vows for him?' he asked, with sudden directness.
The nun started as if he had struck her and half rose from her chair.
'Break my vows?' she cried, her eyes blazing with indignation.
But Monsignor Saracinesca only nodded and laid his thin hand flat on
the table, towards her. She sank to her seat again.
'Then I know that, although you may love him more than any one in the
world, you do not love him better than the work you have promised to
do.'
'Heaven forbid!'
He had used the very same expression a few moments earlier, but with a
different tone; for him it had been an asseveration of good faith, but
with her it was more like a prayer. She had resented his question as
if it had been an insult, but when he showed how much he trusted her,
she began to distrust herself. She would die the martyr's death rather
than break her vows in deed, but she was too diffident of her own
womanhood not to fear a fall from the dignity of heartfelt resignation
to the inward ignominy of an earthly regret. Besides, 'the work she
had promised to do' had been promised for his sake, not for its own;
not for any gain to her soul, but in the earnest hope that it might
profit his, by God's mercy. Since he was not dead, but alive, the
chief purpose of it died with his return to life. She did not love the
work she had promised to do more than she loved him; that was not
true, and never had been. All had been for him--her vow, her work, and
her prayers. Heaven forbid, indeed, that she should now set him before
them; yet it was hard not to do so and there was only one possible
way; in a changed sense they must be given for him still, and for his
salvation, else she could not give at all.
Monsignor Saracinesca had watched her progress from her noviciate to
her present position of responsibility, and had often spoken of her
with the Mother Superior. He would not have advised every nun to do
what he thought best in her case. There was not another in the
community, except the Mother herself, whom he would have trusted so
fully. But, being what she was, his honourable sense of justice to a
man who had suffered much and must suffer more impelled him to act as
he did. As he himself said, it was a matter of opinion and judgment,
and his own approved the course. Those may blame him who think
otherwise, but no one can find fault with Sister Giovanna for
following his advice; she had a right to believe that it was the best,
and as for herself, she had never hesitated. The mere suggestion that
she should not see Giovanni at least once and alone looked to her
outrageous and contrary to all sense, as perhaps it was.
Monsignor Saracinesca would see him first and arrange the meeting. He
thought it should take place in the cloistered garden.
'Why not here, in my office?' asked the nun.
But the churchman objected. If the two were to talk together, out of
hearing, they must not be out of sight. Never, under any
circumstances, should any one be able to say that there had been any
secrecy about their interview. He himself would bring Giovanni to the
place and the Mother Superior would accompany the nun. He and the
Mother would withdraw into the hall and wait until Sister Giovanna
dismissed Severi. The Mother would then join her, and Monsignor
Saracinesca would go away with Giovanni.
In order to forestall evil speaking more effectually, the two should
meet on the afternoon of the day on which the nun's week of duty as
supervising nurse came to an end. On that evening she would go away to
nurse a private case, and before that patient was recovered, Ugo
Severi would certainly be well enough to go home, and Giovanni's daily
visits to the hospital would have ceased. It would thus be easy to
prove that after their only interview, in what might be called a
public place, they had not been within the same walls at the same
time.
No one who has watched the politics of the so-called 'socialist' party
in Rome during the past twenty years will wonder at these precautions
nor even call them exaggerated. To all intents and purposes the
'Vatican question' has ceased to exist; the Italian Government may
fairly be said to be at peace with the Church; the old bitterness may
survive amongst certain prejudiced people, chiefly in small towns, but
the spirit of this time is a spirit of good-will and mutual
forbearance, and the forces that were once so fiercely opposed
actually work together for the common good in many more cases than the
world knows of. The first article of the Italian Constitution states
that the religion of the Kingdom is that of the Roman Catholic Church;
it is, and it will continue to be, and no attempt will ever be made on
the part of the Monarchy to change or to cancel that opening clause.
The danger to which the Church is exposed lies in another quarter, and
threatens not only the Church, but Christianity in all its forms; not
only Christianity, but the Monarchy; and not the Monarchy only, but
all constitutional and civilised government. It is anarchy; and though
it boasts itself to be socialism, true socialists disclaim it and its
doings and all its opinions. If it can be so far honoured as to be
counted as a party, it is the party that murdered King Humbert, that
assassinated the Empress of Austria, and that would sooner or later
kill the Pope, if he left the safe refuge which some persons still
insist on calling his prison.
It is the party that continually spies upon all religious and
charitable institutions in Rome, and does not hesitate to invent
stories of crime outright when it fails to detect one of those little
flaws which its press magnifies to stains of abomination.
Monsignor Saracinesca understood these things better than the others
concerned, and at least as well as any one in Rome. As for Giovanni,
he had known him a little in former days and took him to be a man of
honour, who would submit to any conditions necessary for protecting
the nun from calumny. But he could hardly believe that the young
officer's feelings had undergone no change in five years, for he
judged men as most men judge each other. It was one thing to fall in
love with a charming young girl in her first season; it was quite
another to love her faithfully for five years, without ever seeing her
or hearing from her, and to feel no disappointment on finding her as
much changed as Angela was now, pale, sorrow-worn, and of no
particular age. The true bloom of youth is something real, but it
rarely lasts more than two years; it is as subtle and indescribable as
the bloom of growing roses, which is gone within an hour after they
are cut, though their beauty may be preserved for many days. There was
the nun's habit, too, and the veil and wimple, proclaiming another and
a greater change from which there was no return.
Ippolito Saracinesca had never been in love, even in his early youth; it
was no wonder that he was mistaken in such a man as Giovanni Severi. The
only danger he reckoned with lay in Sister Giovanna's own heart, and he
felt that he could count on her courage, her self-respect, and most of
all on her profoundly religious nature. No danger is ever overcome
without danger, said Mimos. In the case of such a woman it was better,
for her sake, to accept such risk as there might be in a single
interview which must be decisive and final, than to let her live on
haunted by disturbing memories and harassed by regret.