My Little Lady Part 18

His original intention had been to proceed from Paris to Strasbourg, and so into Switzerland, and over the Alps to the Italian lakes. So much of his holiday was already gone, however, that he gave up the idea of the lakes; but Switzerland might still be accomplished, and Strasbourg at any rate must be in his first point, as it was there that, on leaving England, he had directed his letters to be sent in the first instance, and he expected to find them lying awaiting them.

He did find them, and their contents were such as to drive all thoughts of his tour out of his head. It was with a wild throb of excitement and exultation, such as he had never known before, that, on opening the first that came to hand, one that had been lying there for nearly a week, he read that the regiment to which he was attached was under immediate orders for the Crimea, and that he must return, without loss of time, to England. Even then, however, he did not forget little Madelon. He knew that she would be counting on his promised return, and could not bear the idea of going away without seeing her again, and wis.h.i.+ng her good-bye. He calculated that he had still half a day to spare, and, notwithstanding his hurry, resolved to return by Brussels rather than Paris, choosing those trains that would allow him to spend a couple of hours in Liege, and pay a visit to the convent.

It was only three days since he had last seen the white walls and grey roofs that were growing quite familiar to him now, and yet how life seemed to have changed its whole aspect to him--and not to him only, perhaps, but to somebody else too, who within those walls had been spending three of the saddest, dreariest days her small life had ever known.

When Graham asked for Madelon, he was shown, not into the parlour, but into a corridor leading to it from the outer door; straw chairs were placed here also, on either side of the grating that divided it down the middle, and on the inner side was a window looking into another and smaller courtyard.

As Graham sat there waiting, an inner door opened and a number of children came trooping out; they were the _externes_, children of the bourgeois cla.s.s for the most part, who came to school twice a-day at the convent; indeed they were the only pupils, the building not being large enough to accommodate boarders.

The children, laughing and chattering, vanished through the front door to disperse to their different homes, and then, in a minute, the inner door opened again, and a small figure appeared; a nun followed, but she remained in the background, whilst Madelon came forward with a look of eager expectation on the mignonne face that seemed to have grown thinner and paler since Graham had last seen it only three days ago. His return, so much sooner than she had expected, had filled her with a sudden joy, and raised in her a vague hope, that she stood sadly in need of just then, poor child!

"So you see I have come back sooner than I expected, Madelon,"

said Graham, taking the little hands that were stretched out to him so eagerly through the grating, "but I don't know what you will say to me, for I shall not have time for the walk I promised you, when I thought I should stay two or three days in Liege. I must go away this afternoon, but I was determined not to leave without wis.h.i.+ng you good-bye."

"Go away this afternoon!" faltered Madelon, "then you are going away quite--and I shall never see you again!"

"Yes, yes, some day, I hope," said Horace; "why, you don't think I am going to forget you? My poor little Madelon, I am sorry to have startled you, but I will explain how it is," and then he told her how there was a great war going on, and he had been called away to join his regiment which was ordered out to the Crimea; "you know," he said smiling at her, "I told you it would never do for you to come marching about with me, and running the chance of being shot at."

He tried to speak cheerfully, but indeed it was not easy with that sad little face before him. Madelon did not answer; she only leant her head against the wooden bars of the grating, and sobbed in the most miserable, heart-broken way. It made Graham quite unhappy to see her.

"Don't cry so, Madelon," he kept on saying, almost as much distressed as she was, "I cannot bear to see you cry." And indeed he could not, for the kind-hearted young fellow had a theory that children and dogs and birds and all such irresponsible creatures should be happy as the day is long, and there seemed something too grievous in this overpowering distress in little Madelon. She checked herself a little presently, however, drawing back one hand to wipe away her tears, while she clung to him tightly with the other. He began to talk to her again as soon as she was able to listen, saying everything he could to cheer and encourage her, telling her what he was going to do, and how he would write to her, and she must write to him, and tell him all about herself, and how she must be a good little girl, and study very hard, and learn all sorts of things, and how he would certainly come back some day and see her.

"When?" asks Madelon.

"Ah, that I cannot tell you, but before very long I hope, and meantime you must make haste and grow tall--let me see how tall shall I expect you to be? as tall as that----" touching one of the bars above her head.

She tried to smile as she answered, "It would take me a long time to grow as tall as that."

"Not if you make haste and try very hard," he said; "and by that time you will have learnt such a number of things, music, and geography, and sewing, and--what is it little girls learn?"

So he went on talking; but she scarcely answered him, only held his hands tighter and tighter, as if she was afraid he would escape from her. Something seemed to have gone from her in these last few days, something of energy, and spirit, and hopefulness; Horace had never seen her so utterly forlorn and downcast before, not even on the night of her father's death.

At last he looked at his watch. "I must go, Madelon," he said, "I have to catch the train."

"No, no, don't go!" she cried, suddenly starting from her desponding att.i.tude, "don't go and leave me, I cannot stay here--I cannot--don't go!"

She was holding him so tightly that he could not move, her eyes fixed on his face with an intensity of pleading. He was almost sorry that he had come at all.

"My poor little Madelon," he said, "I must go--I must, you know--there--there, good-bye, good-bye."

He squeezed the little hands that were clinging so desperately to him, again and again, and then tried gently to unloose them; suddenly she relaxed her hold, and flung herself away from him. Graham hastened away without another word, but as he reached the door he turned round for one more look. Madelon had thrown herself down upon the low window-seat, her face buried in her folded arms, her frame shaking with sobs; the nun had come forward and was trying to comfort her--the bare grey walls, the black dresses, the despairing little figure crouching there, and outside the courtyard all aglow in the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, with pigeons whirring and perching on the sloping roofs, spreading their wings against the blue sky--it was a little picture that long lived in Graham's memory. Poor little Madelon!

CHAPTER VI.

In the Convent.

Not till Monsieur Horace was indeed gone, and there was no longer any hope of seeing him return, not till the last door was closed between them, the last link broken with the outer world, not till then perhaps did our little Madelon begin to comprehend the change that one brief fortnight had worked in her whole life. Till now, she had scarcely felt the full bitterness of her father's death, or understood that the old, happy, bright, beautiful life was at an end for ever. These last days had been so full of excitement, she had been so hurried from one new sensation to another, that she had not had time to occupy herself exclusively with this great sorrow that had fallen upon her; but there was nothing to distract her now. Her father's death, which she had found so hard to understand in the midst of everyday life and familiar a.s.sociations, she realized all too bitterly when such realization was aided by the blank convent walls and the dull convent routine; the sorrow that had been diverted for a moment by another strong predominant feeling, returned with overwhelming force when on every side she saw none but strange faces, heard none but unfamiliar voices; liberty, and joy, and affection seemed suddenly to have taken to themselves wings and deserted her, and she was left alone with her desolation.

The child was half-crazed in these first days in the extremity of her grief; the nuns tried to console her, but she was at first beyond consolation. She did not know what to do with her sense of misery, her hopeless yearning, with the sudden darkness which had fallen upon her bright life, and where she was left to grope without one hand stretched out by which she could reach back as it were, into the past, and grasp some familiar reality that should help her to a comprehension of this strange new world in which she found herself. We hear often enough of the short life of childish troubles, quickly excited, and as quickly forgotten--true enough perhaps of the griefs isolated, so to speak, in the midst of long days of happiness. But the grief that is not isolated? The grief over which the child cries itself to sleep every night, and which wakes with it in the morning, saddening and darkening with its own gloom the day which ought to be so joyous? In such a grief as this, there is, perhaps, for the time it lasts, no sorrow so sad, so acute, so hopeless, as a child's. For us, who with our wide experience have lived through so much, and must expect to live through so much more, a strength has risen up out of our very extremity, as we have learnt to believe in a beyond, in a future that must succeed the darkest hour. But a child, as a rule, has neither past nor future; it lives in the present. The past lies behind, already half forgotten in to- day's happiness or trouble; the future is utterly wide, vague, and impracticable, in nowise modifying or limiting the sorrow which, to its unpractised imagination, can have no ending.

When a child has learnt to live in the past, or the future, rather than in the present, it has learnt one of the first and saddest of life's experiences--a lesson so hard in the learning, so impossible to unlearn in all the years to come.

A lesson that our Madelon, too, must soon take to heart, in the midst of such dreary distasteful surroundings, with a past so bright to look back upon, with a future which she can fill with any amount of day-dreams, of whatever hue she pleases--a lesson therefore, which she is not long in acquiring, but with the too usual result, a most weary impatience of the present.

The first violence of her grief exhausted itself in time, as was only natural, and something of her old energy and spirit began to show itself again; but the change was not much for the better. She did not mope nor pine, that was not her way; but she became possessed with a spirit of restless petulance, which at first, indeed, was only another phase of unhappiness, but which, not being recognized as such, presently developed into a most decided wilfulness. She turned impatiently from the nun's well-meant kindness and efforts to console her, which somehow were not what she wanted--not that, but something so different, poor child!--she was cross, peevish, fractious without intending it, scarcely knowing why; the nuns set her down as a perverse unamiable child: and so it happened, that she had not been many weeks in the convent before she came to be regarded with general disfavour and indifference instead of with the kindly feeling that had at first been shown to the forlorn little stranger.

Graham had indeed wasted some pity on her, in imagining her under the immediate control of her aunt. The Superior had far too many things to think about for her to trouble herself with any direct superintendence of her little niece; Madelon hardly ever saw her, and in fact, of the convent life in general she knew but little. Her lessons she soon began to do with the other children in the cla.s.s, and for the rest she was placed under the special care of one of the younger Sisters, Soeur Lucie by name.

Like Madelon, Soeur Lucie had been brought, a little ten-year- old orphan to the convent, to be under the care of one of the nuns who was her aunt; and it was, perhaps, on this account, that she was chosen by Mademoiselle Linders as a sort of _gouvernante_ for her niece. But there was no other resemblance between this placid, fair-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked Flemish girl, whose early recollections were all of farms and farmyards, of flat gra.s.sy meadows watered by slow moving streams, of red cows feeding tranquilly in rich pastures, of milking, and cheese-making, and b.u.t.ter-making, of dairies with s.h.i.+ning pots and pans and spotless floors, and our vehement brown-eyed Madelon, who in her ten years had seen more of the world than Soeur Lucie was likely to see if she lived to be a hundred. Soeur Lucie had pa.s.sed a happy, peaceful childhood in the convent, and, as she grew up into girlhood, had listened submissively to the words of exhortation which urged her to give up the world and its vanities, which she had never known, and by such voluntary renunciation to pa.s.s from a state of mere negative virtue into that one of superior holiness only to be attained beneath the nun's veil, and behind the convent grating. She took the vows as soon as she was old enough, endowed the convent with her fortune, and was perfectly happy.

She had neither friends nor relations outside this little world in which she had been brought up, and she desired nothing beyond what it could afford her. She had, as she well knew, secured for herself in the next world a sure compensation for any little sacrifices she might have made in this--a reflection that often consoled her under a too prolonged course of prayer and meditation, for which, to say the truth, she had little apt.i.tude--and for the rest, she was universally allowed to be the best compote-maker (the nuns were famous for their compotes, which were in great demand), the best embroiderer, the best altar-decorator in the convent.

What more could be expected or demanded of life? Soeur Lucie, at any rate, was quite satisfied with her position, and this perfectly simple-minded, good-tempered little sister was a general favourite. Madelon could not have fallen into kinder hands; Soeur Lucie, if not always very wise, was at least very good-natured, and if she did not win much respect or admiration from our little Madelon, who was not long in discovering that she knew a great deal about a great many things that the nun had never heard or dreamt of, the poor child at least learnt to recognize hers as a friendly face, and to turn to her in these dreary days.

The convent was neither very large nor very wealthy. The building itself had formerly been a chateau-farm, which, with its sheds and outlying buildings, had, many years ago, been converted with considerable alterations into its present form; rooms had been part.i.tioned off, a little chapel had been built, the hall turned into a refectory, the farmyard and orchard into a pleasant sunny garden with lawn, and flower- beds, and shrubs, with vines and fruit-trees alternating with creepers along the old walls. As for the sisters, few were from the upper ranks of society, belonging for the most part, rather to the middle and bourgeois cla.s.s. Mademoiselle Linders had gained her present position not less by her superior birth and education, than by that to which she would more willingly have attributed her elevation--a certain asceticism of life which she affected, an extra observance of fasts and vigils, which the good nuns looked upon with reverence, without caring to emulate such peculiar sanct.i.ty in their own persons. The rule was not a strict one, nor, though the Superior was careful to enforce it to its utmost rigour, was the life one of particular hards.h.i.+p or privation. They were a simple, kind, good-hearted set, these Sisters, having their little disputes, and contentions, and jealousies among themselves occasionally, no doubt, but leading good, peaceable lives on the whole, with each day and hour well filled with its appointed tasks, leading through a continual, not useless round of embroidery, teaching, compote-making, and prayers.

Perhaps some one looking round on them, with their honest, homely Belgian faces, would have tried to imagine some history for them, in accordance with the traditions that cling about convent walls, and a.s.sociate themselves with the very mention of a nun; and most likely they would have been all wrong. None of these Sisters had had very eventful lives, and they had, for the most part, dropped into their present mode of existence quite naturally. With little romance to look back upon, save such as finds a place in even the homeliest life, with an imperfect middle-cla.s.s education that had failed to elevate the mind, or give it wide conceptions of life, and religion, and duty, a certain satisfaction at having done with secular life and its cares, and at having their future here and hereafter comfortably provided for, was perhaps the general tone amongst this prosaic, unimaginative community. We are, indeed, far from affirming that in that little society there was no higher tone of religious enthusiasm, that there were not some who not only found their highest religious ideal in the life they had chosen, but to whom it formed, in fact, the highest ideal to which they could attain, and calculated, therefore, to develope in them the best and n.o.blest part of their natures. To such, the appointed, monotonous round, the unquestioning submission to the will of another, the obedience at once voluntary and enforced, would not only bring a gracious sense of repose after conflict, but, by satisfying their religious cravings and aspirations, by demanding the exercise of those virtues which appeared to them at once the highest and the most attainable, would give peace to souls which, in the world's active life, would have tossed for ever to and fro in reckless unquiet warfare, nor have ever once perceived that in such warfare they might, after all, be fulfilling the n.o.blest ends. "Peace, and rest, and time for heavenly meditation," they had cried, stretching out weary hands to this quiet little harbour of refuge, and perhaps--who knows?--they had there found them.

Such, then, was this little world in which our Madelon suddenly found herself placed to her utter bewilderment at first, so alien was it to all her former experiences, so little could she understand of its meaning, its aims, its spirit and intention; no more than, as it seemed to her, those around her understood her, or her wants and wishes. To her, the convent only appeared inexpressibly _triste_ and dreary, a round of dull tasks, enlivened by duller recreations, day after day, for ever bounded by those blank, grey walls--no change, no variety, no escape. The bare, scantily-furnished rooms, the furniture itself, the food, the nuns' perpetual black dress, and ungraceful headgear,--Madelon hated them all, as she gradually recovered from her first desolation, and became alive again to external impressions; and, as the first keenness of her sorrow wore off, this vague sense of general unhappiness and discomfort showed itself in an att.i.tude of opposition and defiance to every one and everything around her. From being helplessly wretched and cross, she became distinctly naughty, and before long our Madelon had drifted into the hopeless position of a child always refractory, always in disgrace, a position from which, when once a.s.sumed, it is almost impossible for the small hapless delinquent to struggle free.

That Madelon was very naughty cannot be denied, and the fact surprised no one so much as herself. The nuns, accustomed to all sorts of children of every variety of temper, of every shade of docility and wilfulness, of cleverness and stupidity, found nothing astonis.h.i.+ng in one more perverse little specimen, but Madelon could not understand it at all. She was not used to feeling naughty, and did not know what it meant at first. In her life hitherto, when she had been as happy as the day is long, she had had singularly few opportunities for exercising the privilege of every child of Adam, and exhibiting her original waywardness. But it was far otherwise now, and she could not understand why she always felt cross, always obstinate, always perverse; she only knew that she was very miserable, and it was quite a discovery to be told one day that it was because she was naughty, and that if she were good, she would be happy.

"I always am good," said Madelon, firing up, and speaking from the experience of former days, "and I am not at all happy--I never shall be here."

But alas! it was proved too clearly that she was not at all good, and indeed she began to think so herself, only she did not see how she could help it.

Madelon got into great disgrace in the very first weeks after her arrival at the convent, and this was the occasion of it.

The only room vacant for her was a cell that had been occupied by a sister who had died a short time previously, a sister of a devout turn of mind, who had a.s.sisted her meditations by the contemplation of a skull of unusual size and s.h.i.+niness. The cell was a cheerful, narrow little room, looking out on the convent garden, and the first pleasant sensation that Madelon knew in the convent was when she was taken into it, and saw the afternoon sun s.h.i.+ning upon its white-washed walls, and the late climbing roses nodding in at the open window; but she became possessed with a perfect horror of the skull. She discovered it the first evening when she was going to bed, and was quite glad to pop her head under the bed-clothes, to shut out all sight and thought of it. But awaking again that first night in her grief and loneliness, she saw a stray moonbeam s.h.i.+ning in, and lighting it up into ghastly whiteness and distinctness, as it stood on a little bracket against the wall beneath a tall wooden crucifix. For the first minute she was half paralysed with terror; she lay staring at it without power to move, and then she would a.s.suredly have run to some one for protection had she known to whom to go, or, indeed, had she not been too terrified to do more than hide her head under the counterpane again. From that time it became a perpetual nightmare to her. By day its terrors were less apparent, though even then, with her innate love for all things bright, and joyous, and pleasant, it was a positive grief to her to have such a grim object before her eyes whenever she came into the room; but at night no sooner was she in bed, and the light taken away, than her imagination conjured up a hundred frightful shapes, that all a.s.sociated themselves with the grinning death's-head. In vain she covered it up, in vain she shut her eyes--sleeping or waking it seemed always there. At length she could bear it no longer, and entreated piteously that it might be taken away; but Soeur Lucie, to whom the little prayer was made, did not view the matter in at all the same light as Madelon. In the first place, if formed part of the furniture of the room, and had always been there, so far as he knew--which, to the nun, whose life was founded on a series of unquestioned precedents, allowing of nothing arbitrary but the will of the Superior, appeared an unanswerable reason why it should always remain; and, in the next place, with the lack of sympathy that one sometimes remarks in unimaginative minds, she did not in the least understand the terror with which it inspired the child, but a.s.sured her, in her good-humoured way, that that was all nonsense, and the she would get over it in time. So the skull remained, and Madelon was miserable, till one night, in a moment of desperation, she jumped out of bed, seized it with both hands, and flung it with all her might through the window into the garden below. She was frightened when she heard the crash of falling gla.s.s, for in her excitement she had never stopped to open the window, but greatly relieved, notwithstanding, to think that her enemy was gone, and slept more soundly that night than she had done for a long time previously.

Next morning, however, Madelon had a cold, a pane of gla.s.s was found in fragments on the gravel walk beneath the window, a skull was discovered, lying among the long gra.s.s on the lawn; one can fancy the exclamations, the inquiries, the commotion.

Madelon, though not a little frightened, avowed boldly enough what she had done, and so far gained her end that the skull never reappeared, and a safe precedent was established for Soeur Lucie's future guidance; but she got into great trouble at the time, and gained moreover the unenviable distinction of having committed a deed of unparalleled audacity. After this, what might not be expected of such a child? The nuns at once formed a bad opinion of her, which they owed it to themselves to confirm on the occasion of each succeeding offence, by a reference to this past misdeed which had first taught them of what enormities she was capable.

Matters were no better when there came to be a question of lessons. Madelon did not mind the actual learning, though she wearied a little of the continued application to which she was unused; but she resented to the last degree the astonishment that her ignorance on all sorts of subjects excited both in the nuns who taught her, and in the other children in the cla.s.s, and which was expressed with sufficient distinctness.

"Never studied geography, nor history, nor arithmetic!" cries Soeur Ursule, who superintended the school; "not know the princ.i.p.al cities in Europe, nor the kings of France, nor even your multiplication table!" These speeches, with strongly implied notes of admiration after each sentence, and ill.u.s.trated by the expression on the faces of a small, open- mouthed audience in the background, roused Madelon's most indignant feelings; she rebelled alike against the injustice of being held up to public reprobation for not knowing what she had never been taught, and against the imputations cast upon her education hitherto. "I can do a great many things you cannot," she would answer defiantly, "I can talk English, and German, and Italian--you can't; I can dance--you can't; I can sing songs, and--and, oh! a great many things that you cannot do!" A speech of this sort would bring our poor Madelon into dire disgrace we may be sure; and then angry, impenitent, she would go away into some corner, and cry--oh! how sadly--for her father; for the happy old days, for Monsieur Horace, too, perhaps, to come back, and take her out of all this misery.

Behind the convent was a strip of ground, which produced cabbages and snails on one side, and apple-trees on the other; a straight walk divided these useful productions from each other. When Madelon was _en penitence_ she used sometimes to be sent to walk here alone during the hour of recreation, and would wander disconsolately enough among the apple-trees, counting the apples by way of something to do, and getting intimately acquainted with the snails and green caterpillars amongst the cabbages. Our poor little Madelon! I could almost wish that we had kept her always in that pretty green valley where we first saw her; but I suppose in every life there come times when cabbages, or things of no cheerfuller aspect than cabbages, are the only prospect, and this was one of her times. She used to feel very unhappy and very lonely as she paced up and down, thinking of the past--ah, how far that past already lay behind her, how separate, how different from anything she did, or saw, or heard in these dull days! She did not find many friends to console her in her troubles; good- natured Soeur Lucie did indeed try to comfort her when she found her crying, and though she was not very successful in her efforts, Madeleine began to give her almost as much grat.i.tude as if she had been. Soeur Lucie could not think of anything to tell her but that she was very naughty, and must try to be good, which Madelon knew too well already. It would have been more to the purpose, perhaps, if she had told her she was not so very bad after all, but Soeur Lucie never thought of that; perhaps she did not care much about the child; by this time Madelon was beginning to be established as the black sheep of the little community, and Soeur Lucie only expressed the general sense; but being very good-natured, she said in a kind way what other people said disagreeably.

Neither from her companions did she meet with much sympathy, and, indeed, when out of disgrace, Madelon was apt to be rather ungracious to her schoolfellows, with whom she had little in common. The children who came daily to the convent were of two cla.s.ses--children of the poor and children of a higher bourgeois grade, shopkeepers for the most part. Madelon was naturally cla.s.sed with the latter of these two sets during the lesson hours, but she stood decidedly aloof from them afterwards, at first through shyness, and then with a sort of wondering disdain. She had never been used to children's society; all her life her father had been careful to keep her apart from companions of her own age, and, accustomed to a.s.sociate continually with grown-up people, she chose to regard with great contempt the trivial chatter, and squabbles, and amus.e.m.e.nts of her small contemporaries. After a time, indeed, she condescended to astonish their minds with some of her old stories, and was gratified by the admiration of a round-eyed, open-mouthed audience, who listened with rapt attention as she related some of the glories of past days, b.a.l.l.s, and theatres, and kursaals, princes and counts, and fine dresses; it served in some sort to maintain the sense of superiority which was sorely tried during the untoward events of the lesson hours; but this also was destined to come to an end. One day there was a whispering among the listeners, which resulted in the smallest of them saying boldly,--

"Marie-Louise says your papa must have been a very bad man."

"What!" cries Madelon, jumping off the high stool on which she had been seated. This little scene took place during the hour of recreation, when the children ate their luncheon of bread and fruit.

"Ah, yes," says Marie-Louise, a broad-faced, flaxen-haired damsel, half a head taller than Madelon, and nodding her head knowingly. "Those are very fine stories that you tell us there, Mademoiselle, but when I related them at home they said it was clear your papa must have been a very wicked man."

Madelon turned quite white and walked up to the girl, her teeth set, her small fists clenched. "You are wicked!" she stammered out; "how dare you say such things? I--I will never speak to you again!" and then she turned, and walked off without another word.

The matter did not end here, however, for the children talked of it among themselves, the nuns heard of it, and, finally, it reached the ears of Madame la Superieure herself. Madelon, summoned into the awful presence of her aunt, received the strictest orders never again to refer to these past experiences in any way. "You are my child now," says Madame, overwhelming the poor little culprit before her with her severest demeanour, "and must learn to forget all these follies." If Madelon feared any one, it was her aunt, who had never cared to win her little niece's love by any show of affection; the child came before her trembling, and escaped from her gladly. She had no inclination to draw down further reprimands by disobedience in this particular, so far as words went, nor indeed had she any temptation to do so. From this time she kept more apart from the rest of the children, rarely joining in their games, and preferring even Soeur Lucie's society to that of her small companions. So, altogether, Madelon's first attempts at a convent life were not a success, and time only brought other sad deficiencies to light.

Whatever the nuns may have thought or said, concerning her ignorance of history, geography, and arithmetic, it was a far more serious matter when there came to be a question of her religious knowledge. The good sisters were really horrified at the complete blank they found, and lost no time in putting her through a course of the most orthodox instruction. Before she had been a month in the convent, she knew almost as much as Nanette, had learnt why people go to church and what they do there, had studied her catechism, could find her places in her prayer-book, could repeat Ave Marias and Paternosters, and tell her beads like every one else. And so Madelon's questions are answered at last, her perplexities solved, her yearnings satisfied! She apprehended quickly all that she was taught, so far as in her lay, and vaguely perceived something still beyond her powers of apprehension, something that still confusedly connected itself with the great church, with the violinist's playing, with the pictures and the music of old days, and which, for the present, in her new life, found its clearest expression, not in the nuns' teaching, for, kind and affectionate as it in truth was, it was marred from the first to Madelon by the inevitable exclamation of wonder and horror that she should not know all about it already--not in the questions and answers in her catechism, nor in the religious dogmas and formulas which she accepted, but could hardly appreciate--not in all these, but in the little chapel with its gaudy altars, and twinkling lights, its services, and music, and incense. Indeed, apart from all higher considerations, the pictures, the colouring, the singing, all were the happiest relief to the child, who, used to perpetual change and brightness, wearied indescribably of the dull, colourless life, the uniform dress, the want of all artistic beauty in the convent. Her greatest reward when she had been good was to be allowed to join in the singing in the chapel--her greatest punishment, to be banished from the evening services.

No need, however, to pursue this part of little Madelon's history further. With the nuns' instruction, and the learning of her catechism, vanished all that had distinguished her, in this respect, from other children of her years and station.

She had learnt most of what can be learnt by such teaching, and for her, as for others, there remained the verifying and realization of these lessons, according to her capacity and experience. Only, one may somehow feel sure, that to this pa.s.sionate, wilful little nature, religion would hardly present itself as one simple sublime truth, high, pure, and serene as the over-arching, all-embracing heaven, through which the sun s.h.i.+nes down on the clas.h.i.+ng creeds of men; but rather as a complex, many-sided problem, too often at variance with her scheme of life, to be felt after through the medium of conflicting emotions, to be worked out at last through what doubts, questionings, with what perplexities, strivings, yearnings, cries for light--along this in nowise singular path, no need to follow our little Madelon.