The White Sister Part 10

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 dest.i.tute 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 inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.ses.

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 bra.s.s 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 att.i.tudes, less and less p.r.o.nounced 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 apt.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 compet.i.tion. 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 circ.u.mstance 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.