The White Sister Part 14

It was not the first time, by many, that Sister Giovanna had heard a delirious patient tell a shameful secret that had been kept long and well. She rose with an effort, pressing one hand upon the table. It was plainly her duty to prevent any further revelations if she could and to forget what she had heard; for a trained nurse's standard of honour must be as high as a doctor's, since she is trusted as he is.

Yet the nun waited a moment before going round the screen, unconsciously arguing that if the patient did not speak again it would be better not to disturb her at that moment. To tell the truth, too, Sister Giovanna had not fully understood the meaning of what her aunt had said. She stood motionless during the long pause that followed the last words.

Then, without warning, the delirious woman began to laugh, vacantly and foolishly at first, and with short interruptions of silence, but then more loudly, and by degrees more continuously, till the spasms grew wild and hysterical, and bad to hear. Sister Giovanna went quickly to her and at once tried to put a stop to the attack. The Princess was rolling her head from side to side on the pillows, with her arms stretched out on each side of her and her white hands clawing at the broad hem of the sheet with all their strength, as if they must tear the fine linen to strips, and she was shrieking with uncontrollable laughter.

Sister Giovanna bent down and grasped one arm firmly with both hands.

'Control yourself!' she said in a tone of command. 'Stop laughing at once!'

The Princess shrieked again and again.

'Silence!' cried the nurse in a stern voice, and she shook the arm she held with a good deal of roughness, for she knew that there was no other way.

The delirious woman screamed once more, and then gulped several times as if she were going to sob; at last she lay quite still for a moment, gazing up into her nurse's eyes. Then a change came into her face, and she spoke in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, and as if frightened.

'Are you going to refuse me absolution for taking the will?' she asked.

The question was so unexpected that Sister Giovanna did not find anything to say at once, and before any words occurred to her the Princess was speaking hurriedly and earnestly, but still in a loud whisper, which occasionally broke into a very low and trembling tone of voice.

'I did it for the best. What could that wretched girl have done with the money, even if the lawyers had proved the will good? Why did not my brother-in-law get civilly married, instead of leaving his daughter without so much as a name? There must have been a reason. Perhaps she was not really his wife's child! It was all his fault, and the will was not legal and would only have given trouble if I had let them find it! So I took it away, and burned it in my own room. What harm was there in that? It saved so many useless complications, and we had a right to the fortune! The lawyers said so! I cannot see that it was really a sin at all, Father, indeed I cannot! I have confessed it from a scruple of conscience, and you will not refuse me absolution! How can you, when I say I am sorry for it? Yes, yes, I am!' The voice rose to a low cry. 'Since you say it was a sin I repent, I will--what? You are not in earnest, Father? Make rest.i.tution? Give the whole fortune to a nun? Oh, no, no! You cannot expect me to do that! Rob my children of what would have been theirs even if I had not taken the will? It is out of the question, I tell you! Utterly out of the question! Besides, it is not mine at all--I have not got a penny of it! It is all my husband's and I cannot touch it--do you understand?'

Sister Giovanna had listened in spite of herself.

'The nun expects nothing and does not want the money,' she said, bending down. 'Try to rest now, for you are very tired.'

'Rest?' cried the Princess, starting up in bed and leaning on one hand. 'How can I rest when it torments me day and night? I come to you for absolution and you refuse it, and tell me to rest!'

She broke into a wild laugh again, but Sister Giovanna instantly seized her arm as she had done before, and spoke in the same commanding way.

'Be silent!' she said energetically.

The delirious woman began to whine.

'You are so rough, Father--so unkind to-day! What is the matter with you? You never treated me like this before!'

She was sobbing the next moment, and real tears trickled through her fingers as she covered her face with her hands.

'You see--how--how penitent I am!' she managed to cry in a broken voice.

'Have pity, Father!'

She was crying bitterly, but though she was out of her mind the nun could not help feeling that she was acting a part, even in her delirium, and in spite of the tears that forced themselves through her hands and ran down, wetting the lace and spotting the scarlet ribbons of her elaborate nightdress. Sister Giovanna put aside the thought as a possibly unjust judgment, and tried to quiet her.

'If you are really sorry for what you did, you will be forgiven,' said the nun.

This produced an immediate effect: the sobbing subsided, the tears ceased to flow, and the Princess repeated the Act of Contrition in a low voice; then she folded her hands and waited in silence. Sister Giovanna stood upright beside the pillows, and prayed very earnestly in her heart that she might forget what she had heard, or at least bear her aunt no grudge for the irreparable wrong.

But the delirious woman, who still fancied that her nurse was her confessor, was waiting for the words of absolution, and after a few moments, as she did not hear them, she broke out again in senseless terror, with sobbing and more tears. She grasped the Sister's arms wildly and dragged herself up till she was on her knees in bed, imploring and weeping, pleading and sobbing, while she trembled visibly from head to foot.

The case was a difficult one, even for an experienced nurse. A lay woman might have taken upon herself to personate the priest and p.r.o.nounce the words of the absolution in the hope of quieting the patient, but no member of a religious order would do such a thing, except to save life, and such a case could hardly arise. The Princess Chiaromonte was in no bodily danger, and the chances were that the delirium would leave her before long; when it disappeared she would probably fall asleep, and it was very unlikely that she should remember anything she had said in her ravings. Meanwhile it was certainly not good for her to go on crying and throwing herself about, as she was doing, for the fever was high already and her wild excitement might increase the temperature still further.

Sister Giovanna took advantage of a brief interval, when she was perhaps only taking breath between her lamentations, out of sheer necessity.

'You must compose yourself,' the nun said with authority. 'You seem to forget that you have been ill. Lie down for a little while, and I will come back presently. In the meantime, I give you my word that your niece has forgiven you with all her heart.'

She could say that with a clear conscience, just then, and gently disengaging herself, she succeeded without much difficulty in making the Princess lay her head on the pillow, for the words had produced a certain effect; then, leaving the bedside, she went back to the table.

But she did not sit down, and only remained standing about a minute before going back to the patient.

She went round by the opposite side of the screen, however, with the hope that the Princess, seeing her come from another direction, would take her for a different person. Very small things sometimes affect people in delirium, and the little artifice was successful; she came forward, speaking cheerfully in her ordinary voice, and at once put her arm under the pillow, propping her aunt's head in order to make her drink comfortably. There was no resistance now.

'You are much better already,' she said in an encouraging tone. 'Does your head ache much?'

'It feels a little light,' the Princess said, quite naturally, 'but it does not hurt me now. I think I have been asleep--and dreaming, too.'

Perhaps some suspicion that she had been raving crossed her unsettled brain, for she glanced quickly at the nun and then shut her eyes.

'Yes,' she said, apparently satisfied; 'I have been dreaming.'

Sister Giovanna only smiled, as sympathetically as she could, and sitting down by the head of the bed, she stroked the burning forehead with her cool hand, softly and steadily, for several minutes; and little by little the Princess sank into a quiet sleep, for she was exhausted by the effort she had unconsciously made. When she was breathing regularly, the nun left her side and went noiselessly back to her seat behind the screen.

She did not open her breviary again that night. For a long time she sat quite still, with her hands folded on the edge of the table, gazing into the furthest corner of the room with unwinking eyes.

She had said that she forgave her aunt with all her heart, and she had believed that it was true; but she was less sure now that she could think of her past life, and of what might have been if she had not been driven from her home dest.i.tute and forced to take refuge with Madame Bernard.

In the light of what she had just learned, the past had a very different look. It was true that she had urged Giovanni to join the expedition, and had used arguments which had convinced herself as well as him. But she had made him go because, if he had stayed, he would have sacrificed his career in the army in order to earn bread for her, who was penniless. If she had inherited even a part of the fortune that should have been hers, it never would have occurred to him to leave the service and go into business for her support; or if it had crossed his mind, she would have dissuaded him easily enough. So far as mere money went, he had not wanted or needed it for himself, but for her; and if she had been rich and had married him, he could not have been reproached with living on her. To persuade him, she had urged that his honour required him to accept a post of danger instead of resigning from the army as soon as it was offered to him, and this had been true to some extent; but if there had been no question of his leaving the service, she would have found him plenty of satisfactory reasons for not going to Africa, and he had not been the kind of man whom gossips care to call a coward. Reasons? She would have invented twenty in those days, when she was not a nun, but just a loving girl with all her womanhood before her!

If her aunt had not stolen the will and robbed her, she would have hindered Giovanni from leaving Italy, and she would have married him, that was the plain truth. He would have been alive now, in his youth and his strength and his love for her, instead of having perished in the African desert. That was the thought that tormented the guilty woman, too: it was the certainty that her crime had indirectly sent him to his death. So thought Sister Giovanna as she sat staring into the dark corner through the hours of the night, and she wondered how she had been able to say that she forgave, or had dared to hope that she could forget. If it had been only for herself, it might have been quite different; but her imagination had too often unwillingly pictured the tragic death of the man she had loved so well to forgive the woman who had caused it, now that she had revealed herself at last.

So long as Angela had believed that her father had left no will, because he had been in ignorance of the law, she had been able to tell herself that her great misfortune had been inevitable; but since it turned out that he had provided for her and had done his duty by her, according to his light, the element of inevitable fate disappeared, and the awful conviction that Giovanni's life had been wantonly sacrificed to enrich Princess Chiaromonte and her children forced itself upon her intelligence and would not be thrust out.

It seemed to Sister Giovanna that this was the first real temptation that had a.s.sailed her since she had taken her vows, the first moment of active regret for what might have been, as distinguished from that heartfelt sorrow for the man who had perished which had not been incompatible with a religious life. Recalling the Mother Superior's words of warning, she recorded her failure, as the first of its kind, and prayed that it might not be irretrievable, and that resentment and regret might ebb away and leave her again as she had been before the unforgettable voice had pierced her ears with the truth she had never guessed.

It was a great effort now to go to the bedside and do what must be done for the sick woman--to smooth the pillow for the head that had thought such thoughts and to stroke the hand that had done such a deed. She was tempted to take the little black bag and leave the house quietly, before any one was up. That was not a very dreadful thought, of course, but it seemed terrible to her, whose first duty in life was to help sufferers and soothe those who were in pain. It seemed to her almost as bad as if a soldier in battle were suddenly tempted to turn his back on his comrades, throw down his rifle, and run away.

She felt it each time that she had to rise and go round the screen, and when she saw the flushed face on the pillow in the shadow, the longing to be gone was almost greater than she could resist. She had not understood before what it meant to loathe any living thing, but she knew it now, and if she did her duty conscientiously that night, easy and simple though it was, she deserved more credit than many of the Sisters who had gone so bravely to nurse the lepers in far Rangoon.

She did not feel the smallest wish to hurt the woman who had injured her, let that be said in her praise; for though vengeance be the Lord's, to long for it is human. She only desired to be out of the house, and out of sight of the face that lay where her father's had lain, and beyond reach of the voice that had told her what she wished she had never known.

But there was no escape and she had to bear it; and when the night wore away at last, it had been the longest she remembered in all her life. Her face was as white as the Mother Superior's and her dark blue eyes looked almost black; even Madame Bernard would not have recognised the bright-haired Angela of other days in the weary and sad-faced nun who met the doctor outside the door of the sick-room when he came at eight o'clock.

She told him that the patient had been delirious about midnight, but had rested tolerably ever since. He glanced at the temperature chart she brought him and then looked keenly at her face and frowned.

'What is the matter with all of you White Sisters?' he growled discontentedly. 'First they send me one who cannot stay over night, and then they send me one who has not been to bed for a week and ought to stay there for a month! When did you leave your last case?'

'Yesterday morning,' answered Sister Giovanna submissively. 'I slept most of the afternoon. I am not tired and can do my work very well, I a.s.sure you.'

'Oh, you can, can you?' The excellent man glared at her savagely through his spectacles. 'You cannot say anything yourself, of course, but I shall go to your hospital to-day and give your Mother Superior such a scolding as she never had in her life! She ought to be ashamed to send out a nurse in your worn-out condition!'

'I felt quite fresh and rested when I left the Convent in the evening,' said the Sister in answer. 'It is not the Mother Superior's fault.'