The White Sister Part 30

He had done the most rash, inconsequent, and uselessly bad deed that had ever suggested itself to his imagination, and now that all was over he wondered how he could have been at once so foolish, so brutal, and so daring. Perhaps five years of slavery in Africa had unsettled his mind; he had heard of several similar cases and his own might be another; he had read of officers who had lost all sense of responsibility after months of fighting in the tropics, perhaps from having borne responsibility too long and unshared, who had come back, after doing brave and honourable work, to find themselves morally crippled for civilised life, and no longer able to distinguish right from wrong or truth from falsehood.

It had all happened quickly but illogically, as events follow each other in dreams, from the moment when he had gone to the Convent hospital with Monsignor Saracinesca till the brougham drove away in the dark, taking Angela back. He understood for the first time how men whom every one supposed to be of average uprightness could commit atrocious crimes; he shuddered to think what must have happened if a mere chance had not changed his mood, making him ask Angela's forgiveness and prompting him to let her go. She had touched him, that was all. If her voice had sounded only a little differently at the great moment, if her eyes had not looked at him with just that expression, if her att.i.tude had been a shade less resolute, what might not have happened? For the conviction that he could force her to be his wife if he chose to keep her a prisoner had taken possession of him suddenly, when all his arguments had failed. It had come with irresistible strength: the simplicity of the plan had been axiomatic, its immediate execution had been in his power, and while she was within the circle of his senses, his pa.s.sion had been elemental and overwhelming. He tried to excuse himself with that; men in such cases had done worse things by far, and at least Angela had been safe from violence.

But his own words accused him; he had threatened her, he had talked of bringing infamy and public disgrace on the woman he loved, in order to force her to marry him; he had thought only of that end and not at all of the vile means; it all took shape now, and looked ugly enough. He felt the blood surging to his sunburnt forehead for shame, perhaps for the first time in his life, and the sensation was painfully humiliating.

It made a deep impression on him when he realised it. Often enough he had said that honour was his G.o.d, and he had taken pleasure in proving that he who makes the rule of honour the law of his life must of necessity be a good man, incapable of any falsehood or meanness or cruelty, and therefore truthful, generous, and kind; in other words, such an one must really be all that a good Christian aims at being.

The religion of honour, Giovanni used to say, was of a higher nature than Christianity, since Christians might sin, repent, and be forgiven again and again, to the biblical seventy times seven times; but a man who did one dishonourable deed in his whole life ceased to be a man of honour for ever. Having that certainty before his eyes, how could he ever be in danger of a fall?

But now he was ashamed, for he had fallen; he had forsaken his deity and his faith; the infamy he had threatened to bring on Angela had come back upon him and branded him. It was not because he had brought her to his lodging to talk with him alone, for he saw nothing dishonourable in that, since he felt sure that no harm could come to her in consequence. The dishonour lay in having thought of the rest afterwards, and in having been on the point of carrying out his threat. If he had kept her a prisoner only a few hours, the whole train of results would most probably have followed; if he had not let her go till the next day, they would have been inevitable and irretrievable. Nothing could have saved Sister Giovanna then.

As he saw the truth more and more clearly, shame turned into something more like horror, and as different from mere humiliation as remorse is from repentance. Thinking over what he had done, he attempted to put himself in Angela's place, and to see, or guess, how he would behave if some stronger being tried to force him to choose between public ignominy and breaking a solemn oath. Moreover, he endeavoured to imagine what the nun, as distinguished from the mere woman, must have felt when she found herself trapped in a man's rooms and locked in.

Even his unbelief instinctively placed Sister Giovanna higher in the scale of goodness than Angela Chiaromonte; he was an unbeliever, but not a scoffer, for somehow the rule of honour influenced him there, too. Nuns could really be saints, and were often holy women, and the fact that they were mistaken, in his opinion, only made their sacrifice more complete, since they were to receive no reward where they hoped for an eternal one; and he no longer doubted that Sister Giovanna was as truly good in every sense as any of them. What must she not have felt, less than an hour ago, when he had entered the room, telling her roughly that she was in his power, beyond all reach of help? Yet he had cherished the illusion that he was an honourable man, who would never take cruel advantage of any woman, still less of an innocent girl, far less, still, of a nursing nun, whose dress alone would have protected her from insult amongst any men but criminals.

In his self-contempt he hung his head as he sat alone by the table, half-fancying that if he raised his eyes he would see his own image accusing him. Sister Giovanna herself would have been surprised if she could have known how complete her victory had been. His G.o.d had forsaken him in his great need, and though he could not believe in hers, he was asking himself what inward strength that must be which could make a woman in extremest danger so gentle and yet so strong, so quick to righteous anger and yet so ready to forgive what he could never pardon in himself.

CHAPTER XVI

Sister Giovanna's nerves were good. The modern trained nurse is a machine, and a wonderfully good one on the whole; when she is exceptionally endowed for her work she is quite beyond praise. People who still fancy that Rome is a mediaeval town, several centuries behind other great capitals in the application of useful discoveries and scientific systems, would be surprised if they knew the truth and could see what is done there, and not as an exception, but as the general rule. The common English and American belief, that Roman nuns nurse the sick chiefly by prayer and the precepts of the school of Salerno, is old-fas.h.i.+oned nonsense; the Pope's own authority requires that they should attend an extremely modern training-school where they receive a long course of instruction, probably as good as any in the world, from eminent surgeons and physicians.

One of the first results of proper training in anything is an increased steadiness of the nerves, which quite naturally brings with it the ability to bear a long strain better than ordinary persons can, and a certain habitual coolness that is like an armour against surprises of all kinds. One reason why Anglo-Saxons are generally cooler than people of other nations is that they are usually in better physical condition than other men.

A digression is always a liberty which the story-teller takes with his readers, and those of us have the fewest readers who make the most digressions; hence the little old-fas.h.i.+oned civility of apologising for them. The one I have just made seemed necessary to explain why Sister Giovanna was able to go to her patient directly from Severi's rooms, and to take up her work with as much quiet efficiency as if nothing unusual had happened.

She had found the portress in considerable perturbation, for the right carriage had just arrived, a quarter of an hour late instead of half-an-hour too soon. Sister Giovanna said that there had been a mistake, that she had been taken to the wrong house, that the first carriage should not have come to the hospital of the White Nuns at all, and that she had been kept waiting some time before being brought back.

All this was strictly true, and without further words she drove away to the Villino Barini, the brougham Severi had hired having already disappeared. As he had foreseen, it was impossible that any one should suspect what had happened, for the nun was above suspicion, and when his carriage had once left the Convent door no one could ever trace the sham coachman and footman in order to question them. In that direction, therefore, there was nothing to fear. The authority of an Italian officer over his orderly is great, and his power of making the conscript's life singularly easy or perfectly unbearable is greater.

Even Sister Giovanna knew that, and she felt no anxiety about the future.

Her mind was the more free to serve her conscience in examining her own conduct. It was not her right to a.n.a.lyse Giovanni's, however; he had made the circ.u.mstances in which she had been placed against her will, and the only question was, whether she had done right in a position she could neither have foreseen, so as to avoid it, nor have escaped from when once caught in it.

Examinations of conscience are tedious to every one except the subject of them, who generally finds them disagreeable, and sometimes positively painful. Sister Giovanna was honest with herself and was broad-minded enough to be fair; her memory had always been very good, she could recall nearly every word of the long interview, and she accused herself of having been weak twice, namely, when she had admitted that she was tempted, and when she had raised the revolver and Giovanni had thrown himself against it. The danger had been great at that moment, she knew, for she had felt that her mind was losing its balance. But she had not wished to kill him, even for a moment, though a terrifying conviction that her finger was going to pull the trigger in spite of her had taken away her breath. Looking back, she thought it must have been the sensation some people have at the edge of a precipice, when they feel an insane impulse to jump off, without having the slightest wish to destroy themselves. If a man affected in this way should lose his head and leap to destruction, his act would a.s.suredly not be suicide. The nun knew it very well, and she was equally sure that if she had been startled into pulling the trigger, and had killed the man she had loved so well, it would not have been homicide, whatever the law might have called it. But the consequences would have been frightful, and the danger had been real. She could be thankful for her good nerves, since nothing had happened, that was all. Where she had done wrong had been in taking up the weapon, great as the provocation to self-defence had been.

Morally speaking, and apart from the possible fatal result, her main fault lay in having confessed to Giovanni that she was really tempted to ask release from her vows. Now that he was not near, no such temptation a.s.sailed her, but there had been a time when to resist it had seemed the greatest sacrifice that any human being could make. She could only draw one conclusion from this fact, but it was a grave one: in spite of her past life, her vows and her heartfelt faith, she was not free from material and earthly pa.s.sion. Innocence is one thing, ignorance is another, and a trained nurse of twenty-five cannot and should not be as ignorant as a child, whether she be a nun or a lay woman. Sister Giovanna knew what she had felt: it had been the thrill of an awakened sense, not the vibration of a heartfelt sympathy; it belonged neither to the immortal spirit nor to the kingdom of the mind, but to the dying body. Temptation is not sin, but it is wrong to expose oneself to it willingly, except for a purpose so high as to justify the risk. Sister Giovanna quietly resolved that she would never see Severi again, and she judged that the surest way of abiding by her resolution was to join the mission to the Far East and leave Italy for ever. Having already thought of taking the step merely in order to get away from the possibility of hating a person who had wronged her and robbed her, it seemed indeed her duty to take it now for this much stronger reason. Since she could still be weak, her first and greatest duty was to put herself beyond the reach of weakening influences. Giovanni would not leave Rome while she stayed there, that was certain; there was no alternative but to go away herself, for a man capable of such a daring and lawless deed as carrying her off from the door of the Convent, under the very eyes of the portress, might do anything. Indeed, he might even follow her to Rangoon; but she must risk that, or bury herself in a cloister, which she would not do if she could help it.

While she was nursing the new case to which she had been called, her resolution became irrevocable. When the patient finally recovered she returned to the Convent, and it was not till she had been doing ordinary work in the hospital during several days that she asked to see the Mother Superior alone. Captain Ugo Severi had gone to the baths of Montecatini to complete his cure, nothing more had been heard of Giovanni, and the Mother was inclined to believe that his meeting with Sister Giovanna had been final, and that he would make no further attempt to see her. But the nun herself thought otherwise.

She sat where she always did when she came to the Mother Superior's room, on a straight-backed chair between the corner of the table and the wall, and she told her story without once faltering or hesitating, though without once looking up, from the moment when she had got into the wrong carriage till she had at last reached the Villino Barini in safety. Though it was late in the afternoon and the light was failing, the Mother shaded her eyes with one hand while she listened.

There was neither rule nor tradition under which Sister Giovanna could have felt it her duty to tell her superior what had happened, and she had necessarily been the only judge of what her confessor should know of the matter. Even now, if she had burst into floods of tears or shown any other signs of being on the verge of a nervous crisis, the elder woman would probably have stopped her and told her not to make confidences that concerned another person until she was calmer. But she evidently had full control of her words and outward bearing, and the Mother listened in silence. Then the young nun expounded the conclusion to which she believed herself forced: she must leave a country in which Giovanni might at any moment make another meeting inevitable, and the safest refuge was the Rangoon Leper Asylum. She formally asked permission to be allowed to join the mission.

The Mother Superior's nervous little hand contracted spasmodically upon her eyes, and then joined its fellow on her knee. She sat quite still for a few seconds, looking towards the window; the evening glow was beginning to fill the garden and the cloisters with purple and gold, and a faint reflection came up to her suffering face.

'It kills me to let you go,' she said at last, just above a whisper.

The words and the tone took Sister Giovanna by surprise, though she had lately understood that the Mother Superior's affection for her was much stronger than she would formerly have believed possible; it was something more than the sincere friends.h.i.+p which a middle-aged woman might feel for one much younger, and it was certainly not founded on the fact that the latter was an exceptionally gifted nurse, whose presence and activity were of the highest importance to the hospital.

Neither friends.h.i.+p nor admiration for a fellow-worker could explain an emotion of such tragic depth and strength that it seemed almost too human in a woman otherwise quite above and beyond ordinary humanity.

Sister Giovanna could find nothing to say, and waited in silence.

'I did not know that one could feel such pain,' said Mother Veronica, looking steadily out of the window; but her voice was little more than a breath.

The Sister could not understand, but in the midst of her own great trouble, the sight of a suffering as great as her own, and borne on account of her, moved her deeply.

All at once the Mother Superior swayed to one side on her chair, as if she were fainting, and she might have fallen if the nun had not darted forward to hold her upright; but at the touch, she straightened herself with an effort and gently pushed the young Sister away from her.

'If it is for me that you are in such pain, Mother,' said Sister Giovanna gently, 'I cannot thank you enough for being so sorry! But I do not deserve that you should care so much--indeed, I do not!'

'If I could give my life for yours, it would still be too little!'

'You are giving your life for many,' Sister Giovanna answered gently.

'That is better.'

'No. It is not better, but it is the best I can do. You do not understand.'

'How can I? But I am grateful----'

'You owe me nothing,' the Mother Superior answered with sudden energy, 'but I owe you everything. You have given me the happiest hours of my life. But it was too much. G.o.d sent you to me, and G.o.d is taking you away from me--G.o.d's will be done!'

Sister Giovanna felt that she was near something very strange and great which she might not be able to comprehend if it were shown clearly, and which almost frightened her by its mysterious veiled presence. The evening light penetrated Mother Veronica's translucid features, as if they were carved out of alabaster, and the hues that lingered in them might have been reflected from heaven; her upturned eyes, that sometimes looked so small and piercing, were wide and sorrowful now. The young Sister saw, but guessed nothing of the truth.

'The happiest hours in your life!' She repeated the words with wonder.

'Yes,' said the elder woman slowly, 'the happiest by far! Since you have been here, you have never given me one bad moment, by word or deed, excepting by the pain you yourself have had to bear. If you go away, and if I should not live long, remember what I have told you, for if you have some affection for me, it will comfort you to think that you have made me very, very happy for five long years.'

'I am glad, though I have done nothing but my duty, and barely that. I cannot see how I deserve such praise, but if I have satisfied you, I am most glad. You have been a mother to me.'

Slowly the transfigured face turned to her at last, full of radiance.

'Do you mean it just as you say it, my dear?'

'Indeed, indeed, I do!' Sister Giovanna answered, wondering more and more, but in true earnest.

The dark eyes gazed on her steadily for a long time, with an expression she had never seen in human eyes before. Then the truth came, soft and low.

'I am your mother.'

'You are a mother to us all,' the young Sister answered.

'I am your mother, dear, your own mother that bore you--you, my only child. Do you understand?'

Sister Giovanna's eyes opened wide in amazement, but there was a forelightening of joy in her face.

'You?' she cried. 'But I knew my mother--my father----'

'No. She whom you called your mother was my elder sister. I ran away with the man I loved, because he was a Protestant and poor, and my parents would not allow the marriage. We were married in his Church, but my family would have nothing more to do with me. I was an outcast for them, disgraced, never to be mentioned. Your own father died of typhoid fever a few days before you were born. I was ill a long time, ill and poor, almost starving. I wrote to my sister, imploring help.

She and her husband bargained with me. They agreed to make a long journey and bring you back as their child. They promised that you should be splendidly provided for; you would be an heiress, all that my brother-in-law could legally dispose of should go to you; but I was to disappear for ever and never let the truth be known. What could I do? You were two months old and I was penniless. I let them take you, and I became a nursing sister. It was like tearing off a limb, but I let you go to the glorious future that was before you. At least, you would have all the world held, to make up for my love, and I knew they would be kind to you. They were ashamed of me, that was all. They said that I was not married! You know how rigid they were, with their traditions and prejudices! That is my story. I have kept my word, and their secret, until to-day.'