The White Sister Part 9

He looked at her in thoughtful silence for a few seconds, holding her hand as if they were old friends.

'There is no such thing as death,' he said gravely.

And with this odd speech he left her and went slowly down the narrow stone steps; and though she watched him till he disappeared at the next landing, he did not once turn his head.

When she was in the sitting-room she set the framed picture on a straight chair near the window and sat down before it in her accustomed seat; and Durand's last words came back to her again and again, as if they were begging to be remembered and understood. Her memory brought with them many exhortations and sayings from the sacred books, but none of them seemed to mean just what she knew that little speech of his must mean if she could quite understand it.

She had come to life again unexpectedly, and the spell of her dreadful solitude was broken. She did not think it strange that her eyes were dry as she gazed at the well-loved face, while the inner voice told her that there was 'no such thing as death.' The dead man had done his duty, and he expected her to do hers until the time came for them to meet for ever.

In the aimless wandering of her thoughts during the past weeks she had only understood that he was gone. In an uncounted moment, while she had been turning over the leaves of a book, or idly talking with Madame Bernard, or plucking a withered leaf from one of the plants outside the window, he had been fighting for his life and had lost it.

Perhaps she had been quietly asleep just then. She had heard people say they were sure that if anything happened to those they dearly loved, some warning would reach them; she had heard tales of persons appearing at the moment of their death to those dearest to them, and even to indifferent people. Such stories were but idle talk, for while she had been reading the news out to Madame Bernard, she had been expecting to hear that the expedition was advancing successfully on its way, she had been wondering what chance there was of getting a letter from the interior, she had been intimately convinced that Giovanni was safe, well, and making good progress, when he had been dead a fortnight.

Madame Bernard had read the details, so far as they were known, but she had wisely said nothing except that the news was fully confirmed.

Angela herself had refused to touch a newspaper since that day; it had been enough that he was gone--to know how, or even to guess, would be a suffering she could not face. What had been found of the poor men who had perished had been brought home; there had been a great military funeral for them; their names were inscribed for ever on the roll of honour. In time, when the political situation changed, an effort would be made to avenge their death, no doubt; for every man who had been murdered a hundred would be slain, or more, if possible, till even a Scythian might feel satisfied that their angry spirits were appeased by blood. Angela knew nothing of all this, for she never left the house except to go to early ma.s.s every day, and Madame Bernard never spoke of the dead man nor of the lost expedition.

When the governess came home, a little after sunset, Angela was still sitting before the picture, her chin resting on her hand and her elbow on her knee as she leaned forward to see better in the failing light.

The girl turned her head with a bright smile, and Madame Bernard started in surprise when she saw the portrait.

'It is he!' she cried. 'It is he, to the very life!'

'Yes,' Angela answered softly, 'it is Giovanni. He has been telling me that I must do my part, as he did his. He is waiting for me, but I cannot go to him till my share is done.'

She was gazing at the face again, while Madame Bernard looked from it to her in undisguised astonishment.

'I do not understand, my dear,' she said very gently. 'Who has brought you this wonderful picture?'

She hardly expected an explanation, and she guessed that the portrait was Durand's work, for few living painters could have made such a likeness, and none would have painted it in that way, which was especially his own. To her surprise Angela turned on her chair without rising, and told her just what had happened, since he had come in early in the afternoon bringing the picture with him. When she had finished she turned to it again, as if there were nothing more to be said, and at that moment Coco began to talk in a tone that made further conversation impossible. Madame Bernard took him on her hand and disappeared with him.

When she came back, Angela was standing on a chair holding up the portrait with both hands and trying to hang it by the inner edge of the frame on an old nail she had found already driven into the wall.

Madame Bernard at once began to help her, as if not at all surprised at her sudden energy, though it seemed nothing less than miraculous.

They succeeded at last, and both got down from their chairs and drew back two steps to judge of the effect.

'It is a little too high,' Angela said thoughtfully. To-morrow I will get a cord and two rings to screw into the frame at the back, and then we will hang it just as it should be.'

'Perhaps we could put it in a better light,' Madame Bernard suggested.

'The room is so dark now that one cannot judge of that.'

'He must be where he can see me,' Angela said.

Her friend looked puzzled, and the young girl smiled again, quite naturally.

'I am not dreaming,' she said, as if answering a question not spoken.

'I do not mean that the picture can really see, any more than I believe that what they call "miraculous images" of saints are the saints themselves! But when I see the eyes of the portrait looking straight at me, I feel that he himself must see me, from where he is; and he will see me do my part, as he has done his. At least, I hope I may.'

She went to her own room, and Madame Bernard followed her to light the little lamp for her as she had always done of late. But to-day Angela insisted on doing it herself.

'You must not wait on me any more,' said the girl. 'I have been very idle for weeks, but I did not understand, and you will forgive me, because you are so good and kind.'

'You are a little angel, my dear!' cried Madame Bernard, much affected. 'They did right to name you Angela!'

But Angela shook her head, as she put the paper shade over the cheap lamp, and then went to the window to close the inner shutters before drawing the chintz curtains.

'I have been a very useless little angel,' she answered, 'and I am sorry for it. But I mean to do better now, and you will help me, won't you?'

'That is all I ask! But to tell the truth, I was discouraged to-day, and I have been to ask the advice of a very good man. There! I have told you, and I am glad of it, because I hate secrets! He has promised to come and see you, and talk to you, but now that you are yourself again----' She stopped, as if embarra.s.sed.

'Who is he?' asked Angela with a shade of distrust. 'A priest?'

'Please do not be angry!' Madame Bernard began to repent of what she had done. 'I was so much distressed--I felt that you were slipping out of the world day by day, just dying of a broken heart, so I went to see him this afternoon.'

'I am not going to die,' Angela said confidently. 'Who is he? I think I know at last what I must do, without the advice of a priest. But tell me who he is.'

'He is such a good man, my dear--Monsignor Saracinesca.'

'That is different,' Angela said, changing her tone at once. 'I shall be very glad to see Monsignor Saracinesca. He is a real saint, if there is one living.'

CHAPTER VII

There is a religious house in Rome, beyond the Tiber and not far from Porta Portese, which I will call the Convent of the White Sisters of Santa Giovanna d'Aza. Their order is a branch of a great and ancient one, though it has not had a separate existence a very long time. The convent contains one of the best private hospitals in Italy, and the Sisters also go out as trained nurses, like those of several other orders. But they do something more, which the others do not; for almost every year two or three, or even four of them go out to the Far East to work in the leper hospitals which missionaries have established in Rangoon and elsewhere; and a good many have gone in the last ten years, but few will ever return.

The convent is much larger than any one would suppose who judged merely from the uninteresting stuccoed wall which faces the quiet street, and in which there are a few plain windows without shutters and a large wooden door, painted a dull green. This door, which is the main entrance, is opened and shut by the portress as often as a hundred times a day and more; but when it is open there is nothing to be seen within but a dark vestibule paved with flagstones; and the portress's wooden face is no more prepossessing than the wall itself.

If any one asks her a question, she answers civilly in a businesslike tone, with a hard foreign accent, for she is the widow of one of the Swiss Guards at the Vatican; but she is naturally silent, stolid, mechanical, and trustworthy. She is a lay sister and is called Sister Anna, and she lives in a small room on the left of the vestibule, as you go in, five steps above the stone pavement. She is very rarely relieved from her duties for a few hours at a time, and all the patients must pa.s.s her when they enter or leave the house, as well as the doctors, and the visitors whose smart carriages and motor cars often stand waiting in the narrow street. Fifty times a day, perhaps, the door-bell rings and Sister Anna deliberately flaps down the five steps in her heavily-soled slippers to admit one person or another, and fifty times, again, she flaps down to let them out again. The reason why she does not go mad or become an imbecile is that she is Swiss. That, at least, is how it strikes the celebrated surgeon, Professor Pieri, who is at the convent very often because he has many of his patients brought there to be operated on and nursed.

The truth is that the hospital is a thoroughly modern one, which has been built as an extension of buildings that date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is managed on soundly scientific principles, without the least fuss, or any 'board of trustees' or 'committee of management,' or any of that c.u.mbrous administration which makes so many public hospitals as intricate as labyrinths, only to be threaded with a clue of red tape, and proportionately unpractical.

There is a still and sunny garden within, surrounded by a wide and dry cloister, above which the ancient building rises only one story on the three sides of the square; but on the fourth side, which looks towards the sun at noon, there are three stories, which have been built lately, and the hospital wards are in that wing, one above the other.

On the opposite side, a door opens from the cloister to the choir of the church, which has also an outer entrance from the street, now rarely used; for the chaplain comes and goes through the cloister, the vestibule, and the green door where the portress is.

Beyond her lodge there is a wide hall, with clerestory windows and gla.s.s doors opening to the cloister and the garden; and from this hall the hospital itself is reached by a pa.s.sage through which all the patients are taken. The Mother Superior's rooms are those above the cloister on the further side of the garden, and have three beautiful thirteenth century windows divided by pairs of slender columns, so that each window has two little arches.

In the middle of the garden there is an old well with three arches of carved stone that spring from three pillars and meet above the centre of the well-head, and the double iron chain runs over a wheel, and has two wrought copper buckets, one at each end of it; but the water is now used only for watering the flowers. There are stone seats round the well, too, on which three old nuns often sit and sun themselves on fine days. They are the last of the Sisters of the old time, when there was no hospital and no training school, and the nuns used to do anything in the way of nursing that was asked of them by rich or poor, with a good heart and a laudable intention, but without even the simplest elements of modern prophylaxis, because it had not been invented then. For that has all been discovered quite recently, as we older men can remember only too well.

There are many roses in the garden, and where there is most sun there is a large bed of carnations, but not of the finer sorts; they are just plain red and white ones, that fill the air with a scent of warm cloves on still mornings in the late spring, when it is beginning to be hot. But if this description has seemed tedious, you must know that Angela lived in the convent and worked there for five whole years after Giovanni was lost in Africa; so that it was needful to say something about her surroundings.

An accomplished psychologist would easily fill a volume with the history of Angela's soul from the day on which she learned the bad news till the morning when she made her profession and took the final vows of her order in the little convent church. But one great objection to psychological a.n.a.lysis in novels seems to be that the writer never gets beyond a.n.a.lysing what he believes that he himself would have felt if placed in the 'situation' he has invented for his hero or heroine. Thus a.n.a.lysed, Angela Chiaromonte would not have known herself, any more than those who knew her best, such as Madame Bernard and her aunt the Princess, would have recognised her. I shall not try to 'factorise' the result represented by her state of mind from time to time; still less shall I employ a mathematical process to prove that the ratio of _dx_ to _dy_ is twice _x_, the change in Angela at any moment of her moral growth.

What has happened must be logical, just because it has happened; if we do not understand the logic, that may or may not be the worse for us, but the facts remain.

It is easy, too, to talk of a 'vocation' and to lay down the law regarding it, in order to say that such and such a woman acted wisely in entering a religious order, or that such another made a mistake.

The fact that there is no such law is itself the reason why neither a man nor a woman is permitted nowadays to take permanent vows until after a considerable period of probation, first as a 'postulant' and then as a novice.

For my own part, when Angela Chiaromonte left Madame Bernard's pleasant rooms in Trastevere and went into the convent hospital of Santa Giovanna d'Aza through the green door, I do not believe that she had the very smallest intention of becoming a nun, nor that she felt anything like what devout persons call a 'vocation.' It was not to disappear from the world for ever that she went there, and it was not in order to be alone with her sorrow, though that would have been a natural and human impulse; nor was it because she felt herself drawn to an existence of asceticism and mystic meditation.

The prospect of work was what attracted her. She was a perfectly healthy-minded girl, and though she might never cease to mourn the man she had loved, it was to be foreseen that in all other respects she might recover entirely from the terrible shock and live out a normal life. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances that is what would have happened; she would have gone back to the world after a time, outwardly the same, though inwardly changed in so far as all possibilities of love and marriage were concerned; she would have lived in society, year after year, growing old gracefully and tenderly, as some unmarried women do whose stories we never knew or have forgotten, but whose hearts are far away, watching for the great To-morrow, beside a dead man's grave, or praying before an altar whence the G.o.d has departed.