After that she took the lamp and went away to a cubicle which was partitioned off the end of the Dormitory and there I could see her prepare to go to bed herself—taking the white bands off her cheeks and the black band off her forehead, and letting her long light hair fall in beautiful wavy masses about her face, which made her look so sweet and home like.
But oh, I was so lonely! Never in my life since—no, not even when I was in my lowest depths—have I felt so little and helpless and alone. After the Sister had gone to bed and everything was quiet in the Dormitory save for the breathing of the girls—all strangers to me and I to them—from mere loneliness I covered up my head in the clothes just as I used to do when I was a little thing and my father came into my mother's room.
I try not to think bitterly of my father, but even yet I am at a loss to know how he could have cast me away so lightly. Was it merely that he wanted peace for his business and saw no chance of securing it in his own home except by removing the chief cause of Aunt Bridget's jealousy? Or was it that his old grudge against Fate for making me a girl made him wish to rid himself of the sight of me?
I do not know. I cannot say. But in either case I try in vain to see how he could have thought he had a right, caring nothing for me, to tear me from the mother who loved me and had paid for me so dear; or how he could have believed that because he was my father, charged with the care of my poor little body, he had control over the little bleeding heart which was not his to make to suffer.
He is my father—God help me to think the best of him.
THIRTEENTH CHAPTER
At half past six in the morning I was awakened by the loud ringing of the getting-up bell, and as soon as I could rouse myself from the deep sleep of childhood I saw that a middle-aged nun with a severe face was saying a prayer, and that all the girls in the dormitory were kneeling in their beds while they made the responses.
A few minutes later, when the girls were chattering and laughing as they dressed, making the room tingle with twittering sounds like a tree full of linnets in the spring, a big girl came up to me and said:
"I am Mildred Bankes and Sister Angela says I am to look after you to-day."
She was about fifteen years of age, and had a long plain-featured face which reminded me of one of my father's horses that was badly used by the farm boys; but there was something sweet in her smile that made me like her instantly.
She helped me to dress in my brown velvet frock, but said that one of her first duties would be to take me to the lay sisters who made the black habits which all the girls in the convent wore.
It was still so early that the darkness of the room was just broken by pale shafts of light from the windows, but I could see that the children of my own age were only seven or eight altogether, while the majority of the girls were several years older, and Mildred explained this by telling me that the children of the Infant Jesus, like myself, were so few that they had been put into the dormitory of the children of the Sacred Heart.
In a quarter of an hour everybody was washed and dressed, and then, at a word from Sister Angela, the girls went leaping and laughing downstairs to the Meeting Room, which was a large hail, with a platform at the farther end of it and another picture of the Sacred Heart, pierced with sharp thorns, on the wall.
The Reverend Mother was there with the other nuns of the Convent, all pale-faced and slow eyed women wearing rosaries, and she said a long prayer, to which the scholars (there were seventy or eighty altogether) made responses, and then there was silence for five minutes, which were supposed to be devoted to meditation, although I could not help seeing that some of the big girls were whispering to each other while their heads were down.
After that, and Mass in the Church, we went scurrying away to the Refectory, which was now warm with the steam from our breakfast and bubbling with cheerful voices, making a noise that was like water boiling in a saucepan.
I was so absorbed by all I saw that I forgot to eat until Mildred nudged me to do so, and even when my spoon was half way to my mouth something happened which brought it down again.
At the tinkle of a hand-bell one of the big girls had stepped up to the reading-desk and begun to read from a book which I afterwards knew to be "The Imitation of Christ." She was about sixteen years of age, and her face was so vivid that I could not take my eyes off it.
Her complexion was fair and her hair was auburn, but her eyes were so dark and searching that when she raised her head, as she often did, they seemed to look through and through you.
"Who is she?" I whispered.
"Alma Lier," Mildred whispered back, and when breakfast was over, and we were trooping off to lessons, she told me something about her.
Alma was an American. Her father was very rich and his home was in New York. But her mother lived in Paris, though she was staying at an hotel in Rome at present, and sometimes she came in a carriage to take her daughter for a drive.
Alma was the cleverest girl in the school too, and sometimes at the end of terms, when parents and friends came to the Convent and one of the Cardinals distributed the prizes, she had so many books to take away that she could hardly carry them down from the platform.
I listened to this with admiring awe, thinking Alma the most wonderful and worshipful of all creatures, and when I remember it now, after all these years, and the bitter experiences which have come with them, I hardly know whether to laugh or cry at the thought that such was the impression she first made on me.
My class was with the youngest of the children, and Sister Angela was my teacher. She was so sweet to me that her encouragement was like a kiss and her reproof like a caress; but I could think of nothing but Alma, and at noon, when the bell rang for lunch and Mildred took me back to the Refectory, I wondered if the same girl would read again.
She did, but this time in a foreign language, French as Mildred whispered—from the letters of the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque—and my admiration for Alma went up tenfold. I wondered if it could possibly occur that I should ever come to know her.
There is no worship like that of a child, and life for me, which had seemed so cold and dark the day before, became warm and bright with a new splendour.
I was impatient of everything that took me away from the opportunity of meeting with Alma—the visit to the lay-sisters to be measured for my new black clothes, the three o'clock "rosary," when the nuns walked with their classes in the sunshine and, above all, the voluntary visit to the Blessed Sacrament in the Church of the Convent, which seemed to me large and gorgeous, though divided across the middle by an open bronze screen, called a Cancello—the inner half, as Mildred whispered, being for the inmates of the school, while the outer half was for the congregation which came on Sunday to Benediction.
But at four o'clock we had dinner, when Alma read again—this time in Italian—from the writings of Saint Francis of Sales—and then, to my infinite delight, came a long recreation, when all the girls scampered out into the Convent garden, which was still bright with afternoon sunshine and as merry with laughter and shouts as the seashore on a windy summer morning.
The garden was a large bare enclosure, bounded on two sides by the convent buildings and on the other two by a yellow wall and an avenue made by a line of stone pines with heads like open umbrellas, but it had no other foliage except an old tree which reminded me of Tommy the Mate, having gnarled and sprawling limbs, and standing like a weather-beaten old sailor, four-square in the middle.
A number of the girls were singing and dancing around this tree, and I felt so happy just then that I should have loved to join them, but I was consumed by a desire to come to close quarters with the object of my devotion, so I looked eagerly about me and asked Mildred if Alma was likely to be there.
"Sure