Zella, in a fresh agony, instantly saw herself the only unveiled person in the chapel, covered with confusion, no doubt contemptuously eyed by everyone, and perhaps ignominiously turned out for irreverence or disregard of rules.
Not one of these alarming forecasts, however, was fulfilled. Mary McNeill, elbowing her way through the pushing, crowded girls, thrust a very stiff new veil into Zella's hands, muttered something unintelligible, and opened the heavy oak door that led to the chapel.
It was a pretty little building, with none of the glamour that Zella had expected from a convent chapel, and quite cheerfully and unmysteriously lighted by gas-jets at intervals against the whitewashed walls. A very light oaken screen separated the children's section from the double rows of carved wooden stalls at which the nuns habitually knelt.
Zella had half expected to hear the low pealing of an organ, or at least the sweet voices of gentle nuns uplifted in an evening hymn; but after a few moments' silence one of the girls began to read aloud from a small book, rather quickly and very loudly, a series of prayers which the others punctuated with Amens.
Zella paid little or no attention, and was fully occupied in pulling at her stiff veil, which persisted in slipping off her head backwards.
Still clutching at it, she followed her neighbours out of the chapel when prayers were finished, and upstairs into a long dormitory. On entering, each of the girls dipped a finger into the holy-water stoup hanging by the door, and a good many of them seemed to find some humour in liberally splashing it at one another.
Mary McNeill silently pointed to a white curtain near the end of the room, and Zella, timidly pulling it aside, saw that the long dormitory was divided into cubicles. The space into which a bed, chair, and washing-stand with two drawers in it, had been compressed seemed to her incredibly tiny. One thin strip of carpet only, lay near the bed, and there was no sign of a looking-glass. Zella was vaguely dismayed, but she was tired and miserable, and longed only to be alone in the dark. She undressed hastily, looked for hot water on the washing stand, and, finding only cold, got into bed with no further attempt at performing any ablutions, leaving her clothes in an untidy heap on the floor.
It was not until she was in bed, hoping that the gas would soon be extinguished, that Zella realized that every sound in the cubicles could be plainly heard on either side of the thin match-board partition.
She was too proud to endure the thought of being heard crying, and lay resolutely choking back her tears while mysterious bells clanged at intervals from a distance; and when she fell into an uneasy doze, it was only to wake with a start at the unexpected sound of a voice in the silence proclaiming, "May the peace of the Lord remain always with us all." Upon which a babble of voices replied Amen, and the light was put out.
XIII
ZELLA rather resented the fact that she did not, on the morning following her arrival at the convent, wake suddenly to the deafening clamour of a bell, and the conviction that it was the middle of the night and the house was on fire. But this orthodox experience, proper to the heroine of every school story she had ever read, was denied her. She woke, on the contrary, just as a big clock from outside chimed half-past five, did not feel in the least bewildered by her new surroundings, and lay wide awake for a weary hour, wishing that it were time to get up, and yet dreading the experiences that might lie before her.
At half-past six a lay Sister substituted a mild ejaculatory prayer at the curtain of each cubicle for the violent bell-ringing of Zella's imagination, and she heard various muffled voices, in different degrees of sleepiness, return an unintelligible response.
When the lay Sister paused outside Zella's curtain and uttered her short Latin formula, Zella, not to be outdone, also muttered something which she trusted would pass as a reply, sooner than let her silence betray her inevitable ignorance.
This infinitesimal incident might have served as the keynote to all her school days. She was occupied, not gradually and half consciously, but frenziedly and continuously, in conforming to type.
At the convent everyone conformed to type. Every nun seemed to Zella exactly like every other nun, even though one or two belonged to the perfectly sweet" category, several to the class that was "frightfully reserved, but awfully nice when you know them," and still more to the type described as "a frightfully kind old thing, but rather deadly."
One limited vocabulary was common to all, one set of feelings animated all alike, all were employing one means to one end.
The girls conformed to type in the same way, and Zella, despising the type and utterly at a loss to understand it, instantly turned all her attention to the same object.
The majority of the vocabulary brought from Villetswood, where the rather precise and elaborate English of a bi-lingual household had prevailed, was discarded, and Zella substituted for all other adjectives the only three recognized and employed, always strictly out of place, by her companions.
She insincerely declared Reverend Mother to be both sweet and ripping, and violently echoed the assertion that it must be awful to arouse Reverend Mother's displeasure.
She acquired slang in a week, learnt that the keenest gratification that could be offered to any of her companions was the most blatant form of raillery, in the presence of as many witnesses as possible, on her infatuation for some particular nun, and that a sure passport to friendship was the observation:
I say, you do look tired to-day; I'm sure you didn't eat a thing at dinner."
She even, in the space of a fortnight, began to indulge in the pious practices of splashing two fingers mechanically into every holy-water stoup—and there were many—in the house, rapidly jerking her left knee towards the ground when passing the door of the chapel, and displaying a flaming badge of the Sacré Coeur upon the front of her alpaca apron.
Zella was far from being unaware that nuns and pupils alike were apt to comment amongst themselves upon this innocent progress towards true faith on the part of the Protestant. She conjectured, very correctly, that Mother Rose might say to Mother Veronica:
"Ah, our Lord has certainly got designs upon that child's soul. I have watched her genuflect in the chapel, when she had no idea that she was being noticed, and I can see the look of faith dawning on her face. It is quite wonderful."
"Yes, indeed, and what a joy it would be to Reverend Mother! We mustn't forget to pray for her daily."
And very likely the conversation would be repeated, with triumphant hopefulness, to Reverend Mother herself.
Zella, quick as she was to adopt the standard of values prevailing amongst her surroundings, desired ardently to become an object of interest to Reverend Mother. Any girl of whom it was said, "Oh, Reverend Mother takes a great interest in her," was at once set apart from her companions as possessing some rare and indefinable virtue, and to this altitude Zella aspired.
With this end in view, she piously insisted upon getting up for the seven o'clock Mass attended daily by the children, knelt when everybody but one or two of the more devout Children of Mary was sitting down, and kept her face hidden in her slender hands throughout the service, with a motionless devotion that might have shamed her companions, provided with prayer-books and rosaries as they were.
But what might be termed Zella's greatest success as a Protestant was her behaviour upon the occasion when she first attended Benediction.
Zella had been to Benediction once or twice in Rome, in one or two of the larger churches, where the ritual had seemed to her utterly incomprehensible and the music merely a meaningless edition of a sacred concert; and she anticipated the convent Benediction with a sensation of unmistakable boredom at the prospect of enduring it twice a week.
But the effect of the small