Complete works of hall c.., p.496
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 496
“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye, then?”
“No,” I answered, drawing my little body to its utmost height.
“And why not?”
“Because you’ve been unkind to mamma and cruel to me, and because you think there’s nobody but Betsy Beauty. And I’ll tell them at the Convent that you are making mamma ill, and you’re as bad as . . . as bad as the bad women in the Bible!”
“My gracious!” said Aunt Bridget, and she tried to laugh, but I could see that her face became as white as a whitewashed wall. This did not trouble me in the least until I reached the carriage, when Father Dan, who was sitting inside, said:
“My little Mary won’t leave home like that — without kissing her aunt and saying good-bye to her cousins.”
So I returned and shook hands with Nessy MacLeod and Betsy Beauty, and lifted my little face to my Aunt Bridget.
“That’s better,” she said, after she had kissed me, but when I had passed her my quick little ear caught the words:
“Good thing she’s going, though.”
During this time my father, with the morning mist playing like hoar-frost about his iron-grey hair, had been tramping the gravel and saying the horses were getting cold, so without more ado he bundled me into the carriage and banged the door on me.
But hardly had we started when Father Dan, who was blinking his little eyes and pretending to blow his nose on his coloured print handkerchief, said, “Look!” and pointed up to my mother’s room.
There she was again, waving and kissing her hand to me through her open window, and she continued to do so until we swirled round some trees and I lost the sight of her.
What happened in my mother’s room when her window was closed I do not know, but I well remember that, creeping into a corner of the carriage. I forgot all about the glory and grandeur of going away, and that it did not help me to remember when half way down the drive a boy with a dog darted from under the chestnuts and raced alongside of us.
It was Martin, and though his right arm was in a sling, he leapt up to the step and held on to the open window by his left hand while he pushed his head into the carriage and made signs to me to take out of his mouth a big red apple which he held in his teeth by the stalk. I took it, and then he dropped to the ground, without uttering a word, and I could laugh now to think of the gruesome expression of his face with its lagging lower lip and bloodshot eyes. I had no temptation to do so then, however, and least of all when I looked back and saw his little one-armed figure in the big mushroom hat, standing on the top of the high wall of the bridge, with William Rufus beside him.
We reached Blackwater in good tithe for the boat, and when the funnels had ceased trumpeting and we were well away, I saw that we were sitting in one of two private cabins on the upper deck; and then Father Dan told me that the other was occupied by the young Lord Raa, and his guardian, and that they were going up together for the first time to Oxford.
I am sure this did not interest me in the least at that moment, so false is it that fate forewarns us when momentous events are about to occur. And now that I had time to think, a dreadful truth was beginning to dawn on me, so that when Father Dan, who was much excited, went off to pay his respects to the great people, I crudled up in the corner of the cabin that was nearest to the door and told myself that after all I had been turned out of my father’s house, and would never see my mother and Martin any more.
I was sitting so, with my hands in my big muff and my face to the stern, making the tiniest occasional sniff as the mountains of my home faded away in the sunlight, which was now tipping the hilltops with a feathery crest, when my cabin was darkened by somebody who stood in the doorway.
It was a tail boy, almost a man, and I knew in a moment who he was. He was the young Lord Raa. And at first I thought how handsome and well dressed he was as he looked down at me and smiled. After a moment he stepped into the cabin and sat in front of me and said:
“So you are little Mary O’Neill, are you?”
I did not speak. I was thinking he was not so very handsome after all, having two big front teeth like Betsy Beauty.
“The girl who ought to have been a boy and put my nose out, eh?”
Still I did not speak. I was thinking his voice was like Nessy MacLeod’s — shrill and harsh and grating.
“Poor little mite! Going all the way to Rome to a Convent, isn’t she?”
Even yet I did not speak. I was thinking his eyes were like Aunt Bridget’s — cold and grey and piercing.
“So silent and demure, though! Quite a little nun already. A deuced pretty one, too, if anybody asks me.”
I was beginning to have a great contempt for him.
“Where did you get those big angel eyes from? Stole them from some picture of the Madonna, I’ll swear.”
By this time I had concluded that he was not worth speaking to, so I turned my head and I was looking back at the sea, when I heard him say:
“I suppose you are going to give me a kiss, you nice little woman, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Oh, but you must — we are relations, you know.”
“I won’t.”
He laughed at that, and rising from his seat, he reached over to kiss me, whereupon I drew one of my hands out of my muff and doubling my little mittened fist, I struck him in the face.
Being, as I afterwards learned, a young autocrat, much indulged by servants and generally tyrannising over them, he was surprised and angry.
“The spitfire!” he said. “Who would have believed it? The face of a nun and the temper of a devil! But you’ll have to make amends for this, my lady.”
With that he went away and I saw no more of him until the steamer was drawing up at the landing stage at Liverpool, and then, while the passengers were gathering up their luggage, he came back with Father Dan, and the tall sallow man who was his guardian, and said:
“Going to give me that kiss to make amends, or are you to owe me a grudge for the rest of your life, my lady?”
“My little Mary couldn’t owe a grudge to anybody,” said Father Dan. “She’ll kiss his lordship and make amends; I’m certain.”
And then I did to the young Lord Raa what I had done to Aunt Bridget — I held up my face and he kissed me.
It was a little, simple, trivial incident, but it led with other things to the most lamentable fact of my life, and when I think of it I sometimes wonder how it comes to pass that He who numbers the flowers of the field and counts the sparrows as they fall has no handwriting with which to warn His children that their footsteps may not fail.
TWELFTH CHAPTER
Of our journey to Rome nothing remains to me but the memory of sleeping in different beds in different towns, of trains screaming through tunnels and slowing down in glass-roofed railway stations, of endless crowds of people moving here and there in a sort of maze, nothing but this, and the sense of being very little and very helpless and of having to be careful not to lose sight of Father Dan, for fear of being lost — until the afternoon of the fourth day after we left home.
We were then crossing a wide rolling plain that was almost destitute of trees, and looked, from the moving train, like green billows of the sea with grass growing over them. Father Dan was reading his breviary for the following day, not knowing what he would have to do in it, when the sun set in a great blaze of red beyond the horizon, and then suddenly a big round black ball, like a captive balloon, seemed to rise in the midst of the glory.
I called Father Dan’s attention to this, and in a moment he was fearfully excited.
“Don’t worry, my child,” he cried, while tears of joy sprang to his eyes. “Do you know what that is? That’s the dome of St. Peter’s! Rome, my child, Rome!”
It was nine o’clock when we arrived at our destination, and in the midst of a great confusion I walked by Father Dan’s side and held on to his vertical pocket, while he carried his own bag, and a basket of mine, down the crowded platform to an open cab outside the station.
Then Father Dan wiped his forehead with his print handkerchief and I sat close up to him, and the driver cracked his long whip and shouted at the pedestrians while we rattled on and on over stony streets, which seemed to be full of statues and fountains that were lit up by a great white light that was not moonlight and yet looked like it.
But at last we stopped at a little door of a big house which seemed to stand, with a church beside it, on a high shelf overlooking the city, for I could see many domes like that of St. Peter lying below us.
A grill in the little door was first opened and then a lady in a black habit, with a black band round her forehead and white bands down each side of her face, opened the door itself, and asked us to step in, and when we had done so, she took us down a long passage into a warm room, where another lady, dressed in the same way, only a little grander, sat in a big red arm-chair.
Father Dan, who was still wearing his knitted muffler, bowed very low to this lady, calling her the Reverend Mother Magdalene, and she answered him in English but with a funny sound which I afterwards knew to be a foreign accent.
I remember that I thought she was very beautiful, nearly as beautiful as my mother, and when Father Dan told me to kiss her hand I did so, and then she put me to sit in a chair and looked at me.
“What is her age?” she asked, whereupon Father Dan said he thought I would be eight that month, which was right, being October.
“Small, isn’t she?” said the lady, and then Father Dan said something about poor mamma which I cannot remember.
After that they talked about other things, and I looked at the pictures on the walls — pictures of Saints and Popes and, above all, a picture of Jesus with His heart open in His bosom.
“The child will be hungry,” said the lady. “She must have something to eat before she goes to bed — the other children have gone already.”
Then she rang a hand-bell, and when the first lady came back she said:
“Ask Sister Angela to come to me immediately.”
A few minutes later Sister Angela came into the room, and she was quite young, almost a girl, with such a sweet sad face that I loved her instantly.
“This is little Mary O’Neill. Take her to the Refectory and give her whatever she wants, and don’t leave her until she is quiet and comfortable.”
“Very well, Mother,” said Sister Angela, and taking my hand she whispered: “Come, Mary, you look tired.”
I rose to go with her, but at the same moment Father Dan rose too, and I heard him say he must lose no time in finding an hotel, for his Bishop had given him only one day to remain in Rome, and he had to catch an early train home the following morning.
This fell on me like a thunderbolt. I hardly know what I had led myself to expect, but certainly the idea of being left alone in Rome had never once occurred to me.
My little heart was fluttering, and dropping the Sister’s hand I stepped back and took Father Dan’s and said:
“You are not going to leave your little Mary are you, Father?”
It was harder for the dear Father than for me, for I remember that, fearfully flurried, he stammered in a thick voice something about the Reverend Mother taking good care of me, and how he was sure to come back at Christmas, according to my father’s faithful promise, to take me home for the holidays.
After that Sister Angela led me, sniffing a little still, to the Refectory, which was a large, echoing room, with rows of plain deal tables and forms, ranged in front of a reading desk that had another and much larger picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall above it. Only one gasjet was burning, and I sat under it to eat my supper, and after I had taken a basin of soup I felt more comforted.
Then Sister Angela lit a lamp and taking my hand she led me up a stone staircase to the Dormitory, which was a similar room, but not so silent, because it was full of beds, and the breathing of the girls, who were all asleep, made it sound like the watchmaker’s shop in our village, only more church-like and solemn.
My bed was near to the door, and after Sister Angela had helped me to undress, and tucked me in, she made her voice very low, and said I would be quite comfortable now, and she was sure I was going to be a good little girl and a dear child of the Infant Jesus; and then I could not help taking my arms out again and clasping her round the neck and drawing her head down and kissing her.
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.
