‘One does not know who they may be,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans gloomily. “I have always said, give me an old English name that one has heard of, and I ask no more.”
“The noble families of our old Catholic countries frequently send their daughters to England for a convent education. Many of my friends have done so — the de Clamieres, the poor Marchesa di San Andrea, the de la Roche Glandy. But I need not continue. In a certain world everyone knows everyone, at least, by name — is it not so?” amiably inquired the Baronne, receiving, however, no response from her visitor, who had never before heard one of the names enumerated.
A most unwonted sense of being baffled had assailed the unfortunate Mrs. Lloyd-Evans. “Had Louis consulted me, I should have told him that I could not approve of the idea of a convent,” she repeated feebly.
“Ah,” said the Baronne, “I rejoice that you have been spared. It is so distressing, so ungracious a task, to express disapproval of the scheme of another. To do so unasked is, of course, unthinkable, but how frequently do the tactless force one into the admission of feelings that delicacy and good-breeding would bid one conceal!”
Delicacy and good-breeding were perhaps responsible for the silent speed with which Mrs. Lloyd-Evans began to put on her gloves again.
“I must say good-bye,” she said agitatedly, “and I feel sure you will understand that all I have said arises only from my affection and anxiety for my dear, dear sister’s only child.”
“Perfectly, perfectly,” warmly replied the Baronne, also rising, and ringing the bell.
“Your anxiety is well to be understood, and I am more than happy to have relieved it. Hippolyte, une voiture de place pour madame.”
Thus it was that ten minutes later the astonished Henry beheld his wife emerge from that vehicle of destruction, a Paris fiacre, apparently too much distraught to have any very clear idea as to how she had ever found herself inside it.
XI
It must be admitted that, in the days that followed her return with her father to Villetswood, Zella was far from proving herself an ideal companion. Her mind was obsessed by the thought of her approaching school life, and even the return to Villetswood, so rich in emotional possibilities, was only one more milestone on the way to school, and was marked by no very acute demonstration of feeling. But Louis, remembering Zella’s tears at Frascati, thought remorsefully that the poor child no longer dared to let youthful sentiment have its way in his presence, and told himself sadly that no man was fit to have the management of a sensitive child.
Later on, Zella was wont to speak with a certain touching wistfulness of long lonely days spent by a solitary motherless child in the great gardens of Villetswood. These may perhaps have covered a period of fifteen days, and then Zella made her farewells, more excited than touching, to the servants and to the old house and garden, and was taken by her father to begin life as a boarder at the Holy Cross Convent, on the outskirts of London.
“You shall come straight back if you are not happy, remember,” said Louis, anxiously surveying his little daughter’s pale face as the cab turned out of the station. Zella squeezed his hand very tightly, partly as a vent to her increasing excitement, partly because she thought some sign of trepidation appropriate to the moment.
“Is it far?” she asked.
“No; your grandmother told me it was only fifteen minutes’ walk from the station. We must be nearly there already.”
They were, and as the iron gates and stone walls came into view Zella made the unoriginal but entirely heartfelt observation:
“How like a prison!”
Up a short, wide avenue and across a rectangular gravelled court, and then the cab stopped in front of a square Georgian portico that looked oddly unimposing by comparison with the huge irregular grey building behind it.
Zella looked for bolts and bars, but saw neither, and the door was opened almost immediately by a small shrivelled figure in black habit and white cap.
She conducted them straight into the parlour, and shuffled away on creaking slippers to fetch the Reverend Mother.
Zella had occasionally visited a convent in Rome with her Aunt Stephanie, and was less appalled than her father at the hideousness of the room in which they found themselves.
High straight-backed chairs with cane seats stood all round the walls, or were arranged in prim groups of threes and fours near the centre of the room, where stood a large round table bearing a pot of artificial palms with large photograph albums and books piled symmetrically round it.
Louis took up one of the books, and put it down again as he read the title—” Letters of Advice to a Convert.”
A bracket on the wall supported a clumsily modelled coloured plaster figure, looking oddly foreshortened seen from below, and a crucifix hung above it.
There was one picture in the room, a badly painted portrait in oils of an aged woman in nun’s habit, with upturned eyes and clasped hands raised on high.
Zella and her father had ample opportunity for scrutinizing their surroundings, since nearly half an hour had elapsed before the lay Sister who had admitted them put her head in at the door, and said to Louis very triumphantly, “Reverend Mother will be here in one moment now,” and then disappeared.
“Does she suppose we have had no time in which to prepare ourselves for the meeting?” said Louis rather grimly.
Zella was too nervous to make any reply. The door opened again, this time to admit Reverend Mother herself. She was a tall stooping woman, with that curious ageless look so often to be seen on the faces of those living in the cloister, and spoke English with the strong harsh accent of a Spanish woman from Malaga. She greeted Louis with a dignified inclination, but gave her hand to Zella, and begged them both to be seated. She herself sat very upright, not leaning back, with hands folded under her wide black sleeves.
Louis knew her to have been a friend of the Baronne’s forty years ago in Paris, and mentioned his stepmother’s name.
Ah yes, Gisele de la Claudidre de Marincourt! Reverend Mother remembered her well. And this was her granddaughter?
She took Zella’s hand in hers immediately. Not quite,” said Louis apologetically—” step-granddaughter, perhaps we should say. You will perhaps remember that I wrote to you about bringing my daughter to school here, and mentioned that she is not a Catholic.”
Poor Louis had composed the letter with so much care and anxiety, lest it should prove an obstacle to Zella’s reception at the convent, that it came as somewhat of a shock to him when Reverend Mother returned with perfect placidity:
“Ah yes, no doubt. We are always very happy when the good God sends us a new child to take care of, even though she is not yet one of ourselves. But we get so many letters, and they must all pass through the hands of the Superior. You will understand that I do not remember all of them.”
“You are doubtless much occupied,” was all that Louis felt able to reply.
“We are all occupied in working for the greater glory of God,” returned Reverend Mother impersonally, “from the smallest of our children to our Mother Provincial herself. You have heard of our dear Mother Provincial? So many people of the world keep up an intercourse, or at least a correspondence, with her.”
Louis de Kervoyou was not one of these, and said so as delicately as he could.
“Ah well, perhaps your little daughter will have the joy of seeing her one day. She is in Spain now, but may be in England next year, and then what rejoicing for all our English houses!”
“Is that, perhaps, a portrait?” hazarded Louis, looking towards the solitary picture on the wall.
“That? Oh no! That is our Mother Foundress, who died nearly fifty years ago. She was very, very wonderful, and it is our great hope that one day the world may see her beatification. The Holy Father has already in his possession documents”
Reverend Mother lowered her voice and paused. Zella, astounded, saw that it was actual emotion that had choked her utterance.
Evidently the l
ittle she had heard or read of the semihysterical emotionalism of nuns was true. Zella felt contemptuous. But there was nothing emotional in the next words, briskly uttered by Reverend Mother:
“But you must forgive me, Monsieur de Kervoyou: I am forgetting your business. What are your wishes for this little one?”
Louis explained as briefly as possible, while Zella tried to compass the feat, at all times ungracious, and peculiarly so to youth, of looking as though she were not there.
“So,” was Reverend Mother’s summing up, “Zella will conform to our custom in the matter of going to the chapel with the other children, but will not follow the classes for religious instruction and catechism. I regret it, but we must follow your wishes, it goes without saying. Especial attention shall be paid to languages, as you wish, and to her music. Our music mistress in chief, Mme Marie Rose, will be pleased to have her. She is the most patient of teachers, a person of the highest virtue, sanctifying herself very rapidly, I can assure you.”
Reverend Mother nodded her head once or twice emphatically at mention of the qualifications of her music mistress in chief. Then she turned to Zella, and said kindly:
“But you will feel hurt that I am robbing you of your last hour with your father. Would you not like to visit the garden with him? I can stay no longer now, but we shall meet again.”
She patted Zella’s hand, bowed to Louis, who rose to open the door for her, and said again:
“You must visit the garden. Look, through the front door and across the court, and then you will see it. Mind you pay a visit to our little Grotto of Lourdes.”
Then she turned down the passage.
Louis and Zella obediently found their way across the gravelled court and into a shady alley beyond.
It was thickly bordered with shrubs, and the spring green of beech-trees met far above their heads. The alley led to a tennis-court, and there were two or three well-kept plots of grass, but there were no flowers to be seen.
The Grotto of Lourdes they could not have missed, even had they wished it. It stood out, in conspicuous blue and whiteness, at the far end of the alley, built up on a fair-sized erection of big stones and woodwork, with a tiny red lamp flickering at the feet of the plaster statue.
“It is like Italy,” said Zella, remembering the wayside shrines at Frascati, and the Grotto of Lourdes was the first place in the convent where she felt at home.
They wandered about rather aimlessly, once or twice encountering a black-robed nun walking rapidly along one of the paths, for the most part reading as she went. And though the nun’s head was always bent in intense absorption over her book or her rosary, she seemed miraculously to know, without for an instant raising her eyes, the precise moment when it became necessary to avoid meeting Louis and his daughter, by turning smartly round and walking in the opposite direction.
It seemed to Louis a baffling manoeuvre, and he said to Zella:
“I should like to have seen some more of your future mistresses, or one or two of the pupils, but I suppose their rule is to avoid the sight of a man whenever possible. I am afraid it is nearly time for me to start for the station, darling; but I won’t leave you till we have found someone to look after you.”
“Let’s go back to the house,” suggested Zella. “We can ask for Reverend Mother again, I suppose.”
But her supposition, not being grounded on convent experience, was entirely wrong.
The lay Sister who opened the door to them shook her head at the mere suggestion that Reverend Mother should again be sent for.
“Reverend Mother’s much occupied,” she said reproachfully to Louis in a strong brogue. “For three days now she has had so many parlours that she has not even been able to attend Vespers at all. And her letters! If ye could see the great stack I take in to her every morning, poor Reverend Mother! And there she sits writing, with a hundred calls upon her time and an interruption every five minutes, though we spare her as much as we can. But, of course, it is the Superior who is called upon to decide every little thing.”
“Perhaps we might see “began Louis, aware that he must walk to the station in less than twenty minutes if he wished to catch his train.
“Ah, and it’s most patient she is — always ready to attend to everyone! And when I come in to fetch the post, sometimes half of that great pile of letters is not even opened yet! And Reverend Mother only says in her own bright way, ‘Ah! me good angel must deal with those during the night, for it’s not I that have the time.’”
“Yes,” said Louis, smiling sympathetically, but too much occupied with the thought of Zella’s forlornness to express the admiration, which the lay Sister obviously expected, at Reverend Mother’s method of dealing with her correspondence.
“I have got to get back to London by the six o’clock train, and I should like to know with whom I can leave my daughter. I cannot leave her all alone in a place quite strange to her,” said Louis rather apologetically.
The lay Sister’s heart was immediately softened.
“Ah, the poor little dear! ye can’t do that at all. But there’s no need to, either. I’ll be calling Mother Mary Veronica for ye.”
She shuffled slowly away, pausing halfway across the hall to finger her rosary for a moment or two before a statue of St. Joseph “Evidently our time is not so valuable as Reverend Mother’s,” said Louis rather ruefully.
But Mother Mary Veronica proved to be no farther than the parlour they had recently left, and in another moment she came hurriedly up to them.
Zella, feeling bewildered, thought that it would never be possible to distinguish these black-veiled, black-robed women one from another.
Mother Mary Veronica was English. She shook hands with Louis, looked at Zella, said, “Is this our new pupil?” and, without waiting for an answer, bumped her face smartly against Zella’s either cheek.
“I am the First Mistress, you know,” she told Louis.
Not knowing, he looked politely interested.
“What is called at colleges the Prefect, I believe,” she instructed him brightly. “So I shall soon make better acquaintance with your little girl, I hope. What is her name?”
She spoke over Zella’s head, but that indignant young lady replied for herself:
My name is Zella de Kervoyou.”
“A French name!” exclaimed the nun in a tone of discovery. “But you are not French, my dear child?”
Louis gave a hurried genealogical sketch, and concluded with a renewed reference to the six o’clock train.
Then he looked at Zella’s little colourless face, and said eagerly, “Unless you would rather I waited till the eight o’clock, mignonne. I can if you wish it.”
“Oh no,” said Zella faintly.
“Miss your train!” exclaimed Mother Mary Veronica in shocked accents. “Oh, that would never do! I am sure Zella will be a brave little girl now, and say good-bye without crying.”
Zella had felt no inclination to tears, but at the encouraging words, which sounded to her ears extraordinarily unsympathetic, she felt the muscles of her throat contract.
She slipped her hand into her father’s, and he looked anxiously at her.
“Shall I stay till eight o’clock?”
“No, don’t miss your train, papa. It will be all right.”
“Brave little darling!” whispered Louis, squeezing her hand tightly.
Then he made his brief adieux to Mother Mary Veronica, who said in a matter-of-fact way, “Good-bye, Mr de Kervoyou. We will take care of Zella, and our dear Lord will certainly reward you both for this sacrifice,” and then, with determined delicacy, firmly turned her back on them.
Zella went with her father to the hall door, and he kissed her a number of times, but did not even say, “God bless you!” which she had vaguely expected — only, “I will write to you in the train, my pet, so you will get a letter in the morning. Write to me to-morrow if you can.”
“Indeed I will.”
Then he impulsively gave he
r all the loose silver in his pockets, told her for the hundredth time that she should come away if she were not happy, kissed her again, and tore himself away.
Zella stood at the door watching her father’s figure disappearing rapidly, and then turned into the hall again, feeling utterly forlorn.
Mother Mary Veronica said, “Now, my dear child, you have made your sacrifice very bravely, and I dare say you would like to come to the chapel for a few minutes before meeting your schoolfellows at supper. Is your dear father a convert?”
“He is not a Catholic,” said Zella, rather embarrassed, “and neither am I.”
“Oh!” Mother Mary Veronica looked startled. “You are a Protestant? I did not know that. But you are not sorry to come to the convent, eh?”
“Oh no,” said Zella, smiling, her strongest instinct, as ever, being to please.
Mother Mary Veronica looked at once triumphant and knowing, as one who had discovered a valuable secret.
“I see,” she repeated, nodding her head. “We must not say too much at present, is that it? You and I will have some little talks later on, when we know one another better, and you must come to me about anything you don’t understand.”
“Thank you,” said Zella prettily, and wondering what on earth she was expected to find which could require an explanation from this simple, foolish woman who seemed to think herself so penetrating.
A bell clanged out, and the nun, abandoning the project of taking Zella to the chapel, suggested that she would like to remove her hat before coming to supper.
“Is it supper-time?” asked Zella, surprised, and looking at her little gold wrist-watch.
The nun also looked at it, and with no approving eye, but she only said:
“Yes; we keep early hours here. Breakfast at half-past seven, dinner at twelve, and supper at six. I expect you are used to different hours in the world.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 11