What if the solution to all her troubles lay here, before the small gilt door of the tabernacle?
Alex had never prayed in her life. The mechanical formula extorted from the Clare children by old Nurse had held no meaning for them, least of all to Alex, who was not temperamentally religious, and instinctively disliked anything which was presented to her in the light of an obligation.
Her lack of fundamental religious instruction had remained undiscovered, and consequently unrectified, throughout her schooldays, and she had unconsciously adopted since then the standard typified no less in Sir Francis’ courteously blank attitude towards the faith of his fathers, than in Lady Isabel’s conventional adherence to the minimum of church-going permitted by the social code.
What if comfort had been waiting for her all the time?
“Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy burdened, and I will refresh you.”
Alex did not know that she was crying until she found herself wiping away the tears that were blinding her.
The loneliness that encompassed her seemed to her to be suddenly lightened, and she formulated the first vague, stammering prayer of her life.
“Help me ... make me good ... and let there be some one soon who will understand ... some one who will understand and still love me ... who will want me to care too ... If only there was some one for whose sake everything really mattered, I believe I could be good.... Please help me....”
She felt certain that her prayer would be heard and granted.
There was the slightest possible movement beside her, and turning sharply, she saw the tall figure of a woman wearing the habit of the Order, standing over her.
She had not known that this nun was in the chapel.
The tall, commanding presence bent and knelt down on the ground beside her, with a deep inclination of her head towards the High Altar.
“Forgive me for disturbing you, but when you are quite ready to come away, will you come and speak to me for a moment or two before you go?” She paused for a second, but Alex was too much surprised to reply.
“Don’t hurry. I shall wait for you outside.”
The nun rose slowly, laying her hand for an instant on Alex’ shoulder, and moved soundlessly away.
Alex looked at her watch, and was surprised by the lateness of the hour.
She drew down her veil, and gathered up the long, fashionable skirt of her dress, preparatory to leaving the chapel.
In the little lobby outside she looked round curiously. On the instant, some one moved forward out of a shadowy corner.
“Come in here for a moment, won’t you? I think it is Miss Clare?”
“Yes.”
Alex, faintly uneasy, although she could not have explained why, looked round for her maid.
Holland came forward at once.
“Good afternoon, Mary,” said the nun, addressing her calmly. “How are you?”
“Very well, thank you, Mother Gertrude. I hadn’t hoped to be here again so soon, but Miss Clare was tired, and we were just going past, on the way back after the procession.”
“Ah, yes, to be sure,” said the nun with the air of recalling an unimportant fact— “the Jubilee procession takes place today. That must make the streets unpleasantly crowded. Won’t you rest a little while in the parlour, Miss Clare? Perhaps your maid might find a cab to take you home.”
“Will you try, Holland?” said Alex eagerly. She felt unable to walk any more.
This time Holland made no demur at the suggestion, and only glanced a respectful farewell at the nun, who said, with a smile that seemed somehow full of authority: “Good-bye, then, Mary, for the present. I will take care of your young lady whilst you are away. It may take a little while to find a cab on a day like this.”
As the maid went out, Mother Gertrude motioned to Alex to precede her down the small, uneven steps leading out of the lobby into a better-lighted passage beyond.
“There are two steps down, that’s all. These old houses are dark, and inconveniently built but we are lucky to get anything so central.... Come into the parlour, we shall not be disturbed, and your maid will know where to find us when she returns.”
“I had no idea that Holland came here, and — and knew you,” said Alex, rather confused.
In the stiff, ugly parlour, furnished with cane-seated chairs and a round table, it was easy to see Mother Gertrude, as she seated herself opposite to Alex in the window.
She was an exceptionally tall, upright woman, a natural dignity of carriage emphasized by the sweeping black folds of veil and habit, her hands demurely hidden under the wide-falling sleeves as she sat with arms lightly crossed. Her strong, handsome face, of a uniform light reddish colour, showed one or two hard lines, noticeably round the closed, determined mouth, and her strongly-marked eyebrows almost met over straight-gazing, very light grey eyes. Even her religious habit could not conceal the lines and contour of a magnificent figure, belonging to a woman in the full maturity of life.
“Are you surprised to find that your maid comes to the convent?” she asked, smiling.
Her voice was deep and of a commanding quality that seemed to match her personality, but her smile was her least attractive feature. It was only a slow widening of her mouth, showing a set of patently porcelain teeth, and deepening the creases on either side of her face. Her eyes remained watchful and unchanged.
“Mary Holland was one of our children when she was quite a little thing, at our Poor-school at Bermondsey. She has always been a good girl, and we take a great interest in her.”
“Was that why you knew who I was?” Alex inquired, remembering how the nun had addressed her by-name.
“Yes. I knew that Mary Holland had taken a place with Lady Isabel Clare, and was much interested to hear from her of her ‘young lady.’ Tell me, were you not at school at our Mother-house in Belgium?”
Alex, unversed in the infinitely far-reaching ramifications of inter-conventual communication, was again surprised.
“Yes, I was there for about five years, but I don’t remember—” She hesitated.
“Oh, no, I was never there. I have been Superior in London for more than ten years, but I have heard your name several times, though not since you left school. We like to keep in touch with our children, but you have probably been busy going about with your mother?”
“I didn’t even know there was a house of the Order here,” Alex admitted.
“It has not been established very long. Our chapel was only consecrated a few months ago. It is very tiny, but perhaps some day you will pay another visit here.”
Mother Gertrude was not looking at Alex as she spoke, but down at her own long rosary beads; and the fact somehow made it easier for Alex to reply without embarrassment.
“Yes, I should like to come if I may — and if I can. It felt so — so peaceful.”
“Yes,” returned the nun, without any show of surprise or indeed, any emotion at all, in her carefully colourless voice. “Yes, it is very peaceful here — a great contrast to the hurry and unrest of the world. And for any one who is tired, or troubled, or perhaps unhappy, and conscious of wrong-doing, there is always comfort to be found here. No one asks any questions, and if, perhaps, a poor soul is too much worn-out with conflict for prayer, why, even that is not necessary.”
Alex gazed at her, surprised.
“Do you think that God wants things put into words?” said the nun with her slow smile.
Alex did not know what to reply. She looked silently at the Superior, and felt that those light, penetrating, grey eyes had probed to the depths of her confusion and beyond it, to the scenes of loneliness and bewilderment that had made her weep in the chapel.
“Do a lot of people come here?” she asked involuntarily, from the sense that a wide experience of humanity must have gone to the making of those keen perceptions.
“Yes. Many of them I know, and see here, and anything that passes in this little room is held in sacred confidence. But very often,
of course, there are visitors to the chapel of whom we know nothing — just passers-by.”
“That was what I was.”
The nun looked at her for a moment. “And yet,” she said slowly, “something made me want to come and speak to you, even before I caught sight of your maid, and guessed you must be Miss Clare. It is curious that you should have turned out to be one of our children.”
Alex thought so too, but the term with its sense of shelter touched her strangely. She was shaken both by physical fatigue and her recent violent crying, and moreover, the forceful, magnetic personality of the Superior was already making its sure impression upon her young, unbalanced susceptibilities.
“May I see you again, next time I come?” she asked rather tremulously.
Mother Gertrude stood up.
“Whenever you like,” she said emphatically, her direct gaze adding weight to the deliberately-spoken words. “Come whenever you like. You have been brought here by what looks like a strange chance. Don’t neglect the way now that you know it.”
She held Alex’ hand in hers for a moment, and then took her back to the little lobby.
“Mary has actually got a four-wheeled cab! That is very clever of her. I hope they will not have been anxious about you at home. You must tell them that you were with friends, quite safe.”
She laid a slight emphasis on the words, smiling a little.
“Good-bye,” said Alex; “thank you very much.”
“Good-bye,” repeated the Nun. “And God bless you, my child.”
XVI
Mother Gertrude
Alex felt strangely comforted for some time after that visit to the convent. It seemed to her that in appealing to the God who dwelt in the chapel shrine, she had found a human friend. Secretly she thought very often of the Superior, wondering if Mother Gertrude remembered her and thought of her too. Once or twice when she was out with Holland, or even with her mother, she manoeuvred a little in order to go past the tall, undistinguished-looking building, and look up curiously at its shrouded windows. But she did not actually enter the convent again until three weeks later, after she had said rather defiantly to Lady Isabel:
“Do you mind my going to see the Superior of the convent near Bryanston Square, mother? It’s the new house they’ve opened — a branch of the Liège house, you know.”
“If you like,” said Lady Isabel indifferently. “What’s put it into your head?”
“Holland told me about it. She went there for some ceremony or other when they opened the chapel, and — and she knew I’d been at school at Liège,” Alex answered.
She was conscious that the reply was evasive, but she was afraid of admitting that she had already made acquaintance with the Superior, with that innate sense, peculiar to the period in which she lived, that anything undertaken upon the initiative of a child would ipso facto be regarded as wrong or dangerous by its parents.
“But mind,” added Lady Isabel suspiciously, “I won’t have your name used by them. I mean that you are not to promise that you’ll patronize all sorts of dowdy, impossible charities.”
“Very well, I won’t.”
Alex was glad to have permission to visit the convent under any conditions, and she secretly resolved that she would make an elastic use of the sanction given her, during the short time that remained before the usual exodus from London.
She felt half afraid that Mother Gertrude might have forgotten her, but the nun greeted her with a warmth that fanned to instant flame the spark of Alex’ ready infatuation. She quickly fell into one of the old, enamoured enthusiasms that had cost her so much in her childish days.
Mother Gertrude did not speak of religion to her, or touch upon any religious teaching, but she encouraged Alex to speak much about herself, and to admit that she was very unhappy.
“Have you no one at home?”
“They don’t understand me,” Alex said with conviction.
“That is hard to bear. And you are very sensitive — and with very great capabilities for either good or evil.”
Alex thrilled to the echo of a conviction which she had hardly dared to admit to herself.
“My dear child — do you mind my calling you so?”
“Oh, no — no. I wish you would call me by my name — Alex.”
“What,” the Superior said, smiling, “as though you were one of my own children, in spite of being a young lady of the world?”
“Oh, yes — if you’ll let me,” breathed Alex, looking up at the woman who had fascinated her with all the fervour of her ardent, unbalanced temperament in her gaze.
“My poor, lonely little Alex! You shall be my child then.” The grave, lingering kiss on her forehead came like a consecration.
Alex went home that day in ecstasy. The whole force of her nature was once more directed into one channel, and she was happy.
One day she told Mother Gertrude, with the complete luxury of unreserve always characteristic of her reckless attachments, the story of her brief engagement to Noel Cardew.
The nun looked strangely at her. “So you had the courage to go against the wishes of your family and break it all off, little Alex?”
It seemed wonderful to Alex that the action which had been so condemned, and which she had long ceased to regard as anything but folly, should be praised as courageous.
“I wasn’t happy,” she faltered. “I used always to think that love, which one read about, made everything perfect when it came — but from the first moment of our engagement I knew it was all wrong somehow.”
“So you knew that?” the Superior said, smilingly. “You have been given very great gifts.”
“Me — how?” faltered Alex.
“It is not every one who would have had the courage to withdraw before it was too late.”
“You mean, it would have been much worse if I’d actually married him?”
“Much, much worse. A finite human love will never satisfy that restless heart of yours, Alex. Tell me, have you ever found full satisfaction in the love of any creature yet? Hasn’t there always been something lacking — something to grieve and disappoint you?”
Alex looked back. She thought of the stormy loves of her childhood; of Queenie, on whom she had lavished such a passion of devotion; of her vain, thwarted longing to bestow all where the merest modicum would have sufficed; lastly, she thought of Noel Cardew.
“Noel did not want all that I could have given him,” she faltered. “He never knew the reallest part of me at all.”
“And yet he loved you, Alex — he wanted you for his wife. But the closest of human intercourse, the warmest and dearest of human sympathy, will never be enough for a temperament like yours.” She spoke with such authority in her voice that Alex was almost frightened.
“Shall I always be lonely, then?” she asked, feeling that whatever the answer she must accept it unquestioningly for truth.
“Until you have learnt the lesson which I think is before you,” said the nun slowly.
“I am not lonely now that I have you,” Alex asserted, clinging passionately to her hand.
Mother Gertrude did not answer — she never contradicted such assertions — but her steady, light eyes gazed outward with a strange pale flame, as though at some unseen bourne destined both to be her goal and that of Alex.
“No one has ever understood me like you do.”
“Poor little child, I think I understand you. You have told me a great deal, and your confidence has meant very much to me. Besides—” The Superior paused. “A nun does not often tell her own story, but I am going to tell you a little of mine. It is not so very unlike your own.
“When I was seventeen I wanted to be a nun. I told my parents so, and they refused their permission. They loved me very, very dearly, and I was the only child. My father told me that it would break his heart if I left them, and my mother was delicate — almost an invalid. I held out for a little time, but their grief nearly broke my heart, and I persuaded myself that it was my duty to
listen to them, and to stay at home. So I stifled the voice of God in my heart, and when I was two-and-twenty, a man much older than I was, whom I had known all my life, asked me to marry him.” The nun spoke with difficulty. “I have not spoken of this to any human being for over twenty years, but I believe that I am right in telling you a little of what I went through. I will gladly bring myself to speak of it, if it is going to be of any help to you. I hesitated for a long while. He told me that he loved me dearly and I knew it was true. I knew that his wife would have the happiest of homes and the most faithful and devoted of husbands. A hundred times, Alex, I was on the verge of telling him that I would marry him. It would have been the greatest happiness to my father and mother, and it would have done away, once and for all, with that lurking dread of a convent which I knew was always at the back of their minds. They were growing old, too — they had neither of them been young people when I was born — and I knew that a time would come when I should find myself all alone. I had no very great friends, and very few relations — none with whom I could have found a home; and in those days a woman left by herself had very little freedom, very few outlets indeed. I had given up the thought of being a nun altogether. I thought that God had taken away the gift of my vocation because I had wilfully neglected it. Even at my blindest I could never persuade myself that it had never existed — that vocation which I had tried so long to ignore. And then, Alex, God in His great love, again took pity on me, and showed me where my treasure really was. I had tried hard to cling to human love and happiness, to find my comfort there, but — just think of it, Alex — a Divine Love was waiting for me.... It was a very hard struggle, Alex. I knew that he wanted all of me, unworthy as I was. And I was so weak and so cowardly and so selfish — that I shrank from giving all. I knew that no half measures would be possible. Like you, I knew that it would have to be, with me, all or none — to whom much is given, from him will much be asked, Alex — and one night I could hold out no longer. I resolved that it should be all. After that, there was no drawing back. I wrote and said that I should never marry — that my mind was made up. Less than a year afterwards I was in the convent. But it was a terrible year. It was not for a long, long while that God let me feel any consolation. Time after time, I felt that He had forsaken me, and I could only cling to the remembrance of the certainty that I had felt at the time, of following His will for me. But He spared me the greatest sacrifice of all, knowing, perhaps, that I should have failed again in courage. My father and mother died within three months of one another that same year, and when my father lay dying, he gave me his blessing and consent, and after he died I went straight to the Mother-house in Paris, where it was then, and a few months after I became an orphan they received me into the novitiate there.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 108