“Possibly you are right,” Mrs. Bradley agreed, so they said no more, and Mrs. Bradley, sitting on the floor where Ulrica had sat, and brooding over the chessboard like a crumpled bird of prey, waved a skinny claw to invite the black-haired child to continue the game which Ulrica had abandoned.
Nearly an hour later, Ulrica came down, not expecting, it was obvious, to discover Mrs. Bradley still there. She watched in absolute silence, while Mrs. Bradley moved on slowly to victory. Then she gave a little sigh, and the victor and the vanquished both looked up.
“This lady could beat my father,” said the Spanish child, picking up a castle in slender, olive-brown fingers. Ulrica nodded, and asked:
“Did she continue the game from the point at which I left it?”
“Yes, she did, and you left it at very bad,” Mrs. Bradley’s opponent observed with considerable candour.
“Sister Genevieve has taken my suitcase to the top of the stairs, and Bessie is coming to carry it out to your chauffeur,” said Ulrica, smiling to show that she felt no resentment of Maria’s frank opinion.
In less than a quarter of an hour, she and Ferdinand had been driven away by George from the convent guest-house. George had just returned with a report of having seen Miss Bonnet’s car in the grounds of Kelsorrow School.
Mrs. Bradley and Bessie watched Ferdinand, George, and Ulrica out of sight, then turned to one another with the mutual congratulation of those who are left behind while others take themselves off. Bessie even wiped her hands on her apron. Her opinion of Ulrica Doyle was soon made clear.
“Snitchy little tripe-hound,” she observed. “Don’t half fancy herself, I reckon. Ask me, she knowed what she was doing when t’other poor nipper conked out.”
“I fear that your remark is highly actionable, dear child,” said Mrs. Bradley, in gently remonstrative tones. Bessie grinned and spat. Then she said good night, and watched, bright-eyed, whilst Mrs. Bradley re-entered the guest-house doorway. She herself returned to the Orphanage for supper, which consisted of thick bread and butter, milk pudding, and cocoa. It was greatly relished by the orphans, and got finished to the very last crumb; this to the perennial mystification of Mother Ambrose, who could not understand how children could be so hungry when, not many hours before, they had made a generous tea.
Mrs. Bradley, with the comfortable feeling of a job well done, went across to soothe Mother Francis, who so far had not been notified of Ulrica Doyle’s departure. Mother Francis, looked greatly concerned, almost ran to meet her, and told her a long involved story, the gist of which was that Mary Maslin could not be found on the building, and had not been seen since just after a quarter past three.
“And if only I had listened to you,” said Mother Francis, with all the disarming humility of her profession, “I should not have caused myself all this terrible new anxiety. I ought to have insisted that both the children were sent away when you said.”
Mrs. Bradley took out a notebook, and asked for all the information which Mother Francis could give.
“Thank God we have got the other child away!” Mother Francis exclaimed more than once in the course of her detailed narration. Mrs. Bradley, longing to dispense with some of the conversation and get to work, had a sudden uneasy recollection of an hour she had spent playing chess whilst Ulrica Doyle was supposed to be packing a suitcase.
Mary, it appeared, had been well on the previous day, when Mother Cyprian went in to take the needlework at half-past two. She had answered her name and, later (perhaps at ten to three, Mother Cyprian thought), she had had her work criticised and was shown how to do a false hem.
And no false hem would have been necessary, Mother Cyprian had reiterated, if only Mary were not such a stupid girl. Even over needlework she was stupid, than which there could not be a pleasanter, easier subject, or one which was in every way more suited to a young girl’s mentality.
This cry from the heart Mrs. Bradley was obliged to receive in full from Mother Francis, who, weighed down, apparently equally, by worry and humility, had lost the faculty for selection, and let Mrs. Bradley have all the material at her disposal in one great tangled muddle of fact, opinion, and emotion.
“And you, my dear friend,” she finished up, almost in tears, “you warned me, and still I would not listen!”
“But what makes you refer the matter back to yesterday afternoon, when the child did not disappear until to-day?” Mrs. Bradley enquired. Mother Francis threw up her hands in a frankly Gallic gesture of despair.
“She was sick! She was sick! I fear the poor innocent young girl has been poisoned!” she said, and went on to make good her words in a mixture of French and English which was not very easy to follow.
* * *
1 She has a headache.
1 It would be better not to say anything more.
CHAPTER 18
SEARCH
“That weary deserts we may tread
A dreary labyrinth may thread
Through dark way underground be led.”
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH: The Kingdom of God.
Mrs. Bradley, armed with all the facts that were known, quickly organised a search. The child had been taken ill on the previous afternoon at just after a quarter past three, because as soon as the form had had their afternoon break at the end of Mother Cyprian’s lesson, Mary, according to the evidence of certain members of the class, had complained of feeling sick, and had gone off alone, refusing the comradely help and companionship usually given to one another by schoolgirls under these circumstances, and they had not seen her again that afternoon.
Two of them had made a tour of the water closets towards the end of break, but those within had all announced their identity, and Mary, it seemed, had concluded her attempts at being sick—“she wasn’t sick,” they announced unanimously (this was the sort of information which, in a form of twelve-year-olds, could be relied on, Mrs. Bradley knew, for accuracy, and is always common property), “but she’d certainly come out before we called to her, because everyone else inside answered.”
Mother Francis was sufficiently overcome by the shock of Mary’s disappearance to be incapable of delivering even the mildest homily upon the indelicacy of these proceedings, and received all the tidings with a curt nod and an order to “go to your places and get straight on with your extra preparation, and do not let me hear another word.”
This display of Old Adam had had the effect of crushing an incipient outbreak of general conversation, and, prompted by Mrs. Bradley, Mother Francis continued the exposition, but would not be hurried into missing out the smallest fact or most unimportant opinion.
After break, Mary’s form had gone to Mother Mary-Joseph for an English lesson, and here Mary Maslin had not appeared at all. An excuse had been brought by a girl named Ryan—Nancy Ryan—aged twelve. All she had said was that Mary felt sick, and would come into class as soon as she possibly could. Nobody added that Mary’s whereabouts at the time that the lesson began were unknown to the rest of the form, and Mother Mary-Joseph—very pale when Mrs. Bradley interviewed her—admitted that she had forgotten the child and had not sent out during the lesson to find out how she was.
“The children should have said something—little donkeys!” said Mother Francis, in a pardonable burst of asperity.
Mary, moreover, had not turned up at tea, had notified nobody of what she had been doing in the meantime, but had been sick twice during the night. She had gone into Saturday school—French with Mother Dominic, English with Mother Mary-Joseph (who asked her whether she felt better), and Geography with Mother Timothy. She had appeared at lunch, but had eaten without much appetite, and then had gone off with Nancy Ryan and some others of the day-girls, to play in the junior dayroom. She had not been seen since.
Unfortunately Nancy Ryan was a day-girl, but five of the boarders were girls in Mary’s form, and the first thing Mrs. Bradley did, after having set in motion a search of the buildings and grounds—nobody to lose touch with the rest of her se
arch party, and no search party to number fewer than four people—was to interview separately all these girls. They could tell her no more than Mother Francis had already found out. They had heard Nancy Ryan give Friday’s message to Mother Mary-Joseph, and they had not been surprised when Mary Maslin did not appear at Friday tea. They assumed that she had gone to bed because she did not feel well, and had said so to Mother Cyprian, whose duty it was that day to supervise the boarders at table.
Mother Cyprian had paid very little attention, as she readily admitted. She was not the Infirmarian, and she had supposed that the child was being properly cared for. She had gone off to church at the usual time, and the boarders had enjoyed recreation. One girl, named Cynthia Parks, had broken rules, however, by sneaking up to the dormitory and peeping into Mary Maslin’s cubicle. She came down and told the others that Mary was not there. When preparation time came, and Mother Timothy, on duty that evening, saw and commented on Mary’s empty place, they told her that Mary had not been well, and Mother Timothy had taken it for granted that the child had been ordered to bed. She actually was in bed when the others all went upstairs, and then had been sick, but not violently so, twice during the night, and had been attended to by Mother Patrick, whose turn it was on duty in that dorter.
Mrs. Bradley could understand Mother Francis’s panic-stricken insistence upon the events of the previous day, but they seemed to her to have very little bearing upon the fact of the disappearance. She tried to get further information from the children, but it was not long before it became obvious that they all knew no more than they had said. She abandoned the interrogation, divided the boarders into five groups, and ordered a further extensive search of the house and grounds.
She herself tiptoed up the stairs to the children’s sleeping quarters. These had been a couple of very large rooms, but extra windows had been made, and these, together with thin wooden partitions and curtains, had made it possible to convert them into a dozen separate cubicles, each with half of a window for light and ventilation.
“Which is Mary’s?” Mrs. Bradley enquired. The Spanish girl, Maria Gartez, who, unbidden but overlooked, had attached herself to Mrs. Bradley, stepped forward and pointed to one of the curtained archways. Mrs. Bradley went in, but the narrow bed was empty.
About a hundred and fifty different thoughts had been passing through Mrs. Bradley’s mind. Two were paramount, and demanded most of her attention. One was common to all the searchers, both nuns and children: the highly dangerous nature of the purlieus of the convent: the high, steep cliffs; the rocks below; the sea; the wild moor; the wilder forest which encroached on it; the bogs, the pits, the paths that ended nowhere, the labyrinthine tracks through gorse and down steep gullies. The second thought, which was possibly hers alone, was that in all probability Ulrica Doyle had known, before she left, of her cousin’s disappearance. True, she had been to look for her, so that she could bid her good-bye, but it seemed incredible that, missing her in her usual haunts, she had not enquired of the members of her form to know where she might be found; and if she had done this, she must have learned of her disappearance from the recreation room during the second part of the afternoon. She probably knew, too, of her cousin’s illness of the previous afternoon and night, and ought to have made some attempt to find out how she was, and whether she had gone to bed again.
She turned to Maria Gartez.
“Did Ulrica know that Mary was lost?” she demanded.
“She said that somebody told her her cousin had been ill,” said Maria. “She went to find her directly after tea.”
“Did she find her?”
“I did not ask. We played chess.”
“Yes, I know you did. What did she say when she came back?”
“I think she said: ‘You have the board ready. I will have black. Black will win.’ I do not remember anything else that she said.”
“So you settled down to play, and were still playing when I found you?”
“Yes. It was almost time to go to preparation when you came. I was very glad you came. I do not like preparation.”
“I see. You ought to have been at preparation whilst you were playing with me?”
“Yes. Ulrica had an excuse. She was to get ready to depart. I made it an excuse to play with you. Thank you very much for a very enjoyable game.” She curtsied. Her dark eyes were grave. She seemed perfectly serious.
“And she didn’t say a word about her cousin?”
“No. But about the board.”
“I see. Thank you, Maria. That is all.”
The Spanish child curtsied and, this time, went away. Meanwhile the Mother Superior had sent Sister Genevieve, the boarders’ matron, and Sister Lucia, the assistant Infirmarian, for the police. They were to walk across the moor to the village and to telephone to Kelsorrow from there. They were not to use the guest-house telephone for fear of alarming the stepmother of the child.
Pending the arrival of the police, other search parties were formed. Reverend Mother Superior herself went into the boarders’ dormitory to do night-duty, and the older nuns and lay-sisters Catherine and Magdalene were left behind. Old Sister Catherine, they thought, could not help in any way; Sister Magdalene was to open the convent gate to the police and explain to them, more fully than could be done in a telephone call, exactly what had happened.
Then one party headed by Mother Benedict and including Mrs. Bradley, and the other headed by Mother Simon-Zelotes and including Mother Francis, set out to search the neighbourhood. Mrs. Bradley’s party carried the convent handbells, five in all, and the other party had whistles used in games periods. It was expected that enough noise would be made to keep the searchers in touch with one another and to warn the missing child of the approach of friends if she had wandered away and got lost. Mrs. Bradley had her electric torch and two spare batteries, and Mother Benedict carried a hurricane lamp. The others in their party, following two by two as long as the nature of the country allowed of this conventual method of progress, were absolutely silent. They were to explore the cliff-top and the sea-shore, and Mrs. Bradley wondered, as she led the way with Mother Benedict, whether theirs or that of the other party, who were to comb the heights and hollows of the moorland, was the more unpleasant and dangerous task.
Soon it became impracticable to continue in the close and unproductive formation of the crocodile, and so, obeying orders, the searchers spread, half of them circling round Mrs. Bradley and her torch, the rest with Mother Benedict and her lamp.
Apart from almost frightening a tramp to death, their search of the cliff-top in the direction of Hiversand Bay had no result whatever. They went back along the path until they came to a place where steps had been cut to make a descent to the beach. Here the two groups separated completely, Mrs. Bradley and her followers to go down to the shore, the others to continue the search along the cliffs and to try the opposite direction.
All were tired but unflagging, and Mrs. Bradley, not for the first time, admired without stint the soldierly courage and cheerfulness of the religious, as, impeded, one would suppose, by their habits, stumbling often in the unevenness of the way, they carried out the thorough, patient search. The thought in her own mind was that all her theories had been false; that the mysteries bore another character from that with which she had been crediting them, and that Mary Maslin was dead, and through her negligence.
She could hear Mother Benedict praying as they went down the dangerous path, not for her own safety—although, in that wild search, and in the darkness, all of them risked their lives—but for the health, life, and safety of the child.
The path kept turning on itself in sharp-angled bends. The steps were unevenly cut and were slippery with rain. Twice Mrs. Bradley saved Mother Benedict from falling, and twice Mother Benedict saved her. The sound of the sea grew louder. A table of tides had indicated that they would reach the shore on an out-going tide, and soon they were walking on shingle and stumbling on great heaps of seaweed, wet, salt and sticky, and
of hideous, fishy fleshiness, left high by the out-going sea.
The sea boomed on the rocks which it was gradually uncovering. They could see them as they approached—great black shapes like leviathans sleeping in the waters, up to the buttocks in the brine which leapt at their heads and fell back, foaming and streaming. Even by night the sky was pale above the water, but the towering cliffs shut out the heavens to the south, for the convent faced north to the sea, owing to the shape of the bay on which it was built.
Clanging their bells like lepers warning the unspotted, or like those in charge of the “dead cart” in time of plague, the untidy little procession, weary, wet-footed, wet-skirted, muddy, and hoarse—for they called the child’s name in addition to ringing the bells—walked for four miles up the coast, until they were two miles beyond the convent. Here the cliff was lower, and farther on it disappeared in sand-dunes covered with rough, spiked grass. Their shoes were full of sand, and they sat down as soon as they came to firm ground, and shook out the sand before they continued their journey. About a mile farther on, they heard the sound of a bicycle bell. Its continuous ringing attracted their attention. It was to bring them news that the child was found. The young policeman who was riding the bicycle got off and walked back with them to the convent. They were almost too tired to rejoice. Nothing more could be done that night. Those who had been left in charge at the convent had food and hot drinks ready for the searchers, and the Reverend Mother Superior put everyone under obedience to eat and drink.
The child had been put to bed. The police had arrived in time to round up the searchers. The story, said Reverend Mother, must wait for the telling until morning.
Mrs. Bradley, whose constitution was of iron, nevertheless felt glad at the thought of bed. She protested against being escorted by Mother Ambrose and Mother Jude to the guest-house, but, tired as they were, they would not leave her until she reached the front door. In she went, and was asleep as soon as she lay down.
St. Peter's Finger (Mrs. Bradley) Page 21