Morally speaking, and apart from the possible fatal result, her main fault lay in having confessed to Giovanni that she was really tempted to ask release from her vows. Now that he was not near, no such temptation assailed her, but there had been a time when to resist it had seemed the greatest sacrifice that any human being could make. She could only draw one conclusion from this fact, but it was a grave one: in spite of her past life, her vows and her heartfelt faith, she was not free from material and earthly passion. Innocence is one thing, ignorance is another, and a trained nurse of twenty-five cannot and should not be as ignorant as a child, whether she be a nun or a lay woman. Sister Giovanna knew what she had felt: it had been the thrill of an awakened sense, not the vibration of a heartfelt sympathy; it belonged neither to the immortal spirit nor to the kingdom of the mind, but to the dying body. Temptation is not sin, but it is wrong to expose oneself to it willingly, except for a purpose so high as to justify the risk. Sister Giovanna quietly resolved that she would never see Severi again, and she judged that the surest way of abiding by her resolution was to join the mission to the Far East and leave Italy for ever. Having already thought of taking the step merely in order to get away from the possibility of hating a person who had wronged her and robbed her, it seemed indeed her duty to take it now for this much stronger reason. Since she could still be weak, her first and greatest duty was to put herself beyond the reach of weakening influences. Giovanni would not leave Rome while she stayed there, that was certain; there was no alternative but to go away herself, for a man capable of such a daring and lawless deed as carrying her off from the door of the Convent, under the very eyes of the portress, might do anything. Indeed, he might even follow her to Rangoon; but she must risk that, or bury herself in a cloister, which she would not do if she could help it.
While she was nursing the new case to which she had been called, her resolution became irrevocable. When the patient finally recovered she returned to the Convent, and it was not till she had been doing ordinary work in the hospital during several days that she asked to see the Mother Superior alone. Captain Ugo Severi had gone to the baths of Montecatini to complete his cure, nothing more had been heard of Giovanni, and the Mother was inclined to believe that his meeting with Sister Giovanna had been final, and that he would make no further attempt to see her. But the nun herself thought otherwise.
She sat where she always did when she came to the Mother Superior’s room, on a straight-backed chair between the corner of the table and the wall, and she told her story without once faltering or hesitating, though without once looking up, from the moment when she had got into the wrong carriage till she had at last reached the Villino Barini in safety. Though it was late in the afternoon and the light was failing, the Mother shaded her eyes with one hand while she listened.
There was neither rule nor tradition under which Sister Giovanna could have felt it her duty to tell her superior what had happened, and she had necessarily been the only judge of what her confessor should know of the matter. Even now, if she had burst into floods of tears or shown any other signs of being on the verge of a nervous crisis, the elder woman would probably have stopped her and told her not to make confidences that concerned another person until she was calmer. But she evidently had full control of her words and outward bearing, and the Mother listened in silence. Then the young nun expounded the conclusion to which she believed herself forced: she must leave a country in which Giovanni might at any moment make another meeting inevitable, and the safest refuge was the Rangoon Leper Asylum. She formally asked permission to be allowed to join the mission.
The Mother Superior’s nervous little hand contracted spasmodically upon her eyes, and then joined its fellow on her knee. She sat quite still for a few seconds, looking towards the window; the evening glow was beginning to fill the garden and the cloisters with purple and gold, and a faint reflection came up to her suffering face.
‘It kills me to let you go,’ she said at last, just above a whisper.
The words and the tone took Sister Giovanna by surprise, though she had lately understood that the Mother Superior’s affection for her was much stronger than she would formerly have believed possible; it was something more than the sincere friendship which a middle-aged woman might feel for one much younger, and it was certainly not founded on the fact that the latter was an exceptionally gifted nurse, whose presence and activity were of the highest importance to the hospital. Neither friendship nor admiration for a fellow-worker could explain an emotion of such tragic depth and strength that it seemed almost too human in a woman otherwise quite above and beyond ordinary humanity. Sister Giovanna could find nothing to say, and waited in silence.
‘I did not know that one could feel such pain,’ said Mother Veronica, looking steadily out of the window; but her voice was little more than a breath.
The Sister could not understand, but in the midst of her own great trouble, the sight of a suffering as great as her own, and borne on account of her, moved her deeply.
All at once the Mother Superior swayed to one side on her chair, as if she were fainting, and she might have fallen if the nun had not darted forward to hold her upright; but at the touch, she straightened herself with an effort and gently pushed the young Sister away from her.
‘If it is for me that you are in such pain, Mother,’ said Sister Giovanna gently, ‘I cannot thank you enough for being so sorry! But I do not deserve that you should care so much — indeed, I do not!’
‘If I could give my life for yours, it would still be too little!’
‘You are giving your life for many,’ Sister Giovanna answered gently. ‘That is better.’
‘No. It is not better, but it is the best I can do. You do not understand.’
‘How can I? But I am grateful — —’
‘You owe me nothing,’ the Mother Superior answered with sudden energy, ‘but I owe you everything. You have given me the happiest hours of my life. But it was too much. God sent you to me, and God is taking you away from me — God’s will be done!’
Sister Giovanna felt that she was near something very strange and great which she might not be able to comprehend if it were shown clearly, and which almost frightened her by its mysterious veiled presence. The evening light penetrated Mother Veronica’s translucid features, as if they were carved out of alabaster, and the hues that lingered in them might have been reflected from heaven; her upturned eyes, that sometimes looked so small and piercing, were wide and sorrowful now. The young Sister saw, but guessed nothing of the truth.
‘The happiest hours in your life!’ She repeated the words with wonder.
‘Yes,’ said the elder woman slowly, ‘the happiest by far! Since you have been here, you have never given me one bad moment, by word or deed, excepting by the pain you yourself have had to bear. If you go away, and if I should not live long, remember what I have told you, for if you have some affection for me, it will comfort you to think that you have made me very, very happy for five long years.’
‘I am glad, though I have done nothing but my duty, and barely that. I cannot see how I deserve such praise, but if I have satisfied you, I am most glad. You have been a mother to me.’
Slowly the transfigured face turned to her at last, full of radiance.
‘Do you mean it just as you say it, my dear?’
‘Indeed, indeed, I do!’ Sister Giovanna answered, wondering more and more, but in true earnest.
The dark eyes gazed on her steadily for a long time, with an expression she had never seen in human eyes before. Then the truth came, soft and low.
‘I am your mother.’
‘You are a mother to us all,’ the young Sister answered.
‘I am your mother, dear, your own mother that bore you — you, my only child. Do you understand?’
Sister Giovanna’s eyes opened wide in amazement, but there was a forelightening of joy in her face.
‘You?’ she cried. ‘But I knew my mother — my father — —’
‘No. She whom you called your mother was my elder sister. I ran away with the man I loved, because he was a Protestant and poor, and my parents would not allow the marriage. We were married in his Church, but my family would have nothing more to do with me. I was an outcast for them, disgraced, never to be mentioned. Your own father died of typhoid fever a few days before you were born. I was ill a long time, ill and poor, almost starving. I wrote to my sister, imploring help. She and her husband bargained with me. They agreed to make a long journey and bring you back as their child. They promised that you should be splendidly provided for; you would be an heiress, all that my brother-in-law could legally dispose of should go to you; but I was to disappear for ever and never let the truth be known. What could I do? You were two months old and I was penniless. I let them take you, and I became a nursing sister. It was like tearing off a limb, but I let you go to the glorious future that was before you. At least, you would have all the world held, to make up for my love, and I knew they would be kind to you. They were ashamed of me, that was all. They said that I was not married! You know how rigid they were, with their traditions and prejudices! That is my story. I have kept my word, and their secret, until to-day.’
Sister Giovanna listened with wide eyes and parted lips, for the world she had lived in during more than five-and-twenty years was wrenched from its path and sent whirling into space at a tangent she could not follow; there was nothing firm under her feet, she had nothing substantial left, not even the name she had once called her own. It had all been unreal. The dead Knight of Malta lying in state in the great palace had not been her father; the delicate woman with the ascetic face, who had died when she had been a little child, had not been her mother; they had never registered her birth at the Municipality because she had not been their child and had not even been born in Rome; they had not taken the proper legal steps to adopt her and make her their heir, because they had been ashamed of her own mother. And her own mother was before her, Mother Veronica, the Superior of the Convent in which she had taken refuge because they had left her a destitute, nameless, penniless waif, after promising to make her their daughter in the eyes of the law. She knew that without a certificate of birth a girl could not easily be legally married in Italy; if the Prince had lived and she had been about to marry, what would he have done about that? But he was gone, and she would not ask herself such a question, for the answer seemed to be that he would have done something dishonest rather than admit the truth. A deep resentment sprang up in her against the dead man and woman who had not honourably kept their solemn promise to her mother, and her aunt’s lawless act and hatred of her sank into insignificance beside their sin of omission. If the Princess’s confession during her illness had not been altogether the invention of a fevered brain, and if there had really been a will, it had been worthless, and its destruction had not robbed Angela of a farthing. She and her mother had been cheated and their lives made desolate by those other two; she must not think of it, lest she should hate the dead, as she had dreaded to hate the living.
All this had flashed upon her mind in one of those quick visions of the truth by which we sometimes become aware of many closely connected facts simultaneously, without taking account of each. After the Mother Superior had ceased speaking the silence lasted only a few seconds, but it seemed long to her now that she had told her secret and was waiting to be answered. Would her daughter forgive her? The young nun’s face expressed nothing she felt at that moment; for the staring eyes and parted lips remained mechanically fixed in a look of blind surprise long after her thoughts were on the wing; and her thoughts flew far, but their wide-circling flight brought them back, like swallows, as swiftly as they had flown away.
Then her heart spoke, and in another moment she was at her mother’s knee, like a child, with a little natural cry that had never passed her lips before. For a breathing-space both guessed what heaven might hold of rest, refreshment, and peace, and the march of tragic fate was stayed while mother and daughter communed together, and dreamed of never parting on earth but to meet in heaven, of keeping their sweet secret from all the world as something sacred for themselves, of working side by side, in one life, one love, one faith, one hope, of facing all earthly trouble together, and of fighting every battle of the spirit hand in hand.
Two could bear what one could not. Sister Giovanna felt that fresh strength was given her, and the long-tried elder woman was conscious that her will to do good was renewed and doubled and trebled, so that it could accomplish twice and three times as much as before. Her daughter would not leave her now, to be a martyr in the East, as the only escape from herself and from the man who loved her too daringly. Why should she go? If she still felt that she must leave Rome for a time, she could go to one of the order’s houses far away, but not to the East, the deadly East! Heaven did not love useless suffering; the Church condemned all self-sacrifice that was not meet, right, and reasonable. In due time she would come back, when all danger was over, when Giovanni had lived through the first days of surprise, disappointment, and passion.
The sunset glow had faded and twilight was coming on when the two went down the steps and crossed the cloistered garden to the chapel, for it was the hour for Vespers. They walked as usual, with an even, noiseless tread, the young nun on the left of her superior and keeping step with her, but not quite close to her, for that would not have been respectful; yet each felt as if the other’s hand were in hers and their hearts were beating gently with the same loving thought. Peace had come upon them and they felt that it would be lasting.
At the chapel door they separated; the Mother Superior passed to her high-backed, carved seat at the end, the three aged nuns who had survived from other times sat next to her in the order of their years, and Sister Giovanna took her appointed place much farther down. A number of seats were empty, belonging to those nurses who were attending private cases.
Cloistered nuns spend many hours of the day and night in chapel, but the working orders use short offices and have much latitude as to the hours at which their services are held. Except on Sundays and at daily mass, no priest officiates; the Mother Superior or Mother Prioress leads with her side of the choir, the Sub-Prioress, or the Mistress of the Novices, or whoever is second in authority, responds with the other nuns. The Office of Saint Dominic for Vespers practically consists of one short Psalm, a very diminutive Lesson, one Hymn, and the beautiful Canticle ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’; then follows a little prayer and the short responsory, and all is over. The whole service does not last ten minutes.
The women’s voices answered each other peacefully, and then rose together in the quaint old melody of the hymn, the sweet notes of the younger ones carried high on the stronger tones of the elder Sisters, while the three old nuns droned on in a sort of patient, nasal, half-mannish counter-tenor, scarcely pronouncing the words they sang, but making an accompaniment that was not wholly unpleasing.
Two versicles of responsory next, and then the Mother Superior began to intone the Magnificat, and Sister Giovanna took up the grand plain-chant with the others. In spite of her deep trouble, the words had never meant to her what they meant now, and she felt her world lifted up from earth to the gates of Peace.
But she was not to reach the end of the wonderful song that day.
‘And His mercy is on them that fear Him, from generation to generation,’ the nuns sang.
With a crash, as if a thunderbolt had fallen at their feet in the choir, the Great Unforeseen once more flashed from its hiding-place and hurled itself into their midst.
The chapel rocked to and fro twice with a horrible noise of loosened masonry grinding on itself, and the panes of the high windows fell in three separate showers and were smashed to thousands of splinters on the stone floor, the lights went out, the sacred ornaments on the altar toppled and fell upon each other, the twilight that glimmered through the broken windows alone overcame the darkness in the wrecked church. The destruction was sudden, viol
ent, and quick. In less than fifteen seconds after the shock, perfect stillness reigned again.
The Sisters, in their first terror, caught at each other instinctively, or grasped the woodwork with convulsed hands. One or two novices had screamed outright, but the most of them uttered an ejaculatory prayer, more than half unconscious. The Mother Superior was standing upright and motionless in her place.
‘Is any one hurt?’ she asked steadily, and looking round the semicircle in the gloom.
No answer came to her question.
‘If any one of you was struck by anything,’ she said again, ‘let her speak.’
No one had been hurt, for the small choir was under the apse of the chapel and there were no windows there.
‘Let us go to the hospital at once,’ she said. ‘The patients will need us.’
Her calm imposed itself upon the young novices and one or two of the more nervous Sisters; the others were brave women and had only been badly startled and shaken, for which no one could blame them. They filed out, two and two, by the side door of the choir, Mother Veronica coming last. From the cloister they could see that the big glass door of the reception-hall was smashed, and that the windows overhead on that side were also broken. Singularly enough, not one of those on the other side was injured.
All had felt the certainty that a dynamite bomb had been exploded somewhere in the building with the intention of blowing up the hospital. As they fell out of their ranks and scattered in twos and threes, hastening to the different parts of the establishment where each did her accustomed work, Sister Giovanna naturally found herself beside the Mother Superior. As one of the supervising nurses, she was, of course, needed in the hospital itself with her superior.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1282