Tales of the Cloister/Under the Black Pall
Under the Black Pall
Under the Black Pall
HEN she entered St. Mary's it seemed to her like stepping out of the marching ranks of a great army into the cool shade of a way-side chapel. Life during the two years between her graduation and this return to the convent as a candidate for the veil had been bearing her forward too swiftly. She felt breathless from its rush, panic-stricken from the sense of pressure on all sides, horrified by the contrast between the feverish turmoil of living "out in the world" and the restful serenity of life within the cloister walls. Above and beyond all, a great loneliness had oppressed her in the world. What had she in common with these men and women who smiled at her, talked to her, flattered her, and—cared for her not at all?
Everything in the large city where her guardian lived had seemed very worldly to the convent girl. Those she met had been so selfish, so sordid. She had been pathetically shy and innocent and inexperienced when she went back to the world from her class-rooms, but these qualities had not protected her from the loss of many illusions. Her companions had taken delight in destroying them. Repeated plunges into the whirlpool had been their method of combating her determination to return to the convent for which she had a longing—strange and inexplicable even to herself—a sort of Heimweh.
When she left the institution she had not been conscious of the breaking of any very close ties. Her strange reserve had not permitted her to form them. But memory's brush laid warm colors on the days that, in passing, had seemed gray enough. Her earliest memories were not of a mother's care, but of that of the nuns in whose charge she had been placed. Even her vacations had been spent with them, by her own choice. Her little world was the world in which they lived. The quiet garden was her fairyland. The dim corridors had been peopled with the creations of her childhood fancies as she played in them on rainy days. In the chapel she had made her first confession, her heart beating so loudly that she fancied the priest and the silent nun in the pew nearest the confessional might hear it and wonder. There, too, she had been confirmed—in white, with her little companions around her, and her guardian's family, much impressed, observing the scene from pews considerately near the altar railing.
The years had gone by quickly. She had been conscious of no especial lack in the affection given her. If there had been a vague feeling of its insufficiency, she could not have told why it was so. Her days were busy ones, filled with the crowding incidents of school life that seemed at that time all-important. And then had come the excitement of the last school year and the breaking of the school-girl ties. Her classmates were bemoaning their separation from each other. None expressed deep regret at parting from her. That had been her first little trouble—and it had not seemed small. Hitherto there had been the prospect of reunion and taking up next year the threads that were dropped. Now everything seemed ended. The future stretched before her, forlornly gray and bleak. On the other side of the convent walls lay Life—something to be worked out and struggled over.
Already persons were saying things to her about responsibilities and the duty one owed to one's position, and the good that could be done with money. It seemed she had some money; she had only lightly realized it. But apparently money imposed duties upon its possessor not to be shirked. She must go out into the world, make her début, and become a part of society. She had been dreaming long enough, her guardian added, as he went on to outline more definitely the career that awaited her. She listened quietly, hearing above his precise utterances the murmur of girlish voices down in the garden, the soft ringing of the chapel bell, the almost noiseless footfalls of shadowy figures moving along the halls. This was home, and she must leave it. But under the regret that she felt and the homesickness that already assailed her there was a semi-conscious thrill of expectancy. After all, she was young; and a new and promising experience awaited her which might bring some of the happiness that had heretofore seemed exclusively the portion of others. Who could tell?
Yet when the moment of parting came she clung to the dignified Mother Superior.
"I do not wish to go!" she cried, in a sudden melting of her habitual reserve. "And I will come back if you will take me, Reverend Mother, when I am of age and my own mistress. You will take me, will you not?" she had asked, with a sudden doubt. The Superior had reassured her gently, smiling with the calm of one whose life it was to know many partings and to give no undue attention to inevitable pulling at the heart-strings.
"We shall be very glad to have you with us again, dear child," she had said. "You must feel that this will always be a home for you, even if you come to it only at long intervals. You will lead a busy and, I hope, a useful and happy life. Perhaps you can do as much good in the world as here—that is for you to decide. Pray over it earnestly; examine your conscience rigorously. Do nothing in haste. Whether you become one of us or not, we shall always hold you in our hearts."
The gentle words of affection, which meant so much to her because so rarely heard, went with her into the world and became a creed by which she half consciously regulated her life. Those she met were weighed by the severe standard of the convent, and found wanting. The weakness, the frivolity, the strangely elastic point of view of these men and women troubled her; the paganism of society appalled the convent girl who went to mass each morning and lived up to the letter of her religion. She tried to do her duty as it was conceived for her by others. She went to dinners, to balls and parties, and felt at each of them the singular aloofness that had marked her life. There were, of course, pleasant things in the new life, and she tried to find them. Once or twice she threw herself into the gayeties of the season with an abandon that surprised her friends and horrified her into rigorous penance when the reaction came. It was all a part of the experiment, of the test she had resolved to make. Once only the question of marriage had for a moment seemed of a vital importance it had never worn for her before. It was when the Honorable Edward Carrington, of England, asked her to be his wife. When she said no it was with the feeling that had he sought her with more convincing ardor something in her soul would have awakened. She would not marry unless her heart was touched, and perfunctory attention could not stir that to love.
Through all, the convent seemed to call to her. "We shall always hold you in our hearts," the Superior had said. No one else had ever said as much. Under the most brilliant ballroom music, the notes of the chapel organ throbbed in her ears. No banquet hall was so attractive as the memory of the stone refectory with the silent nuns seated round its simple pine tables. No grounds were so pleasant as the convent garden, with the scent of its homely flowers filling the air. There was her home; there were the hearts that held her. She filled the vases in her room with garden roses and mignonettes, and her acquaintances marvelled at the taste which preferred these to the sumptuous flowers she might have had. They did not realize that their simple perfume was as if breathed from the cloister to which her heart turned.
Two years passed, and she went back to the convent. It was understood by her friends that she was only "on probation." She was not to take her vows until there had been time to discover that her choice of life should be the cloister and not the world. But she slipped so readily into the little niche awaiting her that there was neither in her soul nor in theirs much question as to her ultimate decision.
As "candidate" and "novice" the years went swiftly. Some slight relaxation of the rules was made for her. She was permitted to see her outside friends occasionally, and keep in touch with their lives and interests. In the perfect conventual system, where each unit has its special place, she had been assigned to the teaching ranks. She prepared herself for this work with characteristic thoroughness. She became also the first assistant of Sister Rodriguez, the convent infirmarian, and won the deep respect of that gentle nun.
When she took the white veil she was conscious of a quiet exhilaration. She had made her choice and was content. Her eyes testified to this so eloquently that the other nuns looked at her with a soft surprise in their own. One or two of the older ones wondered vaguely whether she realized all that she was renouncing—the wealth, the position she might have had in the great world.
As a white-veiled novice her sphere widened a little. She taught six hours a day, and her pupils accepted her instruction cheerfully and laid the usual offerings of fruit and flowers on her desk. They also deigned to obey her mild commands and to make a reasonable amount of progress in their studies, which added to her serene content. They felt no deep school-girl devotion for her, such as they were wont to lavish on their teachers, but they approved of her in a large and general way, and spoke kindly of her among themselves.
"One can't really love Sister Patience," they said. "She does not want it; and with her manner nobody could. But, cold as she is, she is very just. She has no favorites, and never shows a bit of partiality; we like that."
She adapted herself without difficulty to the strict convent routine. She rose at five, attended mass, and ate her breakfast; at half 
SISTER PATIENCE
Her acquaintances came to the convent more rarely as time passed. They realized that her decision was irrevocable before the taking of the black veil should shut her off from the world forever. She, too, realized this, and thought of it with an odd sensation which she found it hard to analyze.
Before she took her final vows she was subjected to further tests of discipline, somewhat more severe, and emerged from them triumphantly. After these there was a "retreat," which included a week of silence and fasting. Then the morning of the final ceremony arrived, and the nearest and dearest of those who had known and loved the candidates for the black veil crowded the convent chapel to see them sever the last tie that bound them to the outside world.
Fifty were to do this. The soft notes of the organ filled the chapel, and the friends of the novices turned wet eyes towards the door through which they were to enter. The heavy odor of many flowers was in the air, and clouds of incense rose to the blue dome. Outside, waiting horses pawed noisily in the usually quiet street. Inside, choked sobs were heard—the last lament of mothers, perhaps, whose children were leaving them forever.
The little door to the left of the sanctuary opened, and the long line of white-veiled Sisters wound its way into the chapel, filling the great space left for them back of the altar railing. Their faces were pale, and the days and nights of fasting had left deep lines on their cheeks, but in their eyes was a light that made those who looked at it hold their breath. The friends of Sister Patience saw her in the row nearest the railing. Her back was towards them, but her tall figure and the carriage of her head were not to be mistaken. When she turned at a point in the ceremony they looked at each other. Some change, some singular change, was in her face. But what?
The solemn ceremony went on. Before the altar the priest and his assistants chanted the words of the service. High up in the organ-loft the choir of nuns responded softly. The row of candidates for the veil rose and knelt, and made their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, while those who loved them, kneeling in the pews behind, looked on with aching hearts.
Suddenly a bell sounded, followed by the soft, muffled fall of the fifty Sisters who were to pronounce their vows, prostrating themselves on the chapel floor. Lay Sisters stretched a great black pall over them, covering them all. In its centre was a white cross, and this, with the outlined figures of the young nuns beneath the sombre cloth, had a strange suggestion of a group of graves. Above the Sisters, dead to the world from this time forth, moaned the cloister's musical farewell to the mundane joys of life.
Sister Patience lay on her face with the others and waited for the signal to rise. At first she had no thought of self. During the early part of the service she had been impressed by the persistent sobs of one person, a woman, and she had sympathized vaguely with an other's sorrow. She knew it was not for her. Not one in all that great throng mourned for her. But in her excited mental state this weeping, heart-rending enough in itself, took on an emblematic meaning. Strange fancies filled her mind. She wondered if that was the weak voice of nature, wailing for those who were to adjure its weakness.
The chapel was full of the stifled sobs of those who watched the scene. The novices were dead—buried beneath that sombre pall, to rise inhabitants of another world. Sister Patience closed her eyes, and the thought came again and again. It ate into her brain. The music seemed to stop. She no longer felt the warmth of the bodies lying near her. Her face rested against the cold chapel floor, and on the background of the scene through which she was passing memory suddenly brought up her past life, like vivid pictures thrown on a screen.
She saw a little child, in a black frock, timidly entering a dimly lighted room. There was something long and black there, and at the head and foot of it wax candles were burning.
The child stood on tip-toe and looked at a sleeping face.
"It is your mother, dear," a voice said. "Kiss her good-bye." The child kissed her, and for years memory never recalled her loss without a sense of the irresponsive, icy lips on which her own had rested.
Then the child stood by an open grave into which a box was being lowered. It was a gray winter day, and falling snowflakes floated through the air. The child looked at the dull skies above, then at the square black hole before her, and she shivered as the first spadeful of earth fell on the box below.
The scene changed. The child, a little older, lay in a great dormitory. Her bed was shut off, like the others, by muslin curtains, but she could hear whispering voices around her and stifled laughs. It was her first night in the convent; she knew none of the other pupils. One of them suddenly stole in between the curtains, and stood, a white-robed figure, behind the bed.
"You're the new girl," she said, curiously, "and Sister says you're an orphan. It must be funny to be an orphan. Mattie Crane says when you are, you have nobody to love you."
The child buried her head in the pillows and did not answer.
Now she was a young girl, at her guardian's house, and a holiday party was in progress. One of the sons of the house followed her to the alcove where she had hidden herself to look at the gayety of others unheeded in her retreat.
"Why in the world," he said, with the patronizing censure of fifteen, "are you hiding away here? Papa is always telling us to be nice to you, but how can anybody like you when you act like this? The boys are afraid of you, and the girls say things about you. It is your own fault, too."
She shrank still farther into her corner and refused to leave it. But even the shy pleasure of looking on was gone. She crept away to her room.
Another recollection burned on the mental screen. The lonely child had become a young lady, after painful struggles with the diffidence of youth. She was waiting in the conservatory to be claimed by her partner for a waltz already begun when his voice reached her ear.
"I must leave you, Harry," he said, "and find Miss Everts. I have this dance with her—for my sins, I suppose. Stand by me after it, for I shall want to be thawed out. Did you ever know a girl that was such a lump of ice? She makes my teeth chatter."
The flippant words rang in her ears as she stole away. What was it about her, she wondered, that repelled? She did not know.
Linked with these words in her memory were those uttered, several years afterwards, in the interval between graduation and her novitiate, by the one man whose proposal of marriage had seemed to call for consideration. She had cared for Edward Carrington; had deeply liked and respected him. With him, at least, there was neither thought nor need of her money. But his words had hurt.
"I do not make love to you as a man would with the usual woman," he had said, "for I realize that it would count but little with a woman like yourself. But you will believe me when I tell you how proud and happy I should be to have you for my wife."
She wondered why he had thought it would "count but little." If he loved her, why should he not say so? She did not know, nor had she ever learned. She never thought of him without pain at the memory of the look in his eyes as he went away.
The lonely life went on. In the world, even in the cloister, there seemed to be drawn around her a circle which no one passed. The mental screen had shown the lonely child, the lonely girl, the lonely woman. The arms of classmates were not thrown around her; the rare caresses of the nuns were not given to her. Admired, deeply respected, she was never loved.
She became suddenly conscious of what and where she was—a nun, making her profession on the floor of the convent chapel, under the black pall, with valedictory strains to the world sighing above her. Why had her mind, which should be filled with uplifting thoughts on so sacred an occasion, taken a time like this to wander? She called herself sternly before the tribunal of the conscience she had thought so keenly alive.
It was the sobbing of that woman which had done it. Others were weeping, too, but those sobs were from the heart—the expression of love and agony. Some one among her companions was loved like that! She herself had never known love—a mother's, a sister's. No, nor man's for the chosen woman. So she had not to renounce such devotion as her associates were sacrificing in the last act of their worldly lives. That reflection had led to others. No one grieved for her. What she had, she gave. Money, position, liberty—she cheerfully renounced all these. Could she have offered, had she possessed it, great, unselfish, human affection? What was she renouncing except things for which she did not care? Simply turning her back on a life which failed to give her that for which her hungry heart had passionately longed, still longed!
She felt herself trembling. If she had done only this, she had not realized it before; she herself had been deceived. Had she turned from the world to the cloister merely because here there was peace and relief from the unrest of life beyond its walls? Those outside who knew her, and those inside as well, had felt that she was renouncing much. They had looked almost with awe upon the woman whose religious feeling was so intense that she must give up the riches that her life held for the service of God.
What a mockery—what deceit! Her eyes had been opened—when it was too late! Opened by the cry of a human heart which seemed the outward expression of her own long years of self-repression and bitter loneliness.
She pressed her cheek against the hard floor and moaned. She was a living lie, but it was too late now to confess it. She must remain a lie until the end—a nun mistaken in her vocation, with no love for it in her heart, yet respected by her associates and pupils for the qualities she had not. She was an impostor! Nature or God, or both, had shown it to her here, in the sanctuary she was profaning by her vows.
Above her the music throbbed tremulously. A single voice, Sister Cecilia's, took up the organ's refrain and carried it forward with a suggestion of triumph in the rich tones. Her face was raised to the arched dome of the chapel, and in her pure eyes burned the light of religious exaltation.
Sister Patience, prone under the black pall, could not see it, but she knew it was there. She had seen it often when Sister Cecilia sang. There had been a reflection of it to-day on the faces of her sister novices. They were happy. Their breasts had swelled over their entrance to the cloister—over this sure refuge in His Heart.
Sister Patience looked down the long gray avenue of future years. On the right and left lay cold duty, untempered by the spiritual love which makes such duty sweet, and at its end the convent cemetery, with rows of board-marked graves. After that, what? What for the lie—the impostor?
The young nun's soul contracted at the loneliness and heart-hunger of the years gone by and of the years to come. In her heart rose the most spontaneous prayer of her whole life.
"God forgive me," she whispered. "God—forgive me! And let me give You what I have."
"George," said the Honorable Edward Carrington, with patient calmness, "do you mind letting up a little on those billiard-balls? This knocking them around is getting on my nerves."
His younger brother brought his cue to rest and faced about.
"Your nerves are getting pretty troublesome of late," he said, rather irritably. "You haven't been yourself for days. I've not seen you like this since we were here before, six years ago."
As the other made no reply, he came over and put his hand on his shoulder.
"Say, old chap," he asked, impulsively, "what's up? Why have we come to America again?"
The older man looked at the boyish face seriously.
"When you were a little beggar, Georgie," he said, "and had a tooth that ached, when it began you used to bite on it to make it worse. Do you remember? Well, that's what I've been doing."
He regarded gravely the puzzled eyes that looked into his. Then he went on, incisively:
"In other words, my boy, I heard that the only woman in the world for me was to bury herself alive to-day. I came to America, and I have seen her do it."
His look had not veered from his brother's eyes.
"I thought you'd got over that, years ago," said the boy, with awkward sympathy, turning his own gaze away.
"I hope when you're older you won't have reason to feel that the Carringtons don't get over such things," his brother replied, slowly.
Then he pulled himself together and grasped the boy's hand with a good English grip.
"It hurt, George," he said, simply.
He let the hand fall, looked at his watch, and added, casually, "It's time we went to dinner, isn't it?"