Sister Josepha
Sister Josepha told her beads mechanically, her fingers numb with
the accustomed exercise. The little organ creaked a dismal "O
Salutaris," and she still knelt on the floor, her white-bonneted
head nodding suspiciously. The Mother Superior gave a sharp
glance at the tired figure; then, as a sudden lurch forward
brought the little sister back to consciousness, Mother's eyes
relaxed into a genuine smile.
The bell tolled the end of vespers, and the sombre-robed nuns
filed out of the chapel to go about their evening duties. Little
Sister Josepha's work was to attend to the household lamps, but
there must have been as much oil spilled upon the table to-night
as was put in the vessels. The small brown hands trembled so
that most of the wicks were trimmed with points at one corner
which caused them to smoke that night.
"Oh, cher Seigneur," she sighed, giving an impatient polish to a
refractory chimney, "it is wicked and sinful, I know, but I am so
tired. I can't be happy and sing any more. It doesn't seem
right for le bon Dieu to have me all cooped up here with nothing
to see but stray visitors, and always the same old work, teaching
those mean little girls to sew, and washing and filling the same
old lamps. Pah!" And she polished the chimney with a sudden
vigorous jerk which threatened destruction.
They were rebellious prayers that the red mouth murmured that
night, and a restless figure that tossed on the hard dormitory
bed. Sister Dominica called from her couch to know if Sister
Josepha were ill.
"No," was the somewhat short response; then a muttered, "Why
can't they let me alone for a minute? That pale-eyed Sister
Dominica never sleeps; that's why she is so ugly."
About fifteen years before this night some one had brought to the
orphan asylum connected with this convent, du Sacre Coeur, a
round, dimpled bit of three-year-old humanity, who regarded the
world from a pair of gravely twinkling black eyes, and only took
a chubby thumb out of a rosy mouth long enough to answer in
monosyllabic French. It was a child without an identity; there
was but one name that any one seemed to know, and that, too, was
vague,--Camille.
She grew up with the rest of the waifs; scraps of French and
American civilization thrown together to develop a seemingly
inconsistent miniature world. Mademoiselle Camille was a queen
among them, a pretty little tyrant who ruled the children and
dominated the more timid sisters in charge.
One day an awakening came. When she was fifteen, and almost
fully ripened into a glorious tropical beauty of the type that
matures early, some visitors to the convent were fascinated by
her and asked the Mother Superior to give the girl into their
keeping.
Camille fled like a frightened fawn into the yard, and was only
unearthed with some difficulty from behind a group of palms.
Sulky and pouting, she was led into the parlour, picking at her
blue pinafore like a spoiled infant.
"The lady and gentleman wish you to go home with them, Camille,"
said the Mother Superior, in the language of the convent. Her
voice was kind and gentle apparently; but the child, accustomed
to its various inflections, detected a steely ring behind its
softness, like the proverbial iron hand in the velvet glove.
"You must understand, madame," continued Mother, in stilted
English, "that we never force children from us. We are ever glad
to place them in comfortable--how you say that?--quarters
--maisons--homes--bien! But we will not make them
go if they do not wish."
Camille stole a glance at her would-be guardians, and decided
instantly, impulsively, finally. The woman suited her; but the
man! It was doubtless intuition of the quick, vivacious sort
which belonged to her blood that served her. Untutored in
worldly knowledge, she could not divine the meaning of the
pronounced leers and admiration of her physical charms which
gleamed in the man's face, but she knew it made her feel creepy,
and stoutly refused to go. Next day Camille was summoned from a
task to the Mother Superior's parlour. The other girls gazed
with envy upon her as she dashed down the courtyard with
impetuous movement. Camille, they decided crossly, received too
much notice. It was Camille this, Camille that; she was pretty,
it was to be expected. Even Father Ray lingered longer in his
blessing when his hands pressed her silky black hair.
As she entered the parlour, a strange chill swept over the girl.
The room was not an unaccustomed one, for she had swept it many
times, but to-day the stiff black chairs, the dismal crucifixes,
the gleaming whiteness of the walls, even the cheap lithograph of
the Madonna which Camille had always regarded as a perfect
specimen of art, seemed cold and mean.
"Camille, ma chere," said Mother, "I am extremely displeased with
you. Why did you not wish to go with Monsieur and Madame Lafaye
yesterday?"
The girl uncrossed her hands from her bosom, and spread them out
in a deprecating gesture.
"Mais, ma mere, I was afraid."
Mother's face grew stern. "No foolishness now," she exclaimed.
"It is not foolishness, ma mere; I could not help it, but that
man looked at me so funny, I felt all cold chills down my back.
Oh, dear Mother, I love the convent and the sisters so, I just
want to stay and be a sister too, may I?"
And thus it was that Camille took the white veil at sixteen
years. Now that the period of novitiate was over, it was just
beginning to dawn upon her that she had made a mistake.
"Maybe it would have been better had I gone with the
funny-looking lady and gentleman," she mused bitterly one night.
"Oh, Seigneur, I 'm so tired and impatient; it's so dull here,
and, dear God, I'm so young."
There was no help for it. One must arise in the morning, and
help in the refectory with the stupid Sister Francesca, and go
about one's duties with a prayerful mien, and not even let a sigh
escape when one's head ached with the eternal telling of beads.
A great fete day was coming, and an atmosphere of preparation and
mild excitement pervaded the brown walls of the convent like a
delicate aroma. The old Cathedral around the corner had stood a
hundred years, and all the city was rising to do honour to its
age and time-softened beauty. There would be a service, oh, but
such a one! with two Cardinals, and Archbishops and Bishops, and
all the accompanying glitter of soldiers and orchestras. The
little sisters of the Convent du Sacre Coeur clasped their hands
in anticipation of the holy joy. Sister Josepha curled her lip,
she was so tired of churchly pleasures.
The day came, a gold and blue spring day, when the air hung heavy
with the scent of roses and magnolias, and the sunbeams fairly
laughed as they kissed the houses. The old Cathedral stood gray
and solemn, and the flowers in Jackson Square smiled cheery
birthday greetings across the way. The crowd around the door
surged and pressed and pushed in its eagerness to get within.
Ribbons stretched across the banquette were of no avail to
repress it, and important ushers with cardinal colours could do
little more.
The Sacred Heart sisters filed slowly in at the side door,
creating a momentary flutter as they paced reverently to their
seats, guarding the blue-bonneted orphans. Sister Josepha,
determined to see as much of the world as she could, kept her big
black eyes opened wide, as the church rapidly filled with the
fashionably dressed, perfumed, rustling, and self-conscious
throng.
Her heart beat quickly. The rebellious thoughts that will arise
in the most philosophical of us surged in her small heavily
gowned bosom. For her were the gray things, the neutral tinted
skies, the ugly garb, the coarse meats; for them the rainbow, the
ethereal airiness of earthly joys, the bonbons and glaces of the
world. Sister Josepha did not know that the rainbow is elusive,
and its colours but the illumination of tears; she had never been
told that earthly ethereality is necessarily ephemeral, nor that
bonbons and glaces, whether of the palate or of the soul,
nauseate and pall upon the taste. Dear God, forgive her, for she
bent with contrite tears over her worn rosary, and glanced no
more at the worldly glitter of femininity.
The sunbeams streamed through the high windows in purple and
crimson lights upon a veritable fugue of colour. Within the
seats, crush upon crush of spring millinery; within the aisles
erect lines of gold-braided, gold-buttoned military. Upon the
altar, broad sweeps of golden robes, great dashes of crimson
skirts, mitres and gleaming crosses, the soft neutral hue of rich
lace vestments; the tender heads of childhood in picturesque
attire; the proud, golden magnificence of the domed altar with
its weighting mass of lilies and wide-eyed roses, and the long
candles that sparkled their yellow star points above the reverent
throng within the altar rails.
The soft baritone of the Cardinal intoned a single phrase in the
suspended silence. The censer took up the note in its delicate
clink clink, as it swung to and fro in the hands of a fair-haired
child. Then the organ, pausing an instant in a deep, mellow,
long-drawn note, burst suddenly into a magnificent strain, and
the choir sang forth, "Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison." One
voice, flute-like, piercing, sweet, rang high over the rest.
Sister Josepha heard and trembled, as she buried her face in her
hands, and let her tears fall, like other beads, through her
rosary.
It was when the final word of the service had been intoned, the
last peal of the exit march had died away, that she looked up
meekly, to encounter a pair of youthful brown eyes gazing
pityingly upon her. That was all she remembered for a moment,
that the eyes were youthful and handsome and tender. Later, she
saw that they were placed in a rather beautiful boyish face,
surmounted by waves of brown hair, curling and soft, and that the
head was set on a pair of shoulders decked in military uniform.
Then the brown eyes marched away with the rest of the rear guard,
and the white-bonneted sisters filed out the side door, through
the narrow court, back into the brown convent.
That night Sister Josepha tossed more than usual on her hard bed,
and clasped her fingers often in prayer to quell the wickedness
in her heart. Turn where she would, pray as she might, there was
ever a pair of tender, pitying brown eyes, haunting her
persistently. The squeaky organ at vespers intoned the clank of
military accoutrements to her ears, the white bonnets of the
sisters about her faded into mists of curling brown hair.
Briefly, Sister Josepha was in love.
The days went on pretty much as before, save for the one little
heart that beat rebelliously now and then, though it tried so
hard to be submissive. There was the morning work in the
refectory, the stupid little girls to teach sewing, and the
insatiable lamps that were so greedy for oil. And always the
tender, boyish brown eyes, that looked so sorrowfully at the
fragile, beautiful little sister, haunting, following, pleading.
Perchance, had Sister Josepha been in the world, the eyes would
have been an incident. But in this home of self-repression and
retrospection, it was a life-story. The eyes had gone their way,
doubtless forgetting the little sister they pitied; but the
little sister?
The days glided into weeks, the weeks into months. Thoughts of
escape had come to Sister Josepha, to flee into the world, to
merge in the great city where recognition was impossible, and,
working her way like the rest of humanity, perchance encounter
the eyes again.
It was all planned and ready. She would wait until some morning
when the little band of black-robed sisters wended their way to
mass at the Cathedral. When it was time to file out the
side-door into the courtway, she would linger at prayers, then
slip out another door, and unseen glide up Chartres Street to
Canal, and once there, mingle in the throng that filled the wide
thoroughfare. Beyond this first plan she could think no further.
Penniless, garbed, and shaven though she would be, other
difficulties never presented themselves to her. She would rely
on the mercies of the world to help her escape from this
torturing life of inertia. It seemed easy now that the first
step of decision had been taken.
The Saturday night before the final day had come, and she lay
feverishly nervous in her narrow little bed, wondering with
wide-eyed fear at the morrow. Pale-eyed Sister Dominica and
Sister Francesca were whispering together in the dark silence,
and Sister Josepha's ears pricked up as she heard her name.
"She is not well, poor child," said Francesca. "I fear the life
is too confining."
"It is best for her," was the reply. "You know, sister, how hard
it would be for her in the world, with no name but Camille, no
friends, and her beauty; and then--"
Sister Josepha heard no more, for her heart beating tumultuously
in her bosom drowned the rest. Like the rush of the bitter salt
tide over a drowning man clinging to a spar, came the complete
submerging of her hopes of another life. No name but Camille,
that was true; no nationality, for she could never tell from whom
or whence she came; no friends, and a beauty that not even an
ungainly bonnet and shaven head could hide. In a flash she
realised the deception of the life she would lead, and the cruel
self-torture of wonder at her own identity. Already, as if in
anticipation of the world's questionings, she was asking herself,
"Who am I? What am I?"
The next morning the sisters du Sacre Coeur filed into the
Cathedral at High Mass, and bent devout knees at the general
confession. "Confiteor Deo omnipotenti," murmured the priest;
and tremblingly one little sister followed the words, "Je
confesse a Dieu, tout puissant--que j'ai beaucoup peche par
pensees--c'est ma faute--c'est ma faute--c'est ma tres grande
faute."
The organ pealed forth as mass ended, the throng slowly filed
out, and the sisters paced through the courtway back into the
brown convent walls. One paused at the entrance, and gazed with
swift longing eyes in the direction of narrow, squalid Chartres
Street, then, with a gulping sob, followed the rest, and vanished
behind the heavy door.
-THE END-
Alice Dunbar's short story: Sister Josepha
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