Now, chattering like a small shrill little bird, she turned from Rachell to Jacqueline and gathered her too to her heart, commenting volubly as she did so upon Jacqueline’s beauty, sweetness, clever forehead, and likeness to her dear, dear mother. Jacqueline’s spirits rose. Not so had Miss Billing received her when she had been handed over to her for instruction at St. Mary’s College. Here, obviously, was a woman who appreciated her worth, who realized that Jacqueline du Frocq was a quite exceptional creature, with brains and beauty far, far above the average. Clasping her arms round Soeur Ursule’s neck she kissed her with an abandon of gratitude, and love unfolded his wings at their kiss with the suddenness of a scarlet pimpernel opening at the sun’s touch.
But if Jacqueline’s spirits rose Rachell’s sank. Soeur Ursule, good woman, would, she felt, be the ruin of the child. For a little prinking, pruning peacock like Jacqueline, flattery was surely the worst thing possible. But here, strangely enough, she was mistaken. The Convent’s appreciation was, in the long run, the salvation of Jacqueline.
“My dear Rachell,” chattered Soeur Ursule, as she led them down a long stone passage and up a steep twisting flight of bare uncarpeted stairs, “I cannot say how much we are touched that you should entrust your precious flower to the care of your old teachers. It shows, dear Rachell,” she added, turning on the stairs and wagging her finger solemnly, “that you realize education inspired by our Holy Church, and taking place within Convent walls, is the only education suitable for Catholic girlhood,” and picking up her skirts and showing her elastic-sided boots, she turned round and climbed on again.
Rachell, feeling guiltily that only one of her four girls was to be educated at the Convent, and that one only after pressure from an unknown and possibly immoral man cast up at Bon Repos from a shipwreck, blushed hotly, and sailed up the stairs behind Soeur Ursule without speech.
“Is that not so, dear?” said Soeur Ursule suddenly at the top.
“I shall never forget all that I learnt here,” said Rachell with perfect truthfulness. If she had learnt little that little had been precious beyond words.
Soeur Ursule opened a door at the top of the stairs and they were in the sun-drenched Convent parlour overlooking the sea. How well Rachell remembered it. In all these years it had not altered a tiny scrap. The same whitewashed walls. The same long ink-stained table with the same handful of pig-tailed girls in black Convent pinafores busy with copy books and old-fashioned grammars. The same lace pillows with the gay beaded bobbins laid out side by side on a form by the wall, waiting patiently for the afternoon’s lace-making lesson. The same cracked blackboard. The same Crucifix on the wall with a vase of flowers on a bracket beneath. The same sea scintillating and murmuring outside the windows. The same placid peace flowing in, filling up, drowning the room under its sweet waters.
For a moment Rachell was lapped round with the old feeling of loving security that she had always known here, then she was jerked out of it by perceiving that the girls sitting at the long table were all tradesmen’s children. In old days the children of gentlefolk had attended the Convent, now it seemed that with the coming of the new College the nuns’ social and educational status had slipped downhill a little. Rachell was horrified. This would mean that Jacqueline, prone as she was to act the superior little cat, would feel herself set upon the pedestal of higher breeding and become quite intolerable. Rachell, outwardly gay and gracious as ever, said good-bye to Jacqueline and Soeur Ursule and left the Convent heavy hearted. . . . The child would be ruined. . . . She should have been sent back to St. Mary’s. . . . All the way home she wished Ranulph Mabier had never set foot on the Island and rated herself for an idiotic woman, running after Will-o’-the-Wisps of presentiments and fantasies with no more sense than the “faeu Bellengier[4]” himself.
[4]Will-o’-the Wisp.
Yet Rachell was wrong and Ranulph was right. The Convent was to Jacqueline the high road to happiness. All her conceited little ways, all her vain thoughts and ceaseless insincerities had grown out of her hidden unacknowledged sense of inferiority. At St. Mary’s she must act the part of a girl she was not or own herself inferior, but here at the Convent the girl she was found favour. The simple lessons did not strain her mind, the affection of the uncritical nuns, proud to have her as their pupil, warmed her starved heart, and the admiration of the girls to whom, by reason of her birth and prettiness, she seemed set on a pedestal, was as balm to her. There was no more ceaseless striving to compel affection, no more struggle to attain to heights beyond her, no more exhausting playing of a part. Her strained nerves relaxed, and after a fortnight at the Convent she got so fat that Rachell had to let her waistband out. And yet, strangely enough, she grew less conceited, not more so. She was grateful for the love given her and gratitude goes hand in hand with humility, as health with normality. She had never known what it was to feel well, but now her placid life eased her body so much that she almost forgot about it. Living without strain and effort she was no longer so painfully aware of herself, and her horizon widened to take in thin Soeur Ursule, fat Soeur Monique, the other girls, the Convent kitten and the lace pillows and embroidery frames—above all, perhaps, the embroidery frames, for to her other joys was added the discovery of skill in herself. For Jacqueline, Soeur Monique discovered, had magic in her finger tips. She could toss and twist her lace bobbins and ply her needle with the skill of a busy little spider spinning a jewelled web—and she had never known it. She could make a garden of crimson roses and golden lilies bloom upon white satin, and twist white threads into butterflies and daisies and white stars of Bethlehem—and she had never known till now that the power was in her.
“Child, did you never do embroidery at St. Mary’s College?” asked fat Soeur Monique one afternoon as they sat in the parlour together embroidering a new banner—a marvellous affair of lilies and roses with the Virgin in the middle in a robe of startling blue.
“They taught us darning,” said Jacqueline, breathless over a petal that she was shading from the deep colour of a clove carnation down to the flushed pink of a wild rose.
A contemptuous snort escaped from Soeur Monique’s Roman nose—she was a large, downright, outspoken woman who snorted easily.
“Darning!” she said, “any idiot can darn—even the heathen do it, it is a natural gift, like eating, but the ability to embroider is a gift of God.”
“Oh?” said Jacqueline, interested, and stopped working, her scarlet-threaded needle poised over her work like a dragon-fly.
“A gift of God,” reiterated Soeur Monique, “and should have been discovered in you. They considered, I gather, that they educated you at St. Mary’s College?”
“I think that was what the College was for,” said Jacqueline, “they taught us everything there—geometry and algebra and literature and history and—”
Soeur Monique interrupted with another snort.
“They may have taught you, but they did not educate you,” she said.
“Oh?” said Jacqueline.
Soeur Monique banged down her scissors on the table, adjusted her glasses, and launched herself on her favourite subject with vigorous enjoyment.
“The function of the educator,” she declaimed, “is to discover in each individual child the gifts implanted in her by Almighty God and to develop and dedicate them to His service.”
Soeur Ursule, seated near with her volume of the Lives of the Saints upon her knee, which she intended to read aloud whenever Soeur Monique condescended to leave off talking, put in a gentle word for St. Mary’s.
“Sometimes, dear,” she said, “it is very difficult indeed to discover what, if any, gifts have been implanted by Almighty God in a human creature. And when a school has such a large number of girls to deal with—”
“Women of discernment can discover a child’s capacities at a glance,” interrupted Soeur Monique, “Jacqueline had not been with me ten minutes before I
saw from the shape of her hands that she could embroider. At St. Mary’s, as far I can see, they discovered nothing about her except that she was a goose at geometry, algebra, literature, and history. Their discoveries were entirely negative, not positive, and negative discoveries are entirely useless in the service of God.”
Jacqueline blushed hotly—it still hurt her to be called a goose.
“You needn’t blush,” said Soeur Monique tartly, “it is of no consequence whatsoever that you should be intellectually a goose. What is of importance is that the few gifts you have got should be used for God. . . . I’ve not seen you put that needle in for five minutes.”
Jacqueline’s poised needle darted down into the heart of the rose and Soeur Monique’s wise words darted down into her mind.
“Then it doesn’t matter if one isn’t clever?” she asked.
“Matter? No, of course not. Why should it?” said Soeur Monique. “God needs you as He made you and not as He didn’t make you. His purposes require us all to be differently gifted. An appalling thing it would be if we were all clever, there’d be no one left with the intelligence to boil an egg or look up a train in a time table.”
All this was entirely new to Jacqueline and its healing ran like a fresh stream to all the parched sore places inside her.
“Am I to read about the holy St. Francis or am I not?” inquired Soeur Ursule with the slightest suspicion of asperity. “This is supposed to be the silent hour.”
“Yes, dear, do,” said Soeur Monique graciously, “I was merely talking while I waited for you to begin.”
Soeur Ursule read about St. Francis and Jacqueline listened astounded. This ideal of poverty was also entirely new.
“Then it doesn’t matter what you possess?” she asked when the reading was finished.
“Good heavens, no,” said Soeur Monique, “why should it?”
“But you are not popular unless you have things,” objected Jacqueline.
“What things?”
“Beauty or cleverness or money or nice clothes,” said Jacqueline, “something to make people admire you.”
Soeur Monique snorted.
“It doesn’t matter two pins whether you are popular or not popular. . . . Why should you be popular?”
“It makes me happy to feel that people admire me,” murmured Jacqueline, blushing hotly again.
“What does it matter whether you are happy or not happy?” demanded Soeur Monique, “nothing matters but the service of God. . . . Good gracious me, did no one ever teach you anything? You don’t seem to know the rudiments of your religion.”
Jacqueline went home that night with all her previous values hurtling about her ears. Indeed, the whole of her first month at the Convent was a time of mental change and readjustment, helped and eased by her physical well-being. It was a time of pulling down rather than of building up. It was not until her second month that she smashed the parlour vase, and the gates of vision opened.
The vase was a hideous object made in Birmingham, and for years and years it had stood on a bracket below the Crucifix in the parlour. Soeur Ursule thought it perfectly lovely; in the summer she kept it filled with fresh flowers, and in the winter with holly and dried sea lavender. It was the apple of her eye and no one was allowed to touch it but herself.
One morning at the beginning of November Jacqueline was sitting in the parlour with the others being instructed by Soeur Monique in the rudiments of English grammar. It was a very simple lesson, well within her capacity, she was at the top of the class and she was enjoying herself. Indeed, they were all enjoying themselves except Soeur Monique, who hated English grammar and had never got, and never would get, beyond its rudiments. They were just in the thick of it when the door opened and Soeur Ursule appeared, her old face pink with excitement, and her arms full of chrysanthemums.
“Sent from the Lieutenant-Governor’s own greenhouse,” she gasped, “I always said there was more in that man than people thought. We shall be able to make the Chapel a bower. Soeur, may I have the girls to help arrange them?”
Soeur Monique adjusted her spectacles and looked at the clock. The grammar lesson should have lasted for another twenty minutes, but as her pupils already knew a good deal more than she knew herself, and she found the task of keeping up with them extremely exhausting, she was inclined to be lenient.
“You know that I don’t like my classes interrupted, dear,” she said severely to Soeur Ursule,” but, of course, if you make a point of it—”
“It is so good for the girls to learn how to make the Chapel beautiful,” pleaded Soeur Ursule,” especially when I am pressed for time.”
“Very well, just for this once,” said Soeur Monique graciously, and the grammar class leapt to its feet with squeaks of pleasure. Jacqueline, her squeaks ended, glanced at the Birmingham vase. The frosts had come early that year and the tarnished Michaelmas daisies that filled it were quite unworthy to be placed at the foot of the Crucifix.
“May I bring the Birmingham vase and do it?” she asked.
Soeur Ursule hesitated. No hands but hers ever touched that precious treasure. Then she yielded. It would have been unkind to disappoint the child.
Jacqueline carried the hideous thing carefully to the little pantry where the Chapel vases were all laid out. There followed a hubbub of chattering girls and tinkling water and clattering cans, brooded over by the pungent lovely scent of great bronze and gold and lily-white chrysanthemums. Soeur Ursule followed after Jacqueline and the Birmingham vase with the frantic clucking of a hen whose duckling is making for the pond. Jacqueline felt slightly irritated. As if she couldn’t be trusted to fill a vase with flowers without breaking it!
“Don’t stand it in the sink, Jacqueline,” implored Soeur Ursule, “you’ll break it. Stand it on the wooden table and fill it from the can.”
“Yes, Sister,” said Jacqueline.
Now it happened that at the great moment of the filling of the vase Jacqueline was quite alone in the pantry with the kitten. She had taken a long time to choose her chrysanthemums, and the others were already staggering up the passage to the Chapel with their heavy vases, Soeur Ursule clacking after them. Jacqueline felt she must hurry. It was quickest to fill the vase at the sink. Better to disobey Soeur Ursule than to be called a slowcoach by the others. Jacqueline filled the vase at the sink, and just as the water brimmed over the top the kitten swarmed up her left leg and clung there, sharpening its claws on her knee. Jacqueline squeaked and staggered, the Birmingham vase crashed against the side of the sink and was shattered. . . .
The instinct to start everything with the supposition that whatever happened she was in the right, and things and events must be arranged to support that supposition, was still so strong in Jacqueline that before she realized what she was doing she had grouped all the objects in the pantry as witnesses to her virtue. She rescued the fragments of the Birmingham vase from the sink and arranged them on the table with the kitten placed in an attitude of contrition behind them, and herself on the floor searching for fragments, and was weeping genuine tears of sorrow over the iniquity of the feline race by the time Soeur Ursule returned from the Chapel.
“The kitten!” she sobbed, flinging herself into Soeur Ursule’s arms, “the kitten knocked it over!”
Soeur Ursule kissed and comforted her, though tears of sorrow for the Birmingham vase were trickling from beneath her spectacles, and heartily agreed with her in attaching every scrap of blame to the kitten.
“You did no wrong, my cabbage,” crooned Soeur Ursule, “you filled the vase on the table exactly as I told you. It was my fault. I should not have left the kitten in the pantry. There, there, do not grieve, my Jacqueline, the fault lay in myself and the kitten. Ah, it is bad, that one!”
The kitten, its tail erected like a banner of protest at a Hyde Park demonstration, and slightly twitching at the top, leaped to the floor and
stalked out of the pantry with incomparable dignity.
For the rest of that day the Convent was plunged in gloom. Soeur Ursule had loved the Birmingham vase as a mother loves her only child. She had filled it with flowers and placed it beneath the Crucifix every day for forty-five years. She uttered no word of complaint, but she went about all day with red rims to her eyes, and every living creature in the Convent mourned with her. A very lovely Venetian vase, the colour of sea water, and fluted like a lily, was unearthed from a dark cupboard, filled with golden chrysanthemums and placed beneath the Crucifix, where it reared its beauty like a good deed in a naughty world, but Soeur Ursule was not comforted. . . . No one was comforted. . . . Jacqueline least of all.
Jacqueline, the victim of the kitten’s sin, was the heroine of the day, a position which in the past had always given her exquisite pleasure, but, somehow, to-day there was no pleasure in it. Her power of seeing herself as she wanted to see herself had, to a certain extent, left her during the last month, and she was beginning to suffer a very little from that most humiliating and unpleasant capacity of seeing herself as she was. For the first time since she had started going to the Convent she went home miserable, and Rachell chose that very evening to burst upon her with the awful news that the nuns wished her to be prepared for Communion, and to make her first confession in December.
From that moment Jacqueline was plunged back once more into her old condition of morbid fear and misery. Only two words existed for her in the vocabulary—sin and confession. Only two facts in the wide world were clear to her—that her sins, especially the appalling lie of the Birmingham vase and the kitten, were the worst in the whole wide world, and that she could not, simply could not, confess them. It would be difficult to say what in the ordeal before her terrified her the most—the thought of having really, at last, to face herself as she was, the humiliation of letting another into the secret of her terrible crimes, or the fact that, in all probability, she would be made to tell Soeur Ursule what she had done and would lose Soeur Ursule’s love. In all this one thing bulked large—was the last unbearable ounce in the load that crushed her—the Birmingham vase. Somehow this sin, the disobedience of it, the deceiving of Soeur Ursule, seemed more terrible than all her other sins and more impossible of confession. W. S. Gilbert suggested that the word “Basingstoke” could be a talisman to calm the nerves, but for the rest of her life the word “Birmingham” was sufficient to send Jacqueline into a perfect ague of remembered agitation.