Part 17 (1/2)
”My children,” she said quietly in the clear, gentle, masterful voice which had kept the Community in whole-hearted subservience to her for thirty years, ”my children.” She bent her wasted old face on them, raising one thin white hand, peremptorily. Her long flowing black sleeve gave a commanding amplitude to this gesture. ”My little children, lift up your hearts....” She waited an instant, till she held every eye, and then she said reverently, ”My children, at every important moment of our lives we must turn to Our Very Holy Mother, to bless us. Before you go on the stage to-day, to represent your school in public, and to do honor to music, which G.o.d has blessed as an instrument of good, let us pray Our Mother to be with you, and guide you.”
She bowed her head. Hypnotically, all the young heads bowed with hers.
She began in a low murmur, ”Ave Maria, sancta tu in mulieribus....” All the young voices murmured with her, discharging in the reverenced words, the nervous tension of their excitement and frolic. When they finished, they were all quiet, with serious faces. The Mother Superior raised her hand over them, murmuring a short, inaudible prayer of her own. There was an instant's silence.
”Go tell Mathurin to raise the curtain,” said the Reverend Mother hurriedly in a low tone to Mademoiselle Vivier; a command which Mademoiselle Vivier lost no time in executing.
CHAPTER XVIII
Marise had noticed as she left the stage, that Madame Garnier was there with her son,--oh, yes, Danielle _had_ said her brother was back from America. Now he'd be tagging around everywhere, tied to his mother's ap.r.o.n-strings, as Papa said all young Frenchmen were. Yes, they were holding hands this minute. How Papa would laugh to see that, as much as he did when Frenchmen with beards kissed each other. And now he'd be everlastingly coming in with his tiresome mother on Maman's days at home, to fidget and stammer and drop his teaspoon. Oh, well, she thought with a superior condescension, he had been hardly more than a boy, just out of the lycee, only twenty-one. He might be better now. Perhaps he had got rid of a little of his shyness in New York; although twenty-three, for a _man_, was of course no age at all.
The fas.h.i.+on at school just then, was to look down on boys and young men as green and insipid. The ideal of all the girls was an _old_ man of forty, with white hair, and black eyebrows, a little pointed gray beard, and such sad, sad eyes! Every girl was waiting for such a chance to devote herself to healing the wounds made by other women, faithless, heartless creatures who had ravaged his youth and destroyed his faith.
To prove to him what a woman's fidelity and love could be, and then die in his remorseful arms, of slow consumption brought on by his neglect...! Or, as the pious ones had it, to bring him back to the Church, and have him become a monk after your death. Or, perhaps, as some of the more dramatic ones imagined the matter, to find a plot against his life, and to sacrifice yourself to defeat it, throwing back at the last moment the hood of your long dark cloak, and showing a beautiful white satin gown, stained with your heart's blood, as you gasped out, ”For you, for you, adored Rene.”
The books from which the girls got these ideas, and many others not so harmless, were kept in a hole hidden behind a big loose stone in the end wall of the school garden. Though they were religiously wrapped in oil-cloth, the damp did more or less penetrate. But spots of green mold and limp damp pages which tore unless you held your breath as you turned them, only added to their charm as you read them, two or three heads bent over the page, while a friend kept guard at the turn of the path by the magnolia tree.
Marise had read them with the others, and although neither Father nor Maman paid the slightest attention to what she read, and there were lots of places in Maman's novels ever so much worse than these, she naturally felt an agreeable thrill at the thought of what an explosion there would be if they were ever discovered, reading love-stories at school. It was the fas.h.i.+on with the girls to do it. So she did, and as dramatically as any of the others. But far down, deep under all this, was a hermetically sealed chamber where she kept a secret disgust for the whole subject of falling in love, a secret distaste for men, old or young, and a furiously held determination never to have anything to do with them. It was all very well to carry on against the rules and to play-act with the girls about something in a book, but the faintest approach of the same thing in reality, froze her stiff with indignation and repugnance. When, walking on the street with Jeanne, some well-dressed young man cast a glance of admiration at her, or some half-tipsy workman called out a rough compliment she shrank away from them, hating them and herself; a feeling which old Jeanne zealously fostered.
She did not often think about the gray cat now, but she had never forgotten it, and she had picked up a great deal more information than she had had, about what made people like Isabelle sn.i.g.g.e.r and grin, when there was talk of getting a husband. She intensely loathed all that she had seen and learned, whether it were the shocked, nauseated expression on the face of one of the older nuns at school, when she forbade any talk among the girls over the gossip that one of the kitchen-girls had let a young man into the kitchen at midnight; or a pa.s.sage in one of Maman's novels, which she had found lying open on the salon table, and read before she could stop herself. Every such experience was like a blow on a bruised spot, deep under the surface of her life, which was so sore now that it ached at the slightest touch, ached and made her sick.
She had learned that she must protect it at all costs, and she fought off blindly whatever seemed to threaten it, fought it off with indignation, with brusqueness, with stiffness, with silence, using any weapon she could s.n.a.t.c.h up. At school, if she found a group of older girls with their heads together, and a certain expression on their faces, the weapon was often simply to run away into another part of the playground. ”I can run away faster than they can run after me!” she told herself, fleeing away to where the little girls were playing hop-scotch and ”chat-perche.”
There were times of course when you couldn't run away literally, but Marise had other methods of running away, the best one being a sudden change of subject--”Oh, Isabelle, your chignon is coming untied!” or ”Gabrielle, isn't Sister Ste. Marie coming down the hall?” ”Jeanne, you're pulling my hair!”
And she had found, too, that to head people off from beginning on the sort of thing you had to run away from, there was no better device than lively spirits. If you kept joking and laughing and carrying on, the girls didn't have time to lower their voices, look over their shoulders and begin to talk with their faces close to yours.
She was still flushed from laughing and talking and carrying on, when she emerged from the side-stairs into the half empty a.s.sembly-room, looking for her wraps, and saw beside Jeanne, Mme. Garnier and her son evidently waiting for Danielle, for Mme. Garnier had Danielle's hat and cloak on her arm. ”Oh, zut! What a bore!” She'd have to speak to them; the young man would fidget and make her nervous, and she did think Mme.
Garnier the tiresomest of all the frumps who came to call on Maman. She was an old snake-in-the-gra.s.s, too,--to use one of Papa's expressions.
She pretended to say such sweet things to Maman, and really they were all different ways to slight poor Maman, who didn't understand half the time. But Marise did, and resented it for her. Poor Maman!
”Good morning, Madame Garnier,” she said with a little bow, coming up to them, and, ”Good morning, Monsieur Jean.”
She remembered to drop her eyes, following the precepts of the teacher of deportment, and profited by the gesture to despise Mme. Garnier's shoes, stuffed lumpily full, like badly made sausages.
When Mme. Garnier finished a long speech, she didn't mean a word of, about how nicely Marise had played, ”Oh, thank you very much, Madame Garnier,” she answered, looking up for a moment.
Jeanne put her hat and coat on now, as Danielle romped in, talking at the top of her voice. Madame Garnier, with the perfunctory air of one attending to a familiar duty, savagely reproached her for boisterousness, and general heathenishness of manners. Danielle took this as it was meant, and paying not the slightest attention to the rebuke, went on talking at the top of her voice, telling her mother and brother all about the foolishness back of the scenes. ”It was simply _killing_!” she shouted, laughing so that no one but Marise had any idea what she was talking about, ”I thought I'd die, didn't you, Marise? You never saw anything in your life so funny! All of us wrong side up, with our heads ... oh, ha! ha! ha!”
She and Marise went off into peals of laughter which they immediately suppressed to giggles and then to smothered m.u.f.fled gasps, as they saw the Reverend Mother's dignified black draperies moving down the side-aisle. They'd hear from it at school if Reverend Mother caught them in such a breach of manners as _laughing in a public place_!
”Who won the prize, my darling?” whispered Jeanne, in Marise's ear, as she smoothed down the collar of her coat.
”Oh, I did,” Marise whispered back casually. She had left the big red alb.u.m of Morceaux de Salon with Mlle. Vivier, because she knew if she tried to carry it home and pa.s.sed by a school-mate she would be greeted with howls of jeering laughter. She would bring some paper to-morrow, to wrap it up.
”We may as well walk along together,” said Mme. Garnier now. ”Our road lies your way.”
Jeanne dropped respectfully behind, Mme. Garnier walked with Marise, Danielle with her brother. Marise shot one sideways glance at Mme.
Garnier as they started along the sidewalks. ”Sapristi,” as Jeanne said, ”what an ugly hat! How could anybody not just drop dead to be seen with such a horror on!” ”Yes, Madame,” she answered politely, at random, not paying any attention to Mme. Garnier's drone. How vulgar it was to let your dress wrinkle across the back where the top of your corset came.
And it was worse to let it cave in in front, at the same place. When she was grown up, she would never let _her_ dress do that! Marise reflected with the utmost satisfaction on the excellent cut and hang of her own dress. There hadn't been a better one there, and she had silk stockings while most of the girls had clumsy cotton ones, or at best lisle thread.