The White Sister | Page 8

was overcome with sympathy for the lonely girl. She found Angela
sitting by a small fire in her own little morning-room on the upper floor.
A tray with something to eat had been set beside her, she knew not by
whom, but she had not tasted anything. Her eyes were dry, but her
hands were burning and when she was conscious of feeling anything
she knew that her head ached. She had forgotten that she had sent for
the governess, and looked at her with a vaguely wondering expression
as if she took the kindly Frenchwoman in black for a new shadow in
her dream.
But presently mechanical consciousness returned, though without much
definite sensation, and she let Madame Bernard have her way in
everything, not making the slightest resistance or offering the smallest
suggestion; she even submitted to being fed like a little child, with
small mouthfuls of things that had no taste whatever for her.
By and by there was a dressmaker in the room, with an assistant, and
servants brought a number of big bandboxes with lids covered with
black oilcloth; and Angela's maid was there, too, and they tried one
thing after another on her, ready-made garments for the first hours of
mourning. Then they were gone, and she was dressed in black, and the
room was filled with the unmistakable odour of black crape, which is
not like anything else in the world.
Again time passed, and she was kneeling at a faldstool in the great hall
downstairs; but a dark screen had been placed so that she could not be
seen by any one who came in to kneel at the rail that divided the upper
part of the hall from the lower; and she saw nothing herself--nothing
but a Knight of Malta, in his black cloak with the great white Maltese
cross on his shoulder, lying asleep on his back; and on each side of him
three enormous wax torches were burning in silver candlesticks taller
than a tall man.

Quite at the end of the hall, five paces from the Knight's motionless
head, three priests in black and silver vestments were kneeling before a
black altar, reciting the Penitential Psalms in a quiet, monotonous voice,
verse and verse, the one in the middle leading; and Angela
automatically joined the two assistants in responding, but so low that
they did not hear her.
The Knight bore a resemblance to her father, that was all. Perhaps it
was only a waxen image she saw, or a wraith in that long dream of hers,
of which she could not quite remember the beginning. She knew that
she was nothing to the image, and that it was nothing to her. While her
lips repeated the grand dirge of the King-poet in Saint Jerome's noble
old Latin words, her thoughts followed broken threads, each cut short
by a question that lacks an answer, by the riddle man has asked of the
sky and the sea and the earth since the beginning: What does it mean?
What could it mean? The senseless facts were there, plain enough. That
morning she had seen her father, she had kissed his hand in the
old-fashioned way, and he had kissed her forehead, and they had
exchanged a few words, as usual. She remembered that for the
thousandth time she had wished that his voice would soften a little and
that he would put his arms round her and draw her closer to him. But he
had been just as always, for he was bound and stiffened in the unwieldy
armour of his conventional righteousness. Angela had read of the
Puritans in history, and an Englishman might smile at the thought that
she could not fancy the sternest of them as more thoroughly puritanical
than her father, who had been brought up by priests from his childhood.
But such as he was, he had been her father that morning. The
motionless figure of the Knight of Malta on the black velvet pall was
not he, nor a likeness of him, nor anything human at all. It was the
outward visible presence of death, it was a dumb thing that knew the
answer to the riddle but could not tell it; in a way, it was the riddle
itself.
While her half-stunned intelligence stumbled among chasms of thought
that have swallowed up transcendent genius, her lips unconsciously
said the Penitential Psalms after the priests at the altar. At the convent

she had been a little vain of knowing them by heart better than the nuns
themselves, for she had a good memory, and she had often been
rebuked for taking pride in her gift. It was not her fault if the noble
poetry meant nothing to her at the most solemn hour of her life,