She found herself reluctant to touch poor Sister Bridget, but she straightened and tidied her clothing as well as she could, and then, taken suddenly with panic, a feeling for which she could not afterwards account, ran screaming like a maniac towards the cloister. ( 3 )
By nine o’clock the whole household, including the boarders and the orphans, were in receipt of the exciting news, although how it had been passed round was not, in the opinion of Mother Francis, at all easy to conceive. She stood before the twenty private-school boarders at nine-thirty, dead white except for two red spots on her cheeks (frightened, said some of the children, furious, said the others), and her mouth in a dead straight line, but to the general disappointment she did not refer to the cause of all the excitement except indirectly.
“You will not, my dear children,” she said, firmly, “go beyond the limits of the school garden to-day on any pretext whatever. You will remain in church” —it was Sunday—“until you are sent for to go across to the refectory.”
And that was very nearly all the share that the boarders had in what happened during the rest of what they felt, with envy, and a certain amount of reason, must be a very exciting day. Even so, they told one another, they had scored over the day girls, who, so far, knew nothing about it.
Sister Bridget, by some miracle, was not dead, and Mrs. Bradley and the doctor who usually attended the convent worked with goodwill to keep in her the little flicker of life which still remained.
She was, as the doctor remarked, a tough old party, and Mrs. Bradley was tough, and the doctor himself was a man who took pleasure, as he informed them, in keeping the religious out of heaven as long as ever he could in order to spite them. His view was that unmarried women were unnatural anyway, but that women who remained unmarried from choice and took vows of chastity were anti-social, and should be persecuted for this reason.
“Whole lot of you ought to be in gaol,” was his expression of this opinion to Mother Jude, who liked him. She beamed upon him when he was present, and prayed for him when he had gone. So did Mother Ambrose pray for him, but this chiefly because he charged the convent only half a crown a visit instead of his customary fee.
It became a battle for Sister Bridget’s life, and Mrs. Bradley and the doctor laboured, and the nuns watched and prayed. They also fetched and carried, obeyed every instruction as though upon it depended their salvation, and reaped some part of their reward when it became increasingly evident that Sister Bridget would live. Upon receipt of this news, Mother Mary-Joseph, Infirmarian to the Community, occupied a brief and popular period of notoriety by pitching down the Common Room steps into the cloister and breaking her left arm. She had borne the brunt of the night-nursing in addition to heavy teaching duties during the day. She was also keeping the Lenten fast, and in various ways was mortifying the flesh. Therefore, said the doctor (who, in addition to a general disapproval of the religious life, held strong views on the subject of fasting, putting it on a par, loudly and violently, with the twin crazes of slimming and Physical Fitness), she deserved to faint and fall down steps, and smash herself up, and have to take time off from school.
“But I am not going to take time off from school,” said Mother Mary-Joseph in the deceptively gentle tone of the iron-willed; neither did she remain away from her classes for so much as half an hour. Mrs. Bradley protested to the Superior, but the old woman answered:
“Be easy, my dear, and let her be. She is young and very ardent. If the life is not a soldier’s life, what is it?”
As Mrs. Bradley had no idea, she could not make an adequate reply.
“If her health were likely to be seriously endangered, she would take the doctor’s advice and follow his orders,” the Superior went on. “She is under obedience, you understand.”
Meanwhile Mother Ambrose and Mother Jude had been far from idle. They had examined carefully Sister Bridget’s room to see whether they could find any cause for the outbreak of fire, and had discovered an overturned candle thick with grease, and also a quantity of cotton-wool, purloined, it turned out, from the medicine chest in the staff room cupboard at the school. The quantity of cotton-wool found by the nuns coincided, so far as they could tell, with the amount that was missing from store. It had not been burnt in the outbreak because it had not been placed near the candle which appeared to have caused the fire. Sister Bridget herself had purloined it, they were almost certain, to make a soft bed for the mouse.
All this they reported, but Mrs. Bradley, who had her own reasons for wanting to know a good deal more about the matter than this meagre information implied, asked that the room should be kept permanently locked and that she herself should be the only person in possession of a key. Three more keys to the room were surrendered, thereupon, by Mother Jude, who merely smiled beatifically at Mrs. Bradley’s expression of surprise. This was on the Thursday following the attack on Sister Bridget. Mrs. Bradley sent George with the keys to her bank in London. George returned next day with Ferdinand Lestrange, who remarked that he could stay until Tuesday.
“Not here, dear child,” his mother observed immediately. She banished him to the village, chided George for bringing him anywhere near her, and went to find Mother Francis. As it was Friday afternoon Mother Francis was teaching. Her subject was drawing, and, although she was not the equal of Mother Benedict she was a very fair artist of the photographic-likeness school. That this was again coming into its own, Mother Francis was not aware, Mrs. Bradley concluded; this for the simple reason that she did not realise that it had ever given place to the impressionistic school, cubism, post-impressionism, or the erotic iniquity of surrealism.
“Ah, so you have come to look at the children’s work!” Mother Francis exclaimed, the teacher in her come uppermost, Mrs. Bradley was interested to remark. Shuddering slightly—a gesture of dissent which was noted and appreciated by the eighteen girls in the fourth form, who received it with leering triumph— their opinion (taken collectively) of their work being on a par with the visitor’s own—Mrs. Bradley was drawn to the supererogatory work of inspection.
That over, and comments suitable to Mother Francis’ rather hen-like attitude having been passed, Mrs. Bradley, whose eyes had been alert for Ulrica Doyle, remarked, as Mother Francis accompanied her to the door,
“I see that those children are still here.”
“We are still waiting for Mrs. Maslin to leave the guest-house and take Mary with her,” Mother Francis’ replied, as she followed Mrs. Bradley into the corridor and closed the class-room door behind them both. “I spoke to her on the subject yesterday, but she replied that she was glad of the rest and change because she had been so much worried by family business matters arising out of Ursula’s death. I know that you expected us to send the girls off last week, but we have had so much anxiety in connection with the attack on Sister Bridget, that, short of sending Ulrica to New York, I have not been able to think of what to do with her.”
“Have the police found anything to go on?” Mrs. Bradley asked, more for the sake of prolonging the conversation than for the gaining of knowledge.
“No. They suspect, as we do, that the attack was the work of those uncontrolled young men from the village of Brinchcommon who came here after the death of Ursula Doyle and did so much damage then, but it seems very difficult to prove it.”
“There have been no more of those demonstrations, have there?”
“You would have known as soon as we should, if there had been. They made, last time, the most dreadful howling noises for more than an hour. The orphans, poor children, were terrified, and so were some of the guests. The Spaniards said to Mother Jude that they had supposed this country to be free from terrorism. It was very dreadful for them. Their nerves are very bad. Some who were ill were set back in their convalescence.”