Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “I will speak to Sister Maria Addolorata,” she said. “Have the goodness to wait.”

  “Outside?” inquired Dalrymple, as the little shutter of the loophole was almost closed.

  “Of course,” answered the nun, opening it again, and shutting it as soon as she had spoken.

  Dalrymple waited a long time in the blazing sun. The main entrance of the convent faced to the southeast, and it was not yet midday. He grew hot, after his walk, and softly wiped his forehead, and carefully folded his handkerchief again before returning it to his pocket. At last he heard the sound of steps again, and in a few seconds the loophole was once more opened.

  “Sister Maria Addolorata will speak with you,” said the portress’s voice, as he approached his face to the little grating.

  He felt an odd little thrill of pleasant surprise. But so far as seeing anything was concerned, he was disappointed. Instead of one veiled nun, there were now two veiled nuns.

  “Madam,” he began, “my friend Doctor Tommaso Taddei has met with an accident which prevents him from leaving his bed.” And he went on to repeat all that he had told the portress, with such further explanations as he deemed necessary and persuasive.

  While he spoke, Maria Addolorata drew back a little into the deeper shadow away from the loophole. Her veil hung over her eyes, and the folds were drawn across her mouth, but she gradually raised her head, throwing it back until she could see Dalrymple’s face from beneath the edge of the black material. In so doing she unconsciously uncovered her mouth. The Scotchman saw a good part of her features, and gazed intently at what he saw, rightly judging that as the sun was behind him, she could hardly be sure whether he were looking at her or not.

  As for her, she was doubtless inspired by a natural curiosity, but at the same time she understood the gravity of the case and wished to form an opinion as to the advisability of admitting the stranger. A glance told her that Dalrymple was a gentleman, and she was reassured by the gravity of his voice and by the fact that he was evidently acquainted with the abbess’s condition, and must, therefore, be a friend of Sor Tommaso. When he had finished speaking, she immediately looked down again, and seemed to be hesitating.

  “Open the door, Sister Filomena,” she said at last.

  The portress shook her head almost imperceptibly as she obeyed, but she said nothing. The whole affair was in her eyes exceedingly irregular. Maria Addolorata should have retired to the little room adjoining the convent parlour, and separated from it by a double grating, and Dalrymple should have been admitted to the parlour itself, and they should have said what they had to say to one another through the bars, in the presence of the portress. But Maria Addolorata was the abbess’s niece. The abbess was too ill to give orders — too ill even to speak, it was rumoured. In a few days Maria Addolorata might be ‘Her most Reverend Excellency.’ Meanwhile she was mistress of the situation, and it was safer to obey her. Moreover, the portress was only a lay sister, an old and ignorant creature, accustomed to do what she was told to do by the ladies of the convent.

  Dalrymple took off his hat and stooped low to enter through the small side-door. As soon as he had passed the threshold, he stood up to his height and then made a low bow to Maria Addolorata, whose veil now quite covered her eyes and prevented her from seeing him, — a fact which he realized immediately.

  “Give warning to the sisters, Sister Filomena,” said Maria Addolorata to the portress, who nodded respectfully and walked away into the gloom under the arches, leaving the nun and Dalrymple together by the door.

  “It is necessary to give warning,” she explained, “lest you should meet any of the sisters unveiled in the corridors, and they should be scandalized.”

  Dalrymple again bowed gravely and stood still, his eyes fixed upon Maria Addolorata’s veiled head, but wandering now and then to her heavy but beautifully shaped white hands, which she held carelessly clasped before her and holding the end of the great rosary of brown beads which hung from her side. He thought he had never seen such hands before. They were high-bred, and yet at the same time there was a strongly material attraction about them.

  He did not know what to say, and as nothing seemed to be expected of him, he kept silence for some time. At last Maria Addolorata, as though impatient at the long absence of the portress, tapped the pavement softly with her sandal slipper, and turned her head in the direction of the arches as though to listen for approaching footsteps.

  “I hope that the abbess is no worse than when Doctor Taddei saw her last night,” observed Dalrymple.

  “Her most reverend excellency,” answered Maria Addolorata, with a little emphasis, as though to teach him the proper mode of addressing the abbess, “is suffering. She has had a bad night.”

  “I shall hope to be allowed to give some advice to her most reverend excellency,” said Dalrymple, to show that he had understood the hint.

  “She will not allow you to see her. But you shall come with me to the antechamber, and I will speak with her and tell you what she says.”

  “I shall be greatly obliged, and will do my best to give good advice without seeing the patient.”

  Another pause followed, during which neither moved. Then Maria Addolorata spoke again, further reassured, perhaps, by Dalrymple’s quiet and professional tone. She had too lately left the world to have lost the habit of making conversation to break an awkward silence. Years of seclusion, too, instead of making her shy and silent, had given her something of the ease and coolness of a married woman. This was natural enough, considering that she was born of worldly people and had acquired the manners of the world in her own home, in childhood.

  “You are an Englishman, I presume, Signor Doctor?” she observed, in a tone of interrogation.

  “A Scotchman, Madam,” answered Dalrymple, correcting her and drawing himself up a little. “My name is Angus Dalrymple.”

  “It is the same — an Englishman or a Scotchman,” said the nun.

  “Pardon me, Madam, we consider that there is a great difference. The Scotch are chiefly Celts. Englishmen are Anglo-Saxons.”

  “But you are all Protestants. It is therefore the same for us.”

  Dalrymple feared a discussion of the question of religion. He did not answer the nun’s last remark, but bowed politely. She, of course, could not see the inclination he made.

  “You say nothing,” she said presently. “Are you a Protestant?”

  “Yes, Madam.”

  “It is a pity!” said Maria Addolorata. “May God send you light.”

  “Thank you, Madam.”

  Maria Addolorata smiled under her veil at the polite simplicity of the reply. She had met Englishmen in Rome.

  “It is no longer customary to address us as ‘Madam,’” she answered, a moment later. “It is more usual to speak to us as ‘Sister’ or ‘Reverend Sister’ — or ‘Sister Maria.’ I am Sister Maria Addolorata. But you know it, for you sent your message to me.”

  “Doctor Taddei told me.”

  At this point the portress appeared in the distance, and Maria Addolorata, hearing footsteps, turned her head from Dalrymple, raising her veil a little, so that she could recognize the lay sister without showing her face to the young man.

  “Let us go,” she said, dropping her veil again, and beginning to walk on. “The sisters are warned.”

  Dalrymple followed her in silence and at a respectful distance, congratulating himself upon his extraordinary good fortune in having got so far on the first attempt, and inwardly praying that Sor Tommaso’s wounds might take a considerable time in healing. It had all come about so naturally that he had lost the sensation of doing something adventurous which had at first taken possession of him, and he now regarded everything as possible, even to being invited to a friendly cup of tea in Sister Maria Addolorata’s sitting-room; for he imagined her as having a sitting-room and as drinking tea there in a semi-luxurious privacy. The idea would have amused an Italian of those days, when tea was looked upon as medicine.


  They reached the end of the last corridor. Dalrymple, like Sor Tommaso, was admitted to the antechamber, while the portress waited outside to conduct him back again. But Maria did not take him into the abbess’s parlour, into which she went at once, closing the door behind her. Dalrymple sat down upon a carved wooden box-bench, and waited. The nun was gone a long time.

  “I have kept you waiting,” she said, as she entered the little room again.

  “My time is altogether at your service, Sister Maria Addolorata,” he answered, rising quickly. “How is her most reverend excellency?”

  “Very ill. I do not know what to say. She will not hear of seeing you. I fear she will not live long, for she can hardly breathe.”

  “Does she cough?”

  “Not much. Not so much as last night. She complains that she cannot draw her breath and that her lungs feel full of something.”

  The case was evidently serious, and Dalrymple, who was a physician by nature, proceeded to extract as much information as he could from the nun, who did her best to answer all his questions clearly. The long conversation, with its little restraints and its many attempts at a mutual understanding, did more to accustom Maria Addolorata to Dalrymple’s presence and personality than any number of polite speeches on his part could have done. There is an unavoidable tendency to intimacy between any two people who are together engaged in taking care of a sick person.

  “I can give you directions and good advice,” said Dalrymple, at last. “But it can never be the same as though I could see the patient myself. Is there no possible means of obtaining her consent? She may die for the want of just such advice as I can only give after seeing her. Would not her brother, his Eminence the Cardinal, perhaps recommend her to let me visit her once?”

  “That is an idea,” answered the nun, quickly. “My uncle is a man of broad views. I have heard it said in Rome. I could write to him that Doctor Taddei is unable to come, and that a celebrated foreign physician is here—”

  “Not celebrated,” interrupted Dalrymple, with his literal Scotch veracity.

  “What difference can it make?” uttered Maria Addolorata, moving her shoulders a little impatiently. “He will be the more ready to use his influence, for he is much attached to my aunt. Then, if he can persuade her, I can send down the gardener to the town for you this afternoon. It may not be too late.”

  “I see that you have some confidence in me,” said Dalrymple. “I am of a newer school than Doctor Taddei. If you will follow my directions, I will almost promise that her most reverend excellency shall not die before to-morrow.”

  He smiled now, as he gave the abbess her full title, for he began to feel as though he had known Maria Addolorata for a long time, though he had only had one glimpse of her eyes, just when she had raised her head to get a look at him through the loophole of the gate. But he had not forgotten them, and he felt that he knew them.

  “I will do all you tell me,” she answered quietly.

  Dalrymple had some English medicines with him on his travels, and not knowing what might be required of him at the convent, he had brought with him a couple of tiny bottles.

  “This when she coughs — ten drops,” he said, handing the bottles to the nun. “And five drops of this once an hour, until her chest feels freer.”

  He gave her minute directions, as far as he could, about the general treatment of the patient, which Maria repeated and got by heart.

  “I will let you know before twenty-three o’clock what the cardinal says to the plan,” she said. “In this way you will be able to come up by daylight.”

  As Dalrymple took his leave, he held out his hand, forgetting that he was in Italy.

  “It is not our custom,” said Maria Addolorata, thrusting each of her own hands into the opposite sleeve.

  But there was nothing cold in her tone. On the contrary, Dalrymple fancied that she was almost on the point of laughing at that moment, and he blushed at his awkwardness. But she could not see his face.

  “Your most humble servant,” he said, bowing to her.

  “Good day, Signor Doctor,” she answered, through the open door, as the portress jingled her keys and prepared to follow Dalrymple.

  So he took his departure, not without much satisfaction at the result of his first attempt.

  CHAPTER VII.

  SOR TOMMASO RECOVERED but slowly, though his injuries were of themselves not dangerous. His complexion was apoplectic and gouty, he was no longer young, and before forty-eight hours had gone by his wounds were decidedly inflamed and he had a little fever. At the same time he was by no means a courageous man, and he was ready to cry out that he was dead, whenever he felt himself worse. Besides this, he lost his temper several times daily with Dalrymple, who resolutely refused to bleed him, and he insisted upon eating and drinking more than was good for him, at a time when if he had been his own patient he would have enforced starvation as necessary to recovery.

  Meanwhile the cardinal had exerted his influence with his sister, the abbess, and had so far succeeded that Dalrymple, who went every day to the convent, was now made to stand with his back to the abbess’s open door, in order that he might at least ask her questions and hear her own answers. Many an old Italian doctor can tell of even stranger and more absurd precautions observed by the nuns of those days. As soon as the oral examination was over, Maria Addolorata shut the door and came out into the parlour, where Dalrymple finished his visit, prolonging it in conversation with her by every means he could devise.

  Though encumbered with a little of the northern shyness, Dalrymple was not diffident. There is a great difference between shyness and diffidence. Diffidence distrusts itself; shyness distrusts the mere outward impression made on others. At this time Dalrymple had no object beyond enjoying the pleasure of talking with Maria Addolorata, and no hope beyond that of some day seeing her face without the veil. As for her voice, his present position as doctor to the convent made it foolish for him to run the risk of being caught listening for her songs behind the garden wall. But he had not forgotten what Annetta had told him, and Maria Addolorata’s soft intonations and liquid depths of tone in speaking led him to believe that the peasant girl had not exaggerated the nun’s gift of singing.

  One day, after he had seen her and talked with her more than half a dozen times, he approached the subject, merely for the sake of conversation, saying that he had been told of her beautiful voice by people who had heard her across the garden.

  “It is true,” she answered simply. “I have a good voice. But it is forbidden here to sing except in church,” she added with a sigh. “And now that my aunt is ill, I would not displease her for anything.”

  “That is natural,” said Dalrymple. “But I would give anything in the world to hear you.”

  “In church you can hear me. The church is open on Sundays at the Benediction service. We are behind the altar in the choir, of course. But perhaps you would know my voice from the rest because it is deeper.”

  “I should know it in a hundred thousand,” asseverated the Scotchman, with warmth.

  “That would be a great many — a whole choir of angels!” And the nun laughed softly, as she sometimes did, now that she knew him so much better.

  There was something warm and caressing in her laughter, short and low as it was, that made Dalrymple look at those full white hands of hers and wonder whether they might not be warm and caressing too.

  “Will you sing a little louder than the rest next Sunday afternoon, Sister Maria?” he asked. “I will be in the church.”

  “That would be a great sin,” she answered, but not very gravely.

  “Why?”

  “Because I should have to be thinking about you instead of about the holy service. Do you not know that? But nothing is sinful according to you Protestants, I suppose. At all events, come to the church.”

  “Do you think we are all devils, Sister Maria?” asked Dalrymple, with a smile.

  “More or less.” She laughed again.
“They say in the town that you have a compact with the devil.”

  “Do you hear what is said in the town?”

  “Sometimes. The gardener brings the gossip and tells it to the cook. Or Sora Nanna tells it to me when she brings the linen. There are a thousand ways. The people think we know nothing because they never see us. But we hear all that goes on.”

  Dalrymple said nothing in answer for some time. Then he spoke suddenly and rather hoarsely.

  “Shall I never see you, Sister Maria?” he asked.

  “Me? But you see me every day—”

  “Yes, — but your face, without the veil.”

  Maria Addolorata shook her head.

  “It is against all rules,” she answered.

  “Is it not against all rules that we should sit here and make conversation every day for half an hour?”

  “Yes — I suppose it is. But you are here as a doctor to take care of my aunt,” she added quickly. “That makes it right. You are not a man. You are a doctor.”

  “Oh, — I understand.” Dalrymple laughed a little. “Then I am never to see your beautiful face?”

  “How do you know it is beautiful, since you have never seen it?”

  “From your beautiful hands,” answered the young man, promptly.

  “Oh!” Maria Addolorata glanced at her hands and then, with a movement which might have been quicker, concealed them in her sleeves.

  “It is a sin to hide what God has made beautiful,” said Dalrymple.

  “If I have anything about me that is beautiful, it is for God’s glory that I hide it,” answered Maria, with real gravity this time.

  Dalrymple understood that he had gone a little too far, though he did not exactly regret it, for the next words she spoke showed him that she was not really offended. Nevertheless, in order to exhibit a proper amount of contrition he took his leave with a little more formality than usual on this particular occasion. Possibly she was willing to show that she forgave him, for she hesitated a moment just before opening the door, and then, to his great surprise, held out her hand to him.