A light fall of snow covered the frozen earth when we dug Beata’s grave with our penknives, and laid her mournfully away. The site selected was back of the “Seven Dolours” chapel (chapels are to convent grounds what arbours and summer-houses are to the profane), and we chose it because the friendly walls hid us from observation. We had brought out our black veils, and we put them on over our hats, in token of our heavy grief. Elizabeth read the burial service,—or as much of it as she deemed prudent, for we dared not linger too long,—and afterwards reassured us on the subject of Beata’s baptismal innocence. That was the great point. She had died in her sinless infancy. We crime-laden souls should envy her happier fate. We put a little cross of twigs at the head of the grave, and promised to plant something there when the spring came. Then we took off our veils, and stuffed them in our pockets,—those deep, capacious pockets of many years ago.
“Let’s race to the avenue gate,” said Tony. “I’m frozen stiff. Burying is cold work.”
“Or we might get one of the swings,” said Lilly.
But Marie—whose real name, I forgot to say, was Francesco—put her arm tenderly around me. “Don’t grieve, Beatrice,” she said. “Our little Beata has died in her baptismal”—
“Oh, come away!” I cried, unable to bear the repetition of this phrase. And I ran as fast as I could down the avenue. But I could not run fast enough to escape from the voice of Beata Benedicta, calling—calling to me from her grave.
Reverend Mother’s Feast
“Mother’s feast”—in other words the saint’s day of the Superioress—was dawning upon our horizon, and its lights and shadows flecked our checkered paths. Theoretically, it was an occasion of pure joy, assuring us, as it did, a congé, and not a congé only, but the additional delights of a candy fair in the morning, and an operetta, “The Miracle of the Roses,” at night. Such a round of pleasures filled us with the happiest anticipations; but—on the same principle that the Church always prefaces her feast days with vigils and with fasts—the convent prefaced our congé with a competition in geography, and with the collection of a “spiritual bouquet,” which was to be our offering to Reverend Mother on her fête.
A competition in anything was an unqualified calamity. It meant hours of additional study, a frantic memorizing of facts, fit only to be forgotten, and the bewildering ordeal of being interrogated before the whole school. It meant for me two little legs that shook like reeds, a heart that thumped like a hammer in my side, a sensation of sickening terror when the examiner—Madame Bouron—bore down upon me, and a mind reduced to sudden blankness, washed clean of any knowledge upon any subject, when the simplest question was asked. Tried by this process, I was only one degree removed from idiocy. Even Elizabeth, whose legs were as adamant, whose heart-beats had the regularity of a pendulum, and who, if she knew a thing, could say it, hated to bound states and locate capitals for all the school to hear. “There are to be prizes, too,” she said mournfully. “Madame Duncan said so. I don’t like going up for a prize. It’s worse than a medal at Primes.”