"I always am good," said Madelon, firing up, and speaking from the experience of former days, "and I am not at all happy—I never shall be here."
But alas! it was proved too clearly that she was not at all good, and indeed she began to think so herself, only she did not see how she could help it.
Madelon got into great disgrace in the very first weeks after her arrival at the convent, and this was the occasion of it. The only room vacant for her was a cell that had been occupied by a sister who had died a short time previously, a sister of a devout turn of mind, who had assisted her meditations by the contemplation of a skull of unusual size and shininess. The cell was a cheerful, narrow little room, looking out on the convent garden, and the first pleasant sensation that Madelon knew in the convent was when she was taken into it, and saw the afternoon sun shining upon its white-washed walls, and the late climbing roses nodding in at the open window; but she became possessed with a perfect horror of the skull. She discovered it the first evening when she was going to bed, and was quite glad to pop her head under the bed-clothes, to shut out all sight and thought of it. But awaking again that first night in her grief and loneliness, she saw a stray moonbeam shining in, and lighting it up into ghastly whiteness and distinctness, as it stood on a little bracket against the wall beneath a tall wooden crucifix. For the first minute she was half paralysed with terror; she lay staring at it without power to move, and then she would assuredly have run to some one for protection had she known to whom to go, or, indeed, had she not been too terrified to do more than hide her head under the counterpane again. From that time it became a perpetual nightmare to her. By day its terrors were less apparent, though even then, with her innate love for all things bright, and joyous, and pleasant, it was a positive grief to her to have such a grim object before her eyes whenever she came into the room; but at night no sooner was she in bed, and the light taken away, than her imagination conjured up a hundred frightful shapes, that all associated themselves with the grinning death's-head. In vain she covered it up, in vain she shut her eyes—sleeping or waking it seemed always there. At length she could bear it no longer, and entreated piteously that it might be taken away; but Soeur Lucie, to whom the little prayer was made, did not view the matter in at all the same light as Madelon. In the first place, if formed part of the furniture of the room, and had always been there, so far as he knew—which, to the nun, whose life was founded on a series of unquestioned precedents, allowing of nothing arbitrary but the will of the Superior, appeared an unanswerable reason why it should always remain; and, in the next place, with the lack of sympathy that one sometimes remarks in unimaginative minds, she did not in the least understand the terror with which it inspired the child, but assured her, in her good-humoured way, that that was all nonsense, and the she would get over it in time. So the skull remained, and Madelon was miserable, till one night, in a moment of desperation, she jumped out of bed, seized it with both hands, and flung it with all her might through the window into the garden below. She was frightened when she heard the crash of falling glass, for in her excitement she had never stopped to open the window, but greatly relieved, notwithstanding, to think that her enemy was gone, and slept more soundly that night than she had done for a long time previously.
Next morning, however, Madelon had a cold, a pane of glass was found in fragments on the gravel walk beneath the window, a skull was discovered, lying among the long grass on the lawn; one can fancy the exclamations, the inquiries, the commotion. Madelon, though not a little frightened, avowed boldly enough what she had done, and so far gained her end that the skull never reappeared, and a safe precedent was established for Soeur Lucie's future guidance; but she got into great trouble at the time, and gained moreover the unenviable distinction of having committed a deed of unparalleled audacity. After this, what might not be expected of such a child? The nuns at once formed a bad opinion of her, which they owed it to themselves to confirm on the occasion of each succeeding offence, by a reference to this past misdeed which had first taught them of what enormities she was capable.
Matters were no better when there came to be a question of lessons. Madelon did not mind the actual learning, though she wearied a little of the continued application to which she was unused; but she resented to the last degree the astonishment that her ignorance on all sorts of subjects excited both in the nuns who taught her, and in the other children in the class, and which was expressed with sufficient distinctness. "Never studied geography, nor history, nor arithmetic!" cries Soeur Ursule, who superintended the school; "not know the principal cities in Europe, nor the kings of France, nor even your multiplication table!" These speeches, with strongly implied notes of admiration after each sentence, and illustrated by the expression on the faces of a small, open- mouthed audience in the background, roused Madelon's most indignant feelings; she rebelled alike against the injustice of being held up to public reprobation for not knowing what she had never been taught, and against the imputations cast upon her education hitherto. "I can do a great many things you cannot," she would answer defiantly, "I can talk English, and German, and Italian—you can't; I can dance—you can't; I can sing songs, and—and, oh! a great many things that you cannot do!" A speech of this sort would bring our poor Madelon into dire disgrace we may be sure; and then angry, impenitent, she would go away into some corner, and cry—oh! how sadly—for her father; for the happy old days, for Monsieur Horace, too, perhaps, to come back, and take her out of all this misery.
Behind the convent was a strip of ground, which produced cabbages and snails on one side, and apple-trees on the other; a straight walk divided these useful productions from each other. When Madelon was en pénitence she used sometimes to be sent to walk here alone during the hour of recreation, and would wander disconsolately enough among the apple-trees, counting the apples by way of something to do, and getting intimately acquainted with the snails and green caterpillars amongst the cabbages. Our poor little Madelon! I could almost wish that we had kept her always in that pretty green valley where we first saw her; but I suppose in every life there come times when cabbages, or things of no cheerfuller aspect than cabbages, are the only prospect, and this was one of her times. She used to feel very unhappy and very lonely as she paced up and down, thinking of the past—ah, how far that past already lay behind her, how separate, how different from anything she did, or saw, or heard in these dull days! She did not find many friends to console her in her troubles; good- natured Soeur Lucie did indeed try to comfort her when she found her crying, and though she was not very successful in her efforts, Madeleine began to give her almost as much gratitude as if she had been. Soeur Lucie could not think of anything to tell her but that she was very naughty, and must try to be good, which Madelon knew too well already. It would have been more to the purpose, perhaps, if she had told her she was not so very bad after all, but Soeur Lucie never thought of that; perhaps she did not care much about the child; by this time Madelon was beginning to be established as the black sheep of the little community, and Soeur Lucie only expressed the general sense; but being very good-natured, she said in a kind way what other people said disagreeably.
Neither from her companions did she meet with much sympathy, and, indeed, when out of disgrace, Madelon was apt to be rather ungracious to her schoolfellows, with whom she had little in common. The children who came daily to the convent were of two classes—children of the poor and children of a higher bourgeois grade, shopkeepers for the most part. Madelon was naturally classed with the latter of these two sets during the lesson hours, but she stood decidedly aloof from them afterwards, at first through shyness, and then with a sort of wondering disdain. She had never been used to children's society; all her life her father had been careful to keep her apart from companions of her own age, and, accustomed to associate continually with grown-up people, she chose to regard with great contempt the trivial chatter, and squabbles, and amusements of her small contemporaries. After a time, indeed, she condescended to astonish their minds with some of her old stories, and was gratified by the admiration of a round-eyed, open-mouthed audience, who listened with rapt attention as she related some of the glories of past days, balls, and theatres, and kursaals, princes and counts, and fine dresses; it served in some sort to maintain the sense of superiority which was sorely tried during the untoward events of the lesson hours; but this also was destined to come to an end. One day there was a whispering among the listeners, which resulted in the smallest of them saying boldly,—
"Marie-Louise says your papa must have been a very bad man."
"What!" cries Madelon, jumping off the high stool on which she had been seated. This little scene took place during the hour of recreation, when the children ate their luncheon of bread and fruit.
"Ah, yes," says Marie-Louise, a broad-faced, flaxen-haired damsel, half a head taller than Madelon, and nodding her head knowingly. "Those are very fine stories that you tell us there, Mademoiselle, but when I related them at home they said it was clear your papa must have been a very wicked man."