Alex had accepted it, however, as she accepted most things now, with a passivity that carried no conviction to her mind. What her outer knowledge told her was true, failed to impress itself in any way upon her imagination, and consequently left her feelings quite untouched. To her inner vision, the life outside remained exactly as she had last seen it, in that summer that she still thought of as "Diamond Jubilee year."
Inside the convent, things had not changed. Looking back, she could remember a faint feeling of amusement when she had returned to the house at Liège at twenty-two years old, believing herself to be immeasurably advanced in years and experience since her schooldays, and had found that scarcely any alteration or modification in the rule-bound convent had taken place. She now sat among the other nuns at the monthly réclame and watched the girls rise one by one in their places, their hands concealed under the ugly black-stuff pèlerine, their hair tightly and unbecomingly strained back, their young faces demurely made heavy and impassive, as they listened to the record read aloud just as unrelentingly as ever by old Mère Alphonsine.
Sister Alexandra very rarely contributed any words of praise or blame to the judgment. At first she had been young, and therefore not expected to raise her voice amongst the many dignitaries present, but even now, when by convent standards she had attained to the maturity of middle age, her opinion would have been of little value.
She was seldom sent among the children, although she gave an English lesson to the moyennes on two evenings a week. In her first year at Liège, there had been an American girl of fourteen who had taken a sudden rapturous liking to her, which had never proceeded beyond the initial stages, since Alex, without explanation, had merely been told to hand over the charge of the child's English and French lessons hitherto in her hands, and had herself been transferred to other duties. Since then, she had been kept on the Community side of the house, and employed principally by Mother Gertrude to assist with the enormous task of correspondence that fell to the share of the Assistant Superior. She was taught to sew, and a large amount of mending passed through her hands and was badly accomplished, for Lady Isabel Clare's daughter had learned little that could be of use to her in the life she had selected. She was not even sufficiently musical to give lessons in piano or organ playing, nor had she any of the artistic talent that might be utilized for the perpetration of the various pious objects d'art that adorned the walls of the parlours or the class-room.
Nevertheless, Sister Alexandra was hard-worked. No one was ever anything else at the convent, where the chanting of the daily Office alone was a very considerable physical strain, both in the raw cold of the early morning and at the dose of the ceaselessly occupied day. Many of the nuns said the Office apart, owing to the numerous duties that called them from the chapel during the hours of praise and supplication, but Sister Alexandra had so few outside calls upon her time that she was one of the most regular in attendance.
At first her health had appeared to improve under the extreme regularity of the life, and later, when her final vows had been made, it was no longer a subject for speculation. She was not ill, and therefore need never reproach herself with being a burden to her Community. Anything else did not matter—one was tired, no doubt—but one had made the sacrifice of one's life.... Thus the conventual creed.
Time had sped by, with strange, monotonous, unperceived rapidity. It was all a matter of waiting for the next thing. At first, Alex Clare had waited eagerly and nervously to be taught some mysterious secret that would enable her to become miraculously happy and good at home in Clevedon Square. Then she had gradually come to see that there would be no return—that her home thenceforward would be with Mother Gertrude, and in the convent. Her novitiate days had come next—strange, trying apprenticeship, that had been lightened and comforted by the woman whose powerful and magnetic personality had never failed to assert itself and its strength.
Belgium, and the anguished waiting and hoping for orders to return to London, and the growing certainty that those orders would not come, had culminated in the rush of relief and joy that heralded Mother Gertrude's unexpected transfer to the Mother-house. After that, her first vows, taken for a term of two years, had inaugurated the long probationary period at the end of which a final and irrevocable pledge would bind her for ever to the way of the chosen few. Those perpetual vows were held out to her as the goal and crown of life itself, and her mind had speculated not at all on what should follow.
She was twenty-six before she was allowed to become a professed religious—according to conventual standards, no longer a very young woman. The delay had inflamed her ardour very much. It was characteristic of Alex to believe implicitly in an overwhelming transformation which should take place within her by virtue of one definite act, so long anticipated as to have acquired the proportions of a miracle.
It sometimes seemed to her that ever since the embracing of those perpetual vows, she had lived on, waiting for the transformation to operate. There was nothing else to wait for. The supreme act in the life of a religious, to the accomplishment of which her whole being had hitherto been tending, impelled at once by precept and by example, had taken place.