Bertha sank heavily on to a chair.
XXI
FRANCES gazed at her hands. Their appearance was the greatest amongst the minor trials of convent life. She wondered wistfully what Rosamund would think of them. They were small hands, with long, nervous fingers, and now each knuckle was swelled and purple from the cold and unaccustomed manual work, and the chilblains on the back of almost every one had broken and exposed raw cracks and fissures to the chill morning air.
The novice with her serge habit tucked up so as to expose the stout black underskirt below, the coarse cotton stockings and heavy, ill-made shoes, bore small resemblance to Frances Grantham in her blue coat and skirt and brown velvet hat, arriving at the convent door some few months before.
Her face was fuller, and had more colour in it, but there was a deep black shadow under each eye denoting lack of sufficient sleep.
This question of sleep had assumed for Frances, as for her companions, a prominence that seemed strange and unnatural.
Hitherto Frances had slept for eight hours every night, sometimes for longer, and had never thought of the amount of rest she took in any but the most cursory and matter-of-fact fashion. In the first days of her convent life, the novice-mistress spoke to her of the early rising as a trial which might perhaps prove severe. Frances thought: “Getting up at five in cold weather must be an effort, until one gets used to it.”
She heard the bell clang out its one hundred strokes every morning, at the first stroke of which the novice in the cubicle on either side of her sprang from her straw mattress to the thin strip of carpet that lay beside each bed. For the first six weeks she had fallen asleep again instantly, and only been roused by the small alarm clock set for six o’clock which her novice-mistress had made her use. Then she asked for permission to rise with the others and follow the full routine of the day, and it was granted her. The first stroke of the “cloche à cent coups” was now the signal for her also to leave her pallet and begin the day with the ritual of mental prayer prescribed for each religious during her robing. Heavy and sodden with sleep though her eyelids felt, Frances found that the mere physical anticipation of the inexorable clang that heralded five o’clock, would very often wake her even earlier, and keep her awake, tense and nervous with the fear that she might lack courage enough to rise on the very instant that the first sound of the bell should clash into the air.
But she always found that the physical effort, in some mysterious way, was overcome, and that accomplished, she lost the sense of mental stress, and was only conscious of the overpowering need of sleep. Through the winter months, when even a liberal application of ice-cold water failed to rouse her more than momentarily, she seldom knew by what mechanical process she had dressed, and found her way down the dark stone corridor and steep stairway only lighted by a flickering little oil-lamp, until she was on her knees in the as-yet-unwarmed chapel, waiting for the stroke of half-past five to proclaim the hour for meditation.
Kneeling upright upon the boards, her hands clasped upon the back of a prie-dieu too high to support her elbows, the struggle with her atrophied senses gradually began. Conscious effort was succeeded by the spasmodic violent starts that proclaimed her will to be alive, and gaining dominion over her relaxed muscles.