From the stall where the novice-mistress knelt, invariably upright, her wide-open gaze fixed upon the High Altar, came the slow unemphatic announcements of the Points of Meditation, cutting across the cold, still atmosphere of the chapel.
Frances forced her mind to receive the words, then gradually to attach to them a meaning. After that, in spite of cold and the cramp that almost invariably seized her from the effort to remain motionless upon her knees, her mind was awake, and her battle with sleep was over until the evening. Through the recital of the Office, and the early Mass, attention was seldom an effort to Frances. Afterwards, the rapid, efficient sweeping and dusting of her cubicle and the struggle to turn the heavy paillasse on the wooden planks which formed the bed, left her heated and glowing, only anxious lest she should be late in taking her place in the long refectory for breakfast.
Instructions and religious exercises filled the morning, and the midday recreation succeeded dinner.
“The test of a good novice is her attitude towards the community recreation,” was a favourite axiom of the novice-mistress.
Frances had been told that this recreation might prove to be a great trial, and sometimes wondered whether there was anything abnormal in her extreme and childlike enjoyment of this part of her religious life.
The ten or twelve novices, most of whom were Irish or English, one American, two Spanish and the rest French, spent the allotted forty-five minutes in company of the novice-mistress, and of one another. The conversation was general, usually gay, and always impersonal.
Up and down the small garden the little group paced slowly on fine days, carefully avoiding the larger gathering of “la grande communautée,” also assembled in recreation round the Superior. Little or no intercourse was permitted between the novices and the professed religious.
On wet days, and not infrequently on days which Frances regretfully thought delightfully fresh and moist, but at which the novice-mistress raised protesting hands and exclamations of “Ce climat anglais!” the perambulations of the novitiate took place in a long corridor some six or seven feet broad, the length of which it was possible to traverse slowly, in little groups of three or four, always with the novice-mistress as central point. Many of the novices walked backwards, so as to face her continually. Most of them held knitting, or wool which could be wound on to cards whilst still walking, but as soon as she made a move into the small community room, mending and darning baskets were produced and set upon the floor beside each low wooden stool ranged against the wall. The novice-mistress sat also upon a stool, placed on a low, wooden dais at the end of the room. She thus dominated the room as naturally as she did the conversation. In her early days at the convent it was a continual cause of wonder to Frances that this conversation, general as it was, could remain so animated and yet so singularly impersonal.
The welfare of the Order in general was often discussed, the old days when its headquarters had been in Paris tenderly recalled by the novice-mistress, and her varied reminiscences of those times and of the expulsion which ensued, eagerly listened to by the little assembly. Sometimes there was talk of such small technicalities as the origin of some point of Rubric, or a broader question of Church ruling, but for the most part the conversation ran cheerfully upon trivial lines. It was always conducted in French, and the famous Gallicanism—“Moi, je”—was apt to provoke a general burst of merry laughter and a humorous glance or word of rebuke from the novice-mistress. But pronouns relating to the first person singular were seldom much in evidence.
The knowledge that she must not seek to place herself beside any one companion, that she must not move from her low stool during recreation without asking and obtaining leave to do so, and that any form of personality beyond the most trivial allusion must be excluded from her conversation, failed to disturb Frances’ calm enjoyment of the three-quarters of an hour which always seemed to her so quickly over.