She was quite weak, and the tears that had not come to her before streamed irrepressibly now. She could not stop crying.
They told her of the little novice, Sister Frances Mary, lying in her white habit with her hands folded against her breast, a crucifix between them, and wearing the chaplet of white artificial flowers which she had worn at her prise d’habit, and with which the nuns had garlanded her now over the white veil.
And Rosamund, the tears pouring down her face, saw only a little girl with soft, flying hair, in a pink sunbonnet, swinging in the orchard above the Wye Valley.
The infirmarian told her of Mère Pauline’s recovery, and of how, still weak and shaken, she had knelt, toute tremblante, pauvre Mère, in the chapel where they had placed her child, and prayed beside the black-draped oaken trestles where lay the mortal remains of Sister Frances Mary.
Rosamund had heard the tolling chapel bell, and Mother Juliana had read her the prayers that had been offered in the hillside cemetery beyond the town, where they had laid Sister Frances Mary. And she had seen another hill, and heard only the sound of two little sisters calling to one another in their play.
The nuns did not understand. They had only known Sister Frances Mary.
They were very kind to her, and the infirmarian daily brought her messages from the Superior, promises of an early visit, and assurances that she was not to think of leaving the convent until le médecin had declared her to be remise du coup.
Rosamund remained passive. The tears that she could not restrain did not matter here, and they kept her from the lowest of those abysmal depths that she had sounded before something snapped within her, and she had felt herself falling helplessly, in the convent parlour, with Mrs. Mulholland’s large, frightened old face wavering strangely before her eyes.
Since then, unutterable weariness and yet unutterable relief had taken possession of her. Frances was dead, and Frances was hers again as in the days when they had been children together, and seen all life before them in an illimitable perspective. Of Porthlew, she thought hardly at all. Her mind had gone back to the Wye Valley days. Old formulæ that had passed between the two, long since forgotten, little trivial memories that had been common to them both, thronged to Rosamund’s mind almost involuntarily in her weakness, and the finality held by Death seemed the only refuge from the far more poignant finality that life had offered.
In the curious need of dependence which utter physical and mental lassitude induces, Rosamund, scarcely conscious of even a vague surprise, found that she had turned to Mrs. Mulholland.