It happened that Gwynneth had spoken of Mrs. Molyneux to her aunt, who knew a good name when she heard it, and had often asked Gwynneth if she was not going to pay that call on Campden Hill; thus her recklessness in casting herself among strangers was more apparent than real, and little likely to aggravate her prime offence against kith and kin. Nor did it; nevertheless it was a plunge into all but unknown waters. The hospital was a private one, and Mrs. Molyneux both spoke and wrote of it as her own. It was a cancer hospital for women, evidently run upon religious lines, and those not easy to define, since Gwynneth happened to know that the Reverend Mother was not a Roman Catholic. And these things were all she did know when her hansom drew up before a red-brick building with ecclesiastical windows, and a cross over the door, in a leafy road not five minutes' climb from Kensington High Street.
Gwynneth pulled the wrought-iron bell-handle, and next moment caught her breath. The door had been opened by a portress in austere but becoming garb, a young girl like herself, and the pretty face between the quaint cap and collar was smiling a sweet greeting to the newcomer. A few worn steps of snowy stone, and a Gothic doorway, with the oak door standing open, showed more girls within against the wainscot; all were pretty; and all wore blue serge, with white aprons and long cambric cuffs, square bib-collars trimmed with lace, and Normandy caps with streamers of fine lawn. Gwynneth blushed for her own conventional attire, as she was ushered through this hall, past a dispensary where another of the uniformed girls was busy among the bottles, and so into the presence of the Reverend Mother.
Mrs. Molyneux, the well-dressed woman of the world whom Gwynneth had known in Leipzig, was a lost identity in a habit which marked her sway only by its supreme severity; an order of St. John of Jerusalem hung upon her bosom, and a crucifix dangled at her side. Her hands were hidden beneath some short and shapeless garment reaching to the waist, but one emerged for a moment to greet Gwynneth warmly. "Do you feel as if you had come into a convent?" the Reverend Mother asked, a gentle humour in her lowered voice. It was exactly what Gwynneth did feel, and the sensation was by no means displeasing to her. The Mother herself then showed Gwynneth over the establishment, which was indeed a singular amalgam of the hospital and the nunnery. The dining-room was termed the "refectory"; a cross hung over every bed in the wards upstairs, and in the nurses' cubicles below the wards. Cap and apron, bib-collar and cuffs, were laid out on Gwynneth's bed, and these she found herself expected to don then and there. The Mother returned when she was ready, and showed her the chapel last of all. It was a tiny chapel, but as beautiful as antique carving, rich embroidery, much stained glass, and hanging lights could make it. In her innocence Gwynneth wondered why these lights were burning while the summer sun, shining through the stained glass, filled the chapel with vivid beams of purple and red. She was even puzzled by the unmistakable odour of recent incense; but she said, with truth, that the chapel delighted her.
"I knew it would," the Mother whispered with her penetrating smile.
"How could you know?" Gwynneth asked, smiling also, because she had never touched on religion with Mrs. Molyneux.
"I saw you once in the English church," the Mother said. "It was before I knew you; and yet, you see, I did know you, even then!"
In this chapel there were daily matins, vespers, nones; and at each of the three services attendance was compulsory on the part of all nurses not required at an actual deathbed, and of all patients who were still up and about. French-capped, pink-frocked maid-servants and ward-maids filled the front rows of chairs; the patients sat behind; and on either hand, in the carved oak stalls, were the pretty nurses, the Reverend Mother near the entrance in their midst. The services, conducted by an attendant Anglican of small account, were punctuated by genuflexions and the sacred sign; and it was impossible to follow them in the Book of Common Prayer.
Gwynneth tried hard to lift up her heart in this strange sanctuary. She longed for real religion as she had longed for little in her life before. At the first blush, it seemed as though Providence alone could have led her into so unique a haven of equal sanctity and usefulness; and yet, also from the first, the girl was repelled a little if attracted more. She liked her work; she was a natural nurse, and soon grew used, but never hardened, to hopeless suffering and slow death. There were patients who loved Gwynneth, and not a nurse who was not fond of her, before she had been at St. Hilda's a month. Already she was playing the organ at all three services, and her own music, and the voices floating up to her, at these set times, filled her heart with peace; but she wondered if it was the right kind of peace; she wondered whether this was religion at all. Sometimes the sweet little chapel—for it was all that to Gwynneth's mind—struck her also as a stage of studied effects. The nurses were so pretty, their garb so becoming, and the blue of it had such a perfect foil in the maid-servants' pink. But then the Reverend Mother, in her sombre supremacy, gradually revealed herself as the superb mistress of deliberate effect; and a strange study Gwynneth found her; of foibles and fascination all compact; at once subtle, simple, vain, and noble. It appeared that Mrs. Molyneux was an extremely wealthy widow, whose one consoling hobby was this anomalous retreat upon Campden Hill.
The patients paid nothing; the nurses received nothing; it was a retreat for both, and Gwynneth was not the only one who had sought it primarily, and frankly, for peace of mind and salvation from self. Her hands at least were not the less tender and untiring on that account. Some of her capped and cuffed comrades were no older than herself; many were refreshingly frivolous, and properly free from care. Gwynneth's chief crony was Nurse Ella, a bright young widow, who wore spectacles, and declared herself unable to understand what the Reverend Mother had ever seen in her, as she was neither pretty nor religious, nor as young as the rest.
Nurse Ella had, however, a shrewd wit and a sharp tongue; made wicked fun of the Mother's sacerdotal pretensions when alone with Gwynneth; and thus stimulated the latter to think for herself, if only to refute her friend's arguments. Nurse Ella was above all things an extraordinarily decided character, aggressively so in immaterial issues, but good for Gwynneth by that very fact.