Mrs. Hambledon looked vastly knowing, and I laughed. If ever I try to fancy myself married to such a man I cannot help laughing.
This, however, is not diary.—Item: We returned home because it began to rain, and to pass the time, here am I at my book.
But is this the sort of thing that will be of interest to read hereafter? I have begun too late; I should have written in those days when I saw the dull walls of our convent prison for the last time. It seems so far back now (though, by the calendar it is hardly six months), that I cannot quite recall how it felt to live in prison. And yet it was not unhappy, and there was no horror in the thought we both had sometimes then, that we should pass and end our lives in the cage. It did not strike us as hard. It seemed, indeed, in the nature of things. But the bare thought of returning to that existence now, to resume the placid daily task, to fold up again like a plant that has once expanded to sun and breeze, to have never a change of scene, of impression, to look forward to nothing but submission, sleep, and death; oh, it makes me turn cold all over!
And yet there are women who, of their own will, give up the freedom of the world to enter a convent after they have tasted life! Oh, I would rather be the poorest, the ugliest peasant hag, toiling for daily bread, than one of these cold cloistered souls, so that the free air of heaven, be it with the winds or the rain, might beat upon me, so that I might live and love as I like, do right as I like; ay, and do wrong if I liked, with the free will which is my own.
We were told that the outer world, with all its sorrows and trials, and dangers—how I remember the Reverend Mother's words and face, and how they impressed me then, and how I should laugh at them, now!—that the world was but a valley of tears. We were warned that all that awaited us, if we left the fold, was misery; that the joys of this world were bitter to the taste, its pleasures hollow, and its griefs lasting.
We believed it. And yet, when the choice was actually ours to make, we chose all we had been taught to dread and despise. Why? I wonder. For the same reason as Eve ate the apple, I suppose. I would, if I had been Eve. I almost wish I could go back now, for a day, to the cool white rooms, to see the nuns flitting about like black and white ghosts, with only a jingle of beads to warn one of their coming, see the blue sky through the great bare windows, and the shadows of the trees lengthening on the cold flagged floors, hear the bells going ding-dong, ding-dong, and the murmur of the sea in the distance, and the drone of the school, and the drone of the chapel, to go back, and feel once more the dull sort of content, the calmness, the rest!
But no, no! I should be trembling all the while lest the blessed doors leading back to that horrible world should never open to me again.
The sorrows and trials of the world! I suppose the Reverend Mother really meant it; and if I had gone on living there till my face was wrinkled like hers, poor woman, I might have thought so too, in the end, and talked the same nonsense.
Was it really I that endured such a life for seventeen years? O God! I wonder that the sight of the swallows coming and going, the sound of the free waves, did not drive me mad. Twist as I will my memory, I cannot recall that Molly of six months ago, whose hours and days passed and dropped all alike, all lifeless, just like the slow tac, tac, tac of our great horloge in the Refectory, and were to go on as slow and as alike, for ever and ever, till she was old, dried, wrinkled, and then died. The real Molly de Savenaye's life began on the April morning when that dear old turbaned fairy godmother of ours carried us, poor little Cinderellas, away in her coach. Well do I remember my birthday.
I have read since in one of those musty books of Bunratty, that moths and butterflies come to life by shaking themselves out, one fine day, from a dull-looking, shapeless, ugly thing they call a grub, in which they have been buried for a long time. They unfold their wings and fly out in the sunshine, and flit from flower to flower, and they look beautiful and happy—the world, the wicked world, is open to them.