The White Sister

by F. Marion Crawford

She had said that she forgave her aunt with all her heart, and she had believed that it was true; but she was less sure now that she could think of her past life, and of what might have been if she had not been driven from her home destitute and forced to take refuge with Madame Bernard.

In the light of what she had just learned, the past had a very different look. It was true that she had urged Giovanni to join the expedition, and had used arguments which had convinced herself as well as him. But she had made him go because, if he had stayed, he would have sacrificed his career in the army in order to earn bread for her, who was penniless. If she had inherited even a part of the fortune that should have been hers, it never would have occurred to him to leave the service and go into business for her support; or if it had crossed his mind, she would have dissuaded him easily enough. So far as mere money went, he had not wanted or needed it for himself, but for her; and if she had been rich and had married him, he could not have been reproached with living on her. To persuade him, she had urged that his honour required him to accept a post of danger instead of resigning from the army as soon as it was offered to him, and this had been true to some extent; but if there had been no question of his leaving the service, she would have found him plenty of satisfactory reasons for not going to Africa, and he had not been the kind of man whom gossips care to call a coward. Reasons? She would have invented twenty in those days, when she was not a nun, but just a loving girl with all her womanhood before her!

If her aunt had not stolen the will and robbed her, she would have hindered Giovanni from leaving Italy, and she would have married him, that was the plain truth. He would have been alive now, in his youth and his strength and his love for her, instead of having perished in the African desert. That was the thought that tormented the guilty woman, too: it was the certainty that her crime had indirectly sent him to his death. So thought Sister Giovanna as she sat staring into the dark corner through the hours of the night, and she wondered how she had been able to say that she forgave, or had dared to hope that she could forget. If it had been only for herself, it might have been quite different; but her imagination had too often unwillingly pictured the tragic death of the man she had loved so well to forgive the woman who had caused it, now that she had revealed herself at last.

So long as Angela had believed that her father had left no will, because he had been in ignorance of the law, she had been able to tell herself that her great misfortune had been inevitable; but since it turned out that he had provided for her and had done his duty by her, according to his light, the element of inevitable fate disappeared, and the awful conviction that Giovanni's life had been wantonly sacrificed to enrich Princess Chiaromonte and her children forced itself upon her intelligence and would not be thrust out.

It seemed to Sister Giovanna that this was the first real temptation that had assailed her since she had taken her vows, the first moment of active regret for what might have been, as distinguished from that heartfelt sorrow for the man who had perished which had not been incompatible with a religious life. Recalling the Mother Superior's words of warning, she recorded her failure, as the first of its kind, and prayed that it might not be irretrievable, and that resentment and regret might ebb away and leave her again as she had been before the unforgettable voice had pierced her ears with the truth she had never guessed.

It was a great effort now to go to the bedside and do what must be done for the sick woman—to smooth the pillow for the head that had thought such thoughts and to stroke the hand that had done such a deed. She was tempted to take the little black bag and leave the house quietly, before any one was up. That was not a very dreadful thought, of course, but it seemed terrible to her, whose first duty in life was to help sufferers and soothe those who were in pain. It seemed to her almost as bad as if a soldier in battle were suddenly tempted to turn his back on his comrades, throw down his rifle, and run away.

She felt it each time that she had to rise and go round the screen, and when she saw the flushed face on the pillow in the shadow, the longing to be gone was almost greater than she could resist. She had not understood before what it meant to loathe any living thing, but she knew it now, and if she did her duty conscientiously that night, easy and simple though it was, she deserved more credit than many of the Sisters who had gone so bravely to nurse the lepers in far Rangoon.

She did not feel the smallest wish to hurt the woman who had injured her, let that be said in her praise; for though vengeance be the Lord's, to long for it is human. She only desired to be out of the house, and out of sight of the face that lay where her father's had lain, and beyond reach of the voice that had told her what she wished she had never known.

But there was no escape and she had to bear it; and when the night wore away at last, it had been the longest she remembered in all her life. Her face was as white as the Mother Superior's and her dark blue eyes looked almost black; even Madame Bernard would not have recognised the bright-haired Angela of other days in the weary and sad-faced nun who met the doctor outside the door of the sick-room when he came at eight o'clock.

She told him that the patient had been delirious about midnight, but had rested tolerably ever since. He glanced at the temperature chart she brought him and then looked keenly at her face and frowned.