It did not take me long to see a white lady slip down that alley, like a white mist swallowed up in sombre night. No power on earth could have convinced me that I had not seen a ghost, and I stood at the window straining my eyes out in waiting for the white lady's return, with both hands frantically clasped upon my heart, which beat as if it projected a spring through my throat. White-faced and appalled, I hurried to the infirmarian, who brought me in something hot to take, and screamed out, "Oh, I've seen her, I've seen her! she was all in white, a real ghost!"
That night I was in full fever, and my poor silly little story-books were taken away. But they had done their work, and by the time I was well again my imagination had wrought out the stupendous fiction that was to communicate its thrill even to some of the big girls, and send a dozen of little girls crawling upon their knees and hands, victims of my imagination. The white lady I conceived to be the ghost of a beautiful Catholic persecuted in the days of Tyburn. She lived in this old manor-house, for we knew that the Ivies had been a manor. In her terror she had flown through the panel-door leading to the infirmary. The flight of stairs, of course, in those days continued beyond the floor, and the subterranean passage probably led round by the courtyard to the gate at the end of the dark alley. I decided that there must be several whitened bones under the floor of this corridor and the infirmary, and so convinced all my companions, even Frank, that whining little cad whom we all so heartily detested, that on play-days, during the holidays, on Sunday afternoons, every moment we could spend in secrecy, in turn two of us (companionship was necessary to add to the excitement of labour and the terrors of consequences) would crawl away from the rest with penknives and pencils, and assiduously cut away at the wooden floor until we had made a hole large enough to insert our little fists underneath. It must be admitted we always found something hard and white, which proved my theory, and those bits of dry chips we handled in awe.
For some singular months we lived upon this romance, and lived in it so intensely that all else became but a dream. Dream-like we accomplished our tasks, filled our slates with figures, copied headlines, recited verses, the dates of English history, wrought our samplers, and answered the responses of the rosary. But our thoughts, ourselves, were elsewhere, with the next beam to make a hole in, and the assurance I had given them that I had seen through a chink of the infirmary floor a white hand like marble. I was the first victim of my own invention, for I honestly believed all I said. I will not say that vanity was an alien factor in the unconscious invention. I enjoyed my power, my triumph, the fear I had inspired and so thrillingly shared—above all, I enjoyed the popularity it gave me as leader of a band of miscreants.
I do not remember how or why the fever abated. Were we found out and punished for mutilated planks? We so exaggerated the mystery of our conspiracy that it would be strange indeed if it were not discovered. But the end of the romance is completely effaced from memory. It has left no impression whatever. I see myself in turn frozen and fevered with terror, digging at every mortal spot of the convent open to the depredations of my penknife, in a wild hunt for bones and secret passages and forbidden stairs. I see the whole school enthralled by my ardent whim. And that is all.
Chapter XV. AN EXILE IN REVOLT.
What surprises me most when I recall those days is my own rapid development. The tiny inarticulate pensive creature of Ireland is, as if by magic, turned into a turbulent adventurer, quick with initiation, with a ready and violent word for my enemies, whom I regarded as many, with a force of character that compelled children older than myself to follow me; imperious, passionate, and reckless. How did it come about? It needed long months of unhappiness at home to make me revolt against the most drastic rule, and here it sufficed that a nun should doubt my word to turn me into a glorified outlaw.
I confess that whatever the deficiences of my home training, I had not been brought up to think that anybody lied. My mother never seemed to think it possible that any of her children could lie. In fact, lying was the last vice of childhood I was acquainted with. You told the truth as you breathed, without thinking of it, for the simple reason that it could not possibly occur to you not to tell the truth. This was, I knew, how I took it, though I did not reason so. I believe it was that villain Frank who broke a statue of an angel, and behind my back asserted that he had seen me do it. I had no objection in the world to break forty statues if it came in the day's work, and so far from concealing my misdeeds, I was safe to glory in any iniquity I could accomplish. So when charged with the broken angel, I said, saucily enough I have no doubt—oh! I have no wish to make light of the provocations of my enemies—that I hadn't done it.