The Other Side of the Door

by Lucia Chamberlain

I could not tell how long a time had passed, but gradually out of complete consciousness, grew up the sense of a wretched throbbing. I thought it was my head. I opened my eyes and found I was looking straight up into the sky. I lay staring at it, it was so wonderfully soft and blue. Presently the wind swayed a green branch into my line of vision; at sight of that the query of where I was came into my mind.

I moved my head and felt the crackle of twigs at my cheek. I was lying in a mass of ivy and lemon verbena bushes, and at one side of me rose the great face of a wall. The memory of what had happened returned. I scrambled to a sitting posture. My head was so dizzy that I had to catch at the bushes to hold myself upright, and my body felt sore and shaken, but the impulse to get away from the house, whose windows overlooking the convent wall still spied upon me, carried me to my feet.

Through the shrubbery I peered at the garden beyond. There was a level green lawn, with sedate paths marching around it, but no black hooded figures were moving there in ones or twos or in solemn file, as I had been wont to see them. I walked rather uncertainly forward across the grass, across the dank and mossy paths, and into the shadowy length of the corridor. This, too, was empty, and at one end of it a little door, with a grill across it, seemed as effectually to bar me out as the Spanish Woman's house had shut me in. In my dazed state the only thing I could think of doing, to call the attention of the place to my presence, was to seize the grill in both hands and shake it with all my weakened strength. It made quite a rattling, and then I heard hurrying feet, and presently the small, startled face of a nun peered through the grating.

"I want to see the Mother Superior," I said in a trembling voice.

She looked at me sharply, and, I thought, a little as if she were frightened. "Why didn't you ring the bell?" she asked.

"The bell? What bell?" I stammered, for the only bell I could call to mind was the bell the Spanish Woman had rung. Then, as the sister appeared to be about to draw back, "Oh, please, please," I cried, "take me to the Mother Superior! I am in great trouble!"

There was a pause; then a little rustling, then a whispering of voices behind the grating, and another face, rounder and larger than the first, peered out; and a more sympathetic voice said: "Poor little creature! and her hat is all on one side!"

Then, after some further deliberation, in which one of the voices seemed to be protesting that it was afraid of something, the nun who had come first disappeared,—I could hear the sound of her feet hastening away,—and the second opened the grating and drew me in. She led me down a narrow, musty-smelling hall and into a dull little room where she made me sit down, and put my hat straight, and smoothed my hair very kindly but rather clumsily with hands like white pincushions. At last, with the timid nun following furtively at her heels, the Mother Superior came. She was a thin woman in flowing robes, with a great white sheer coif around her delicate face; and she looked at me very kindly and benevolently while I stammered out the essentials of my story—how the Spanish Woman had tried to keep me in her house, and how I got out of the window and through a hole in the wall and so down into the garden. When I came to this point in my tale, "But those windows are closed up!" cried one of the nuns. "And the wall is eight feet!" cried the other, "and there is no hole in it! It would be impossible!"

The Mother Superior shook her head at them, and said to me: "Can you tell me where you live, my child?"

I thought it odd that there should be any doubt in her mind as to that, but I eagerly gave her the number and the street. "And if you will only send for a carriage," I said, "because I am afraid I am too tired to walk, I should like to go home."