"La-la-la!" cried Sister Chucha. "Keep that for Father Vicente, if you please, my dear. That is his affair. Our patroness led a jolly life before she was a saint. No doubt, you should not have stabbed Don Bartolomé, and of course the Ramonez would never overlook such a thing. But we all understand that you must save your own skin if you could—that's very reasonable. And I hear that there was another reason." Here she chucked her chin. "I don't wonder at it," she said with a meaning smile.
The girl coloured and hung her head. She was still quivering with the shame of her public torture. She could still see Manvers' eyes stare chilly at the wall before them, and believe them to grow colder with each stave of her admissions. Her one consolation lay in the thought that she could please him by amendment and save him by a conviction; so it was hard to be petted by Sister Chucha. She would have welcomed the whip, would have hugged it to her bosom—the rod of Salvation, she would have called it; but compliments on her beauty, caresses of cheek and chin—was she not to be allowed to be good? As for escape, she had no desire for that. She could love her Don Osmundo best from a distance. What was to be gained, but shame, by seeing him?
Her shining hair was cut off; the cap, the straight prison garb were put on. She stood up, slim-necked, an arrowy maid, with her burning face and sea-green eyes chastened by real humility. She made a good confession to Father Vicente, and took her place among her mates.
It was true, what Sister Chucha had told her. Every penitent in that great and gaunt building was thrilled with one persistent hope, worked patiently with that in view, and under its spell refrained from violence or clamour. There was not one face of those files of grey-gowned girls which, at stated hours, entered the chapel, knelt at the altar, or stooped at painful labour through the stifling days, which did not show a gleam. Stupid, vacant, vicious, morose, pretty, sparkling, whatever the face might be, there was that expectation to redeem or enhance it, to make it human, to make it womanish. There was, or there would be, some day, any day, a lover outside—to whom it would be the face of all faces.
Manuela had not been two hours in the company of her fellow-prisoners before she was told that there were two ways of escape from the Recogidas. Religion or marriage these were; but the religious alternative was not discussed.
Sister Chucha, it transpired, had chosen that way—"But do you wonder?" cried the girl who told Manuela, with shrill scorn. Most of the sisters had once been penitents—"Vaya! Look at them, my dear!" cried this young Amazon, conscious of her own charms.
She was a plump Andalusian, black-eyed, merry, and quick to change her moods. Love had sent her to Saint Mary Magdalene, and love would take her out again.
That Chucha, she owned, was a kind soul. She always put the pretty ones to housework—"it gives us a chance at the windows. I have Fernando, who works at the sand-carting in the river. He never fails to look up this way. Some day he will ask for me." She peered at herself in a pail of water, and fingered her cap daintily. "How does my skirt hang now, Manuela? Too short, I fancy. Did you ever see such shoes as they give you here! Lucky that nobody can see you."
This was the strain of everybody's talk in the House of Las Recogidas—in the whitewashed galleries where they walked in squads under the eye of a nun who sat reading a good book against the wall, in the court where they lay in the shade to rest, prone, with their faces hidden in their arms, or with knees huddled up and eyes fixed in a stare. They talked to each other in the hoarse, tearful staccato of Spain, which, beginning low, seems to gather force and volume as it runs, until, like a beck in flood, it carries speaker and listener over the bar and into tossing waves of yeasty water.
Manuela, through all, kept her thoughts to herself, and spoke nothing of her own affairs. There may have been others like her, fixed to the great achievement of justifying themselves to their own standard: she had no means of knowing. Her standard was this, that she had purged herself by open confession to the man whom she loved. She was clean, sweetened and full of heart. All she had to do was to open wide her house that holiness might enter in.