Her own ear is on the alert to catch sounds outside—the shuffling of feet, the rattle of rosary beads, or the swishing of a dress against the door.
She hears none; and at length satisfied that Sister Ursule’s suspicions are spent, or her patience exhausted, she draws a free breath—the first since the séance commenced.
Then rising to her feet, she steps to a corner of the cell, not commanded by the keyhole; and there dashes the hook down, as though it had been burning her fingers!
“My first scene of deception,” she mutters to herself—“first act of hypocrisy. Have I not played it to perfection?”
She draws a chair into the angle, and sits down upon it. For she is still not quite sure that the spying eye has been withdrawn from the aperture, or whether it may not have returned to it.
“Now that I’ve made a beginning,” she murmurs on, “I must think what’s to be done in continuance; and how the false pretence is to be kept up. What will they do?—and think? They’ll be suspicious for a while, no doubt; look sharply after me, as ever! But that cannot last always; and surely they won’t doom me to dwell for ever in this dingy hole. When I’ve proved my conversion real, by penance, obedience, and the like, I may secure their confidence, and by way of reward, get transferred to a more comfortable chamber. Ah! little care I for the comfort, if convenient,—with a window out of which one could look. Then I might have a hope of seeing—speaking to some one—with heart less hard than Sister Ursule’s, and that other creature—a very hag!”
“I wonder where the place is? Whether in the country, or in a town among houses? It may be the last—in the very heart of a great city, for all this death-like stillness! They build these religious prisons with walls so thick! And the voices, I from time to time hear, are all women’s. Not one of a man amongst them! They must be the Convent people themselves! Nuns and novices! Myself one of the latter! Ha! ha! I shouldn’t have known it if Sister Ursule hadn’t informed me. Novice, indeed—soon to be a nun! No! but a free woman—or dead! Death would be better than life like this!”
The derisive smile that for a moment played upon her features passes off, replaced by the same forlorn woe-begone look, as despair comes back to her heart. For she again recalls what she has read in books—very different from that so contemptuously tossed aside—of girls, young and beautiful as herself—high-born ladies—surreptitiously taken from their homes—shut up as she—never more permitted to look on the sun’s light, or bask in its beams, save within the gloomy cloisters of a convent, or its dismally shadowed grounds.
The prospect of such future for herself appals her, eliciting an anguished sigh—almost a groan.
“Ha!” she exclaims the instant after, and again with altered air, as though something had arisen to relieve her. “There are voices now! Still of women! Laughter! How strange it sounds! So sweet! I’ve not heard such since I’ve been here. It’s the voice of a girl? It must be—so clear, so joyous. Yes! Surely it cannot come from any of the sisters? They are never joyful—never laugh.”