We clung closer to Father W——’s skirts. “Rounds,” replies the officer in a voice of command, his sword rattling on the ground, iron-hard with the frost. “What rounds?” “Grand rounds!” “Advance, grand rounds, and give the countersign!” Then the sergeant of the guard, the alarm being given, rushes out into the street with his men, all with bayonets drawn and looking terrible in the moonlight. They form in line, and the officer advances. A whispered conversation takes place; the soldiers present arms and march back into the warm guard-house; and the officer passes silently on to the next guard.
While this scene was going on we stood half terrified and fascinated, hardly knowing whether to take to our heels or not. But the calm voice of Father W——, as he answered “A friend” to the sentry’s challenge, reassured us. Soon we reached the convent gate, and, entering the grounds, which were open for the occasion, found the convent all ablaze with lights. The parents and friends of the young lady pupils were permitted to attend the midnight Christmas Mass. The convent, and convent chapel which communicated with it, stood in the midst of winding walks and lawns very pretty in the summer; but the tall trees, now stripped of their leaves, swung their bare branches in the wind with a melancholy recollection of their faded beauty. Groups, in twos and threes, walked silently up the paths, muffled in cloaks and shawls, and disappeared within the chapel. We were received by the lady-superior, Mme. P——, whose kind voice and refined and gentle manners were sadly maligned by a formidable Roman nose, that struck our youthful minds with awe. What unprincipled whims does Nature sometimes take thus to impress upon the countenance the appearance of a character so alien to our true disposition! Nor is it less true that a beautiful face and a form that Heaven has endowed with all the charms of grace and fascinating beauty may hide a soul rank with vice and malice. The Becky Sharpes of the world are not all as ferret-featured as Thackeray’s heroine, whom, nevertheless, with much truth to art, he represents as attractive and alluring in her prime. But dear Mme. P——’s Roman nose was not, I have reason to believe, without its advantages; the fortuitous severity of its cast helping to maintain a degree of discipline among her young lady boarders, which a tendency to what Mr. Tennyson calls “the least little delicate curve” (vulgo, a pug), or even a purely classical Grecian, might have failed to inspire. Forgive me the treason if I venture even to hint that those young ladies in white and blue who floated in and out of Mme. P——’s parlors on reception-days, like angels cut out from the canvas on the walls, were ever less demure than their prototypes!
We altar-boys were marshalled into a long, narrow hall running parallel with the chapel. There we busied ourselves in putting on our red soutanes and white surplices, and preparing the altar for Mass. But we had a long time to wait, and while we stood there in whispering silence, and the chapel slowly filled, suddenly appeared Mme. P—— with a lay sister, carrying six little china plates full of red and white sugar-plums, and some cakes not bigger than a mouthful, to beguile our tedium. To this day the sight of one of those small plates, filled with that kind of sugar-plums, brings back to my mind with wonderful minuteness all the scenes I have described and those that followed. The long walk through the snow, the guard-house, the convent grounds, the figures of Mme. P—— and her lay sister advancing towards us, rise before me undimmed by time; and even now as I write the flavor of the sugared cassia-buds seems to be in my mouth, though it is over twenty years ago since I cracked them between my teeth with a school-boy’s relish for sweetmeats.
The feeling of distant respect engendered by the sight of Mme. P——’s nose gave way all at once to a profound sympathy and admiration for that estimable lady, as she handed us those dainties. Yet, as they disappeared before our juvenile appetites, sharpened by the frost, we could not help feeling all a boy’s contempt for the girls that could be satisfied with such stuff, instead of a good, solid piece of gingerbread that a fellow could get two or three bites at! We had no doubt that the convent girls had a congé that day, and that this was a part of the feast that had been provided for them.
We marched gravely into the sanctuary before Father W——, and took our places around the altar-steps while he ascended the altar. A deeper hush seemed to fall on the congregation kneeling with heads bowed down before the Saviour born on that blessed morning. The lights on the altar burned with a mystical halo at the midnight hour. The roses around the Crib of the infant Redeemer bloomed brighter than June. We heaped the incense into the burning censer, and the smoke rushed up in a cloud, and the odorous sweetness filled the air. Then along the vaulted roof of the chapel stole the first notes of the organ, now rising, now falling; and the murmuring voice of the priest was heard reading the Missal. Did my heart stand still when a boy—or is it touched by a memory later?—as, birdlike, the pure tones of the soprano rose, filling the church, and thrilling the whole congregation? Marvellous magic of music! Can we wonder to see an Arion borne by dolphins over the waves, and stilling the winds with his lyre? Poor Mme. L——! She had a voice of astonishing brilliancy and power. Her upper notes I have never heard excelled in flute-like clearness and sustained roundness of tone. When I heard her years later, with a more experienced ear, her voice, though a good deal worn, was still one to be singled out wherever it might be heard. She is since dead. She was a French lady of good family. Her voice had the tone of an exile. She sang the Adeste fideles on that Christmas morning with a soul-stirring pathos that impressed me so much as a boy that the same hymn, sung by celebrated singers and more pretentious choirs, has always appeared to me tame.
It would not serve my present purpose to pursue these recollections farther. Enough has been said to show how quickly the mind grasps at some one prominent point affected by sense, to group around it a tableau of associated recollections. That little china tea-plate with its blue and gilt edge, heaped over with sugar-plums, brings back to me scenes that seem to belong to another age, so radical is the change which time makes in the fortunes and even emotions of men.
When the lights were all out in the chapel, except those that burned around the Crib, and the congregation had silently departed, we wended our way back to the college with Father W—— in the chill morning air more slowly than when we started; sleepy, but our courage still unabated by reason of the great things we had shared in, and the still greater things separated from us by only one more, fast-coming dawn. We slept like tops all the morning, being excused from six o’clock Mass on account of our midnight excursion. When we joined the home circle on Christmas morning, you may be assured we had plenty to talk about. Nor was it until after dinner, and all the walnuts had been cracked, and our new pair of skates—our most prized Christmas gift—tried on and admired, that the recollection of our first Christmas Mass began to fade from our minds. Pure hearts and innocent joys of youth! How smooth the stream—nescius auræ fallacis—on which it sails its tiny craft! How rough the sea it drifts into!
S. LOUIS’ BELL.[212]
S. Louis’ bell!