A large, lofty, clean, trim hall was open to a flight of steps, and we found a young lady in the hall, playing, instead of a pious sonata—which I vainly thought was the practice in such godly seminaries of learning—that abominable rattling piece of music called ‘La Violette,’ which it has been my lot to hear executed by other young ladies; and which (with its like) has always appeared to me to be constructed upon this simple fashion—to take a tune, and then, as it were, to fling it down and upstairs. As soon as the young lady playing ‘The Violet’ saw us, she quitted the hall and retired to an inner apartment, where she resumed that delectable piece at her leisure. Indeed, there were pianos all over the educational part of the house.
We were shown into a gay parlour (where hangs a pretty drawing representing the melancholy old convent which the Sisters previously inhabited in Cork), and presently Sister No. Two-Eight made her appearance—a pretty and graceful lady, thus attired.
‘’Tis the prettiest nun of the whole house,’ whispered the lady who had been educated at the convent; and I must own that, slim, gentle, and pretty as this young lady was, and calculated, with her kind smiling face and little figure, to frighten no one in the world, a great six-foot Protestant could not help looking at her with a little tremble. I have never been in a nun’s company before; I’m afraid of such—I don’t care to own—in their black mysterious robes and awful veils. As priests in gorgeous vestments, and little rosy incense-boys in red, bob their heads and knees up and down before altars, or clatter silver pots full of smoking odours, I feel I don’t know what sort of thrill and secret creeping terror. Here I was, in a room with a real live nun, pretty and pale—I wonder has she any of her sisterhood immured in oubliettes down below: is her poor little, weak, delicate body scarred all over with scourgings, iron collars, hair shirts? What has she had for dinner to-day?—as we passed the refectory there was a faint sort of vapid nunlike vegetable smell, speaking of fasts and wooden platters; and I could picture to myself silent sisters eating their meal—a grim old yellow one in the reading-desk, croaking out an extract from a sermon for their edification.
But is it policy, or hypocrisy, or reality? These nuns affect extreme happiness and content with their condition; a smiling beatitude, which they insist belongs peculiarly to them, and about which the only doubtful point is the manner in which it is produced before strangers. Young ladies educated in convents have often mentioned this fact, how the nuns persist in declaring and proving to them their own extreme enjoyment of life.
Were all the smiles of that kind-looking Sister Two-Eight perfectly sincere? Whenever she spoke her face was lighted up with one. She seemed perfectly radiant with happiness, tripping lightly before us, and distributing kind compliments to each, which made me in a very few minutes forget the introductory fright which her poor little presence had occasioned.
She took us through the hall (where was the vegetable savour before mentioned), and showed us the contrivance by which the name of Two-Eight was ascertained. Each nun has a number, or a combination of numbers, prefixed to her name; and a bell is pulled a corresponding number of times, by which each sister knows when she is wanted. Poor souls! are they always on the look-out for that bell, that the ringing of it should be supposed infallibly to awaken their attention?
From the hall the sister conducted us through ranges of apartments, and I had almost said avenues of pianofortes, whence here and there a startled pensioner would rise, hinnuleo similis, at our approach, seeking a pavidam matrem, in the person of a demure old stout mother hard by. We were taken through a hall decorated with series of pictures of Pope Pius VI.,—wonderful adventures, truly, in the life of the gentle old man. In one, you see him gracefully receiving a Prince and Princess of Russia (tremendous incident!). The Prince has a pigtail, the Princess powder and a train, the Pope a—— but never mind, we shall never get through the house at this rate.