The Goodness of St. Rocque by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Author:Alice Dunbar-Nelson [Dunbar-Nelson, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

“The ring, where?” muttered the landlady. There it was, clasped between her fingers on her bosom,—a bosom white and cold, under a cold happy face. Christmas had indeed dawned for Miss Sophie.

SISTER JOSEPHA

Sister Josepha told her beads mechanically, her fingers numb with the accustomed exercise. The little organ creaked a dismal “O Salutaris,” and she still knelt on the floor, her white-bonneted head nodding suspiciously. The Mother Superior gave a sharp glance at the tired figure; then, as a sudden lurch forward brought the little sister back to consciousness, Mother’s eyes relaxed into a genuine smile.

The bell tolled the end of vespers, and the sombre-robed nuns filed out of the chapel to go about their evening duties. Little Sister Josepha’s work was to attend to the household lamps, but there must have been as much oil spilled upon the table to-night as was put in the vessels. The small brown hands trembled so that most of the wicks were trimmed with points at one corner which caused them to smoke that night.

“Oh, cher Seigneur,” she sighed, giving an impatient polish to a refractory chimney, “it is wicked and sinful, I know, but I am so tired. I can’t be happy and sing any more. It doesn’t seem right for le bon Dieu to have me all cooped up here with nothing to see but stray visitors, and always the same old work, teaching those mean little girls to sew, and washing and filling the same old lamps. Pah!” And she polished the chimney with a sudden vigorous jerk which threatened destruction.

They were rebellious prayers that the red mouth murmured that night, and a restless figure that tossed on the hard dormitory bed. Sister Dominica called from her couch to know if Sister Josepha were ill.

“No,” was the somewhat short response; then a muttered, “Why can’t they let me alone for a minute? That pale-eyed Sister Dominica never sleeps; that’s why she is so ugly.”

About fifteen years before this night some one had brought to the orphan asylum connected with this convent, du Sacré Coeur, a round, dimpled bit of three-year-old humanity, who regarded the world from a pair of gravely twinkling black eyes, and only took a chubby thumb out of a rosy mouth long enough to answer in monosyllabic French. It was a child without an identity; there was but one name that any one seemed to know, and that, too, was vague,—Camille.

She grew up with the rest of the waifs; scraps of French and American civilization thrown together to develop a seemingly inconsistent miniature world. Mademoiselle Camille was a queen among them, a pretty little tyrant who ruled the children and dominated the more timid sisters in charge.

One day an awakening came. When she was fifteen, and almost fully ripened into a glorious tropical beauty of the type that matures early, some visitors to the convent were fascinated by her and asked the Mother Superior to give the girl into their keeping.

Camille fled like a frightened fawn into the yard, and was only unearthed with some difficulty from behind a group of palms.

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