The House of Martha Part 9

GRAY ICE.

During the engagement of my present secretary, a question had frequently arisen in my mind, which I wished to have answered, but which I had hesitated to ask, for fear the sister should imagine it indicated too much personal interest in her. This question related to her name, and now it was really necessary for me to know it. I did not wish any longer to speak to her as if she were merely a principle; she had become a most decided ent.i.ty. However harsh and gray and woolly her name might be, I wanted to know it and to hear it from her own lips. The next morning I asked her what it was.

She was sitting at the table arranging the pages she was going to read, and at the question she turned toward me. Her face was flushed, but not, I think, with displeasure.

"Do you know," she said, "it has seemed to me the funniest thing in the world that you have never cared the least bit to know my name."

"I did care," I replied, "in fact it was awkward not to know it; but of course I did not want to--interfere in any way with the rules of your establishment."

"Ah," she said, "I have noticed your extreme solicitude in regard to our rules, but there is no rule against telling our names. Mine is Sister Hagar."

"Hagar!" I exclaimed. "You do not mean that is your real name?"

"It is the name given me by the House of Martha," she answered. "There is a list of names by which the sisters must be called, and as we enter the inst.i.tution we take the names in their order on the list. Hagar came to me."

"I shall not call you by that," said I, "and we may as well go on with our work."

I was anxious to have her read, and to forget that she was called Hagar.

She was a long time arranging the ma.n.u.script and putting the pages in order. I did not hurry her, but I could not see any reason for so much preparation. Presently she said, still arranging the sheets, and with her head bent slightly over her work: "I don't know whether or not I ought to tell you, but I dislike to be called Hagar. The next name on the list is Rebecca, and I am willing to take that, but the rules of the House do not allow us to skip an unappropriated name, and permit no choosing. However, Mother Anastasia has not pressed the matter, and, although I am entered as Sister Hagar, the sisters do not call me by that name."

"What do they call you?"

"Oh, they simply use the name that was mine before I entered the House of Martha," said she.

"And what is that?" I asked quickly.

"Ah," said my nun, pus.h.i.+ng her sheets into a compact pile, and thumping their edges on the table to make them even, "to talk about that would be decidedly against the rules of the inst.i.tution;--and now I am ready to read."

Thus did she punish me for what she considered my want of curiosity or interest; I knew it as well as if she had told me so. I accepted the rebuff and said no more, and she went on with her reading.

On this and the following day I became aware how infinitely more pleasant it was to listen than to be listened to,--at least under certain circ.u.mstances. I considered it wonderfully fortunate to be able to talk to such an admirable listener as Walkirk: but to sit and hear my nun read; to watch the charming play of her mouth, and the occasional flush of a smile when she came to something exciting or humorous; to look into the blue of her eyes, as she raised them to me while I considered an alteration, was to me an overwhelming rapture,--I could call it nothing less. But by the end of the third morning of reading my good sense told me that this sort of thing could not go on, and it would be judicious for me to begin again my dictation, and to let my secretary confine herself to her writing. The fact that on any morning I had not allowed her to read until the hour of noon was an additional proof that my decision was a wise one.

The story of Tomaso and Lucilla now went bravely on, with enough groundwork of foreign land for the characters to stand on, and I tried very hard to keep my mind on the writing of my book and away from its writer. Outwardly I may have appeared to succeed fairly well in this purpose, but inwardly the case was different. However, if I could suppress any manifestations of my emotions, I told myself, I ought to be satisfied.

A few mornings after the recommencement of the dictation I was a little late in entering my study, and I found my secretary already at the table in the anteroom. In answer to my morning salutation she merely bowed, and sat ready for work. She did not even offer to read what she had last written. This surprised me. Was she resenting what she might look upon as undue stiffness and reserve? If so, I was very sorry, but at the same time I would meet her on her own ground. If she chose to return to her old rigidity, I would accept the situation, and be as formal as she liked.

More than this, I began to feel a little resentment. I would revert not only to my former manner, but to my former matter. I would wind up that love-story, and confine myself to the subject of foreign travel.

Acting on this resolution, I made short work of Tomaso and Lucilla. The former determined not to think of marriage until he was several years older, and had acquired the necessary means to support a wife; and Lucilla accepted the advice of her mother and the priest, and obtained a situation in a lace-making establishment in Venice, where she resolved to work industriously until the middle-aged innkeeper had made up his mind whether or not he would marry one of the handsome girls to whom he had become guardian.

To this very prosaic conclusion of the love-story I added some remarks intended as an apology for introducing such a story into my sketches of travel, and showing how the little narrative brought into view some of the characteristics of the people of Sicily. After that I discoursed of the present commerce of Italy as compared with that of the Middle Ages.

My secretary took no notice whatever of my change of subject, but went on writing as I dictated. This apathy at last became so annoying to me that, excusing myself, I left my study before the hour of noon.

It is impossible for me to say how the events, or rather the want of events, of that morning disturbed my mind. By turns I was angry, I was grieved, I was regretful, I was resentful. It is so easy sometimes for one person, with the utmost placidity, to throw another person into a state of mental agitation; and this I think is especially noticeable when the placid party is a woman.

As the day wore on, my disquiet of mind and body and general ill humor did not abate, and, wis.h.i.+ng that other people should not notice my unusual state of mind, I took an early afternoon train to the city; leaving a note for Walkirk, informing him that his services as listener would not be needed that evening. The rest of that day I spent at my club, where, fortunately for my mood, I met only a few old fellows who could not get out of town in the summer, and who had learned, from long practice, to be quite sufficient unto themselves. Seated in a corner of the large reading-room, I spent the evening smoking, holding in my hand an unread newspaper, and asking myself mental questions.

I inquired why in the name of common sense I allowed myself to be so disturbed by the conduct of an amanuensis, paid by the day, and, moreover, a member of a religious order. I inquired why the fates should have so ordered it that this perfectly charming young woman should suddenly have become frozen into a ma.s.s of gray ice. I inquired if I had inadvertently done or said anything which would naturally wound the feelings or arouse the resentment of a sister of the House of Martha. I inquired if there could be any reasonable excuse for a girl who, on account of an omission or delay in asking her name, would a.s.sume a manner of austere rudeness to a gentleman who had always treated her with scrupulous courtesy. Finally I asked myself why it was that I persisted, and persisted, and persisted in thinking about a thing like this, when my judgment told me that I should instantly dismiss the whole affair from my mind, and employ my thoughts on something sensible; and to this I gave the only answer which I made to any of the inquiries I had put to myself. That was that I did not know why this was so, but it was so, and there was no help for it.

Walking home from the station quite late at night, the question which had so much troubled me suddenly resolved itself, and I became convinced that the change in the manner of my secretary was due to increased pressure of the rules of the House of Martha. I would not, I could not, believe that a fit of pique, occasioned by my apparent want of interest in her, could make her thus cold and even rude. She was not the kind of girl to do this thing of her own volition. It was those wretched rules; and if they were to be enforced in this way, the head of the House of Martha should know that I considered the act a positive discourtesy, if nothing more.

I was angry,--that was not to be wondered at; but it was a great relief to me to feel that I need not be angry with my secretary.

XX.

TOMASO AND I.

The next day my amanuensis bade me good-morning in her former pleasant manner, but without turning toward me seated herself quickly at the table, and took the ma.n.u.script from the drawer. "Oh, ho!" I thought, "then you can speak; and it was not the rules which made you behave in that way, but your own pique, which has worn off a little." I glanced at her as she intently looked over the work of the day before, and I was considering whether or not it would be fitting for me to show that there might be pique on one side of the grating as well as on the other, when suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by a burst of laughter,--girlish, irrepressible laughter. With the ma.n.u.script in her hands, my nun actually leaned back in her chair and laughed so heartily that I wonder my grandmother did not hear her.

"I declare," she said, turning to me, her eyes glistening with tears of merriment, "this is the funniest thing I ever saw. Why, you have actually separated those poor lovers for life, and crushed every hope in the properest way. And then all the rest about commerce! I wouldn't have believed you could do it."

"What do you mean?" I exclaimed. "You showed no surprise when you wrote it."

Again she laughed.

"Wrote it!" she cried. "I never wrote a line of it. It was Sister Sarah who was your secretary yesterday. Didn't you know that?"

I stood for a moment utterly unable to answer; then I gasped, "Sister Sarah wrote for me yesterday! What does it mean?"

"Positively," said she, pus.h.i.+ng back her chair and rising to her feet, "this is not only the funniest, but the most wonderful thing in the world. Do you mean truly to say that you did not know it was Sister Sarah who wrote for you yesterday?"

"I did not suspect it for an instant," I answered.

"It was, it was!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands in her earnestness, and stepping closer to the grating. "When we came here yesterday, and found you were not in your room, a sudden idea struck her. 'I will stay here myself, this morning,' she said, 'and do his writing. I want to know what sort of a story this is that is being dictated to a sister of our House;' and so she simply turned me out and told me to go home. You don't know how frightened I was. I was afraid that, as we dress exactly alike, you might not at first notice that Sister Sarah was sitting at the table, and that you might begin with an awfully affectionate speech by Tomaso; for I knew that something of that kind was just on the point of breaking out, and I knew too that if you did it there would be lively times in the House of Martha, and perhaps here also. I fairly s.h.i.+vered the whole morning, and my only hope was that she would begin to snap at you as soon as you came in, and you would then know whom you had to deal with, and that you would have to put a lot of water into your love-making if you wanted any more help from the sisters. But if I had known that you would not find out that she was writing for you, I should certainly have died. I couldn't have stood it. But how in the world could you have kept on thinking that that woman was I? She is shorter and fatter, and not a bit like me, except in her clothes; and if you thought I was writing for you, why did you dictate that ridiculous stuff?"

I stood confounded. Here were answers to devise.

"Of course the dress deceived me," I said presently, "and not once did she turn her face toward me; besides, I did not imagine for a moment that any one but you could be sitting at that table."

"But I cannot understand why," she pursued, "if you didn't know it was Sister Sarah, you made that sudden change in your story."

For a moment I hesitated, and then I saw I might as well speak out honestly. When a man sees before him a pair of blue eyes like those which were then fixed upon me, the chances are that he will speak out honestly.

"The fact is," I said, "that I'm a little--well, sensitive; and when you, or the person I thought was you, did not speak to me, nor look at me, nor pay any more heed to me than if I had been a talking-machine worked with a crank, I was somewhat provoked, and determined that if you suddenly chose to freeze in that way I would freeze too, and that you should have no more of that story in which you were so interested; and so I smashed the loves of Tomaso and Lucilla and took up commerce, which I was sure you would hate."

At this there was a quick flash in her eyes, and the first tremblings of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

"Oh!" she said, and that was all she did say, as she returned to the table and took her seat.

"Is my explanation satisfactory?" I asked.

"Oh, certainly," she answered; "and if you will excuse me for saying so, I think you are a very fortunate man. In trying to punish me you protected yourself,--that is, if you care to have secretaries from our inst.i.tution."