“And you, my dear friend,” she finished up, almost in tears, “you warned me, and still I would not listen!”
“But what makes you refer the matter back to yesterday afternoon, when the child did not disappear until to- day?” Mrs. Bradley enquired. Mother Francis threw up her hands in a frankly Gallic gesture of despair.
“She was sick! She was sick! I fear the poor innocent young girl has been poisoned!” she said, and went on to make good her words in a mixture of French and English which was not very easy to follow.
chapter 18
search
richard chenevix trench: The Kingdom of God.
« ^ »
Mrs. bradley, armed with all the facts that were known, quickly organised a search. The child had been taken ill on the previous afternoon at just after a quarter past three, because as soon as the form had had their afternoon break at the end of Mother Cyprian’s lesson, Mary, according to the evidence of certain members of the class, had complained of feeling sick, and had gone off alone, refusing the comradely help and companionship usually given to one another by schoolgirls under these circumstances, and they had not seen her again that afternoon.
Two of them had made a tour of the water closets towards the end of break, but those within had all announced their identity, and Mary, it seemed, had concluded her attempts at being sick—‘she
Mother Francis was sufficiently overcome by the shock of Mary’s disappearance to be incapable of delivering even the mildest homily upon the indelicacy of these proceedings, and received all the tidings with a curt nod and an order to ‘go to your places and get
This display of Old Adam had had the effect of crushing an incipient outbreak of general conversation, and, prompted by Mrs. Bradley, Mother Francis continued the exposition, but would not be hurried into missing out the smallest fact or most unimportant opinion.
After break, Mary’s form had gone to Mother Mary-Joseph for an English lesson, and here Mary Maslin had not appeared at all. An excuse had been brought by a girl named Ryan—Nancy Ryan—aged twelve. All she had said was that Mary felt sick, and would come into class as soon as she possibly could. Nobody added that Mary’s whereabouts at the time that the lesson began were unknown to the rest of the form, and Mother Mary-Joseph— very pale when Mrs. Bradley interviewed her—admitted that she had forgotten the child and had not sent out during the lesson to find out how she was.
“The children should have said something—little donkeys!” said Mother Francis, in a pardonable burst of asperity.
Mary, moreover, had not turned up at tea, had notified nobody of what she had been doing in the meantime, but had been sick twice during the night. She had gone into Saturday school—French with Mother Dominic, English with Mother Mary-Joseph (who asked her whether she felt better), and Geography with Mother Timothy. She had appeared at lunch, but had eaten without much appetite, and then had gone off with Nancy Ryan and some others of the day-girls, to play in the junior dayroom. She had not been seen since.
Unfortunately Nancy Ryan was a day-girl, but five of the boarders were girls in Mary’s form, and the first thing Mrs. Bradley did, after having set in motion a search of the buildings and grounds—nobody to lose touch with the rest of her search party, and no search party to number fewer than four people—was to interview separately all these girls. They could tell her no more than Mother Francis had already found out. They had heard Nancy Ryan give Friday’s message to Mother Mary-Joseph, and they had not been surprised when Mary Maslin did not appear at Friday tea. They assumed that she had gone to bed because she did not feel well, and had said so to Mother Cyprian, whose duty it was that day to supervise the boarders at table.
Mother Cyprian had paid very little attention, as she readily admitted. She was not the Infirmarian, and she had supposed that the child was being properly cared for. She had gone off to church at the usual time, and the boarders had enjoyed recreation. One girl, named Cynthia Parks, had broken rules, however, by sneaking up to the dormitory and peeping into Mary Maslin’s cubicle. She came down and told the others that Mary was not there. When preparation time came, and Mother Timothy, on duty that evening, saw and commented on Mary’s empty place, they told her that Mary had not been well, and Mother Timothy had taken it for granted that the child had been ordered to bed. She actually
Mrs. Bradley could understand Mother Francis’ panic-stricken insistence upon the events of the previous day, but they seemed to her to have very little bearing upon the fact of the disappearance. She tried to get further information from the children, but it was not long before it became obvious that they all knew no more than they had said. She abandoned the interrogation, divided the boarders into five groups, and ordered a further extensive search of the house and grounds.
She herself tiptoed up the stairs to the children’s sleeping quarters. These had been a couple of very large rooms, but extra windows had been made, and these, together with thin wooden partitions and curtains, had made it possible to convert them into a dozen separate cubicles, each with half of a window for light and ventilation.
“Which is Mary’s?” Mrs. Bradley enquired. The Spanish girl, Maria Gartez, who, unbidden but overlooked, had attached herself to Mrs. Bradley, stepped forward and pointed to one of the curtained archways. Mrs. Bradley went in, but the narrow bed was empty.
About a hundred and fifty different thoughts had been passing through Mrs. Bradley’s mind. Two were paramount, and demanded most of her attention. One was common to all the searchers, both nuns and children: the highly dangerous nature of the purlieus of the convent: the high, steep cliffs; the rocks below; the sea; the wild moor; the wilder forest which encroached on it; the bogs, the pits, the paths that ended nowhere, the labyrinthine tracks through gorse and down steep gullies. The second thought, which was possibly hers alone, was that in all
