Thus spoke the young doctor and did not observe his own involuntary confession of having looked very deep into Sister Hedvig’s eyes.
Perhaps there was something in what he said after all. Though Laura had probably said the truest word. The fundamental fact in Sister Hedvig’s nature was still fear. And this fear had not, as in Peter’s case, spread over the surface in the shape of pretended good nature and a magnificent tissue of lies. No, in Hedvig it grew inwards in the dark. And this growth she felt as an ever-present gnawing ache in her inmost being. In the end this dark groping fear had become so much a part of her that every glimpse of happiness, liberty, spaciousness only seemed to her a mockery. But her suffering was terrible just because of its indefiniteness, its formlessness and its teeming darkness. Under these circumstances she must have felt every really definite cause for fear as a sort of relief, a release. He who sees, need not brood. That was why the sick bed and the death bed held such a strange attraction for her. That was why her expression would sometimes reveal such curious relief in the presence of the most awful struggles. That was why she closed the eyes of the dead with such pale and still solemnity. She herself interpreted it as the brief precious peace of heart before God after service and sacrifice. During her training as a nurse Sister Hedvig had turned more and more away from the world and relapsed into religious gloom. She walked about like a living protest against every form of levity and vanity.
And now she stood on a cold and clear September day by Percy’s bed at Hill Villa.
Percy stared at her dark eyes and pale cheeks. It was really an unusual pallor. One did not know whether she burned or froze.
“And so you are Stellan’s sister,” he muttered. “We must have met, as children at least, when I was still living at Stonehill. Strange that I did not notice your looks, then.”
“I have always kept apart,” she answered coldly.
Percy smiled a little apologetic smile.
“But now … now Sister Hedvig comes here and wants to help me, poor wretch. …”
“I will try to do my duty,” answered Sister Hedvig.
Percy sank back with half-closed eyes on his pillow. It suddenly seemed to him inconceivable that a woman with such a face should witness his frailty, help him to change his shirt and reach him the basin. “I shall have a high temperature this evening,” he thought. “But that doesn’t matter. I shan’t be bored anyhow.”
Hedvig left the sick room on some errand. When she came back Percy had already managed to allot a place to the newcomer in his world.
“Now I have got it,” he said contentedly. “Sister Hedvig is a Spanish saint. Yes? I have seen Sister Hedvig hanging on a church wall in Toledo. … Or perhaps it is something Byzantine,” he added thoughtfully. “Yes, you would look well in a mosaic … on a ground of gold … or perhaps a cold greenish blue. …”
Sister Hedvig received this speech, which was to her partly incomprehensible, partly offensive, in silence. She had never before met a dilettante patron of art of Percy’s type. She was highly distressed and confused by the whole atmosphere of Hill’s villa. She walked with lowered eyes and frightened steps through these rooms in which the walls were covered with impudently brilliant coloured pictures. I won’t even mention all the nudes that met her gaze everywhere without trace of shame, in strange and challenging forms. To her the nude was now exclusively associated with sickness and death. She could not and would not think of it except under fever cooling bandages or under the surgeon’s knife. And here it insolently glowed with health or made a pretence of harmony and peace which could be nothing but a delusion and abomination. It was incredible. But that was not all. Even from the landscapes it seemed to her that there emanated something of sin and danger. The mixture of French impressionism and national lyricism of that time, which nowadays appears to us so harmless and innocent, still seemed then alarmingly modern, and Hedvig also found in these pictures a defiant worldliness quite different from that of the old brown-gravy landscapes which hung on the walls at Selambshof. Art with its flavour of sin and damnation pursued her even into the sickroom. Opposite the bed there hung a picture of a handsome naked youth who smiled an ecstatic smile though his breast was pierced with cruel arrows.
“Isn’t he beautiful, Saint Sebastian?” said Percy proudly. “I discovered him in Naples in an old Jew’s shop. The painter is unknown, but you can see at once that he must have been a contemporary of Bernini. The typical mixture of sensualism and ecstasy of the baroque style cannot be mistaken. My Sebastian is a male cousin of Saint Teresa of the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. His breast is full of the arrows with which the beautiful angel threatens her. One does not quite know if it is the arrows of love or of martyrdom.”
Sister Hedvig looked at the floor and shook her head:
“I don’t understand anything of all this. And I don’t want to understand it either. I am not here to look at pictures.”
In this strange world she had come into, Percy Hill’s illness was somehow the only thing she had to hold on to and she felt hurt that he did not take it seriously enough.
Percy looked quite frightened.
“Dear, dear, surely I have not hurt you, Sister, in any
