“She wished it,” said Conrad Masters sharply. “She has a God.”
And thereupon he left me, to see another patient he had there, but I had not waited more than a few minutes in the waiting-room, which had that intangible odour of old cloth and illness, when I was called upstairs by an old stern nun, hard and silent as a rock, and I remember wondering: “Good my God, if this should be Iris’s day-nurse. Oh, poor Iris!”
The stairway we ascended was handsome and wide, of polished oak, the most dignified stairway you could well imagine in a nursing-home. It swept in a noble curve to a broad passage, also of oak, as, no doubt, was only fit and proper in a nursing-home patronised by une clientèle européenne la plus chic. But maybe it was a little too dignified, I thought, it was sombre; and the old stern nun who was my guide did not seek to relieve the atmosphere, giving me a massive black shoulder and to my question no more than a stern whisper which was no more and no less than a shout of disapproval: “Assez bien, monsieur, assez bien. Nous nous confions en Dieu.”
The chill, the gloom, the nun, the air of religious prostration, to which I am lamentably ill-accustomed, had quite killed my spirit, else, as I did my best quietly to follow her up the long, dark, uncarpeted passage, I had put it to her that to trust in God is very well but must He be trusted at such little expense, for in these oaken passages they had no more than a jet or two of gaslight, and wasn’t it also reasonable to suppose that the patients behind the doors, each inscribed with a Saint’s name, would lie the more comfortably for a strip of carpet along the passages? From below, as though from the bowels of the earth in labour, one might still faintly hear the murmurings of a religious nature and the woman’s manlike voice raised, no doubt, in exhortation; but I supposed the patients would not be minding that for they would be Catholics, and I wondered if Iris was a Catholic, but nowadays that is the last thing one ever learns about anybody, whether they are Catholic, Anglican, Jew, or what they are. …
As we came by a certain door, not far from which a gas-jet flamed an ailing yellow, it was opened from within and I saw before me the sweetest face that I ever saw in my life, and I knew that her God had been good to Iris.
“Sœur Virginie,” said the stern old nun, and I am glad to say I never saw her again. Sister Virginie, looking up at me with a grave smile, for she was very little, greeted me by my name, and do you know that I said: “Sister Virginie, had I only met you last night I would have slept much better than I did.”
She had altogether such a neat and tidy look, an inner look as well as an outer look, that you must be sceptical indeed not to believe at once that if ever there was a nurse to soothe away death here she was before you, her hands folded over her wooden crucifix, smiling up at you as though you were a gentle friend. Her face was oval and so white, but white in a different way, a soft clear way, and it was only when I came to think back on this sweet lady that I realised that of course this would be so because Sister Virginie never had used powder and such things, and that must also be why she had the lips of a girl, although what I could see of the dark brown eyes under the nun’s coif showed the understanding of more than forty years.
“You see, I know your name,” she said. She did not need to whisper. “Madame has a great regard for you, I must tell you. Now, you must not talk when you go in. She will look, look. But you must not say one word. She will see you are there, and it will make her content that her friend has thought of her.”
The oak door behind her was just ajar, and within I could see a faint pink glow, as it might be of a deeply-shaded light far in the room. Across the door, just above Sister Virginie’s coif, for she was very little, was painted in faded black lettering the name of a Saint, but what the Saint was I could not make out, and the only other time I called there I forgot to look.
“Now, remember,” Sister Virginie was saying, “you must not say one word in there. She will look, that is all. But how she looks, as though she is listening to the choir of angels!”
“Sister Virginie,” I said, “do you promise me that she will not die?”
And Sister Virginie smiled up at me with a gaiety that I have only seen on the still faces of women in old French books.
“Today we have thought she will not die,” she said, “for last night we gave her a piqûre du cœur. …”
II
I wish I could describe that room in which
