Tales of the Cloister/Her Audience of Two
Her Audience of Two
Her Audience of Two
NE—two—three—four. One—two—three—four.
Ernestine's fingers thumped out the time on the old piano, and the tired instrument, worn by the assaults of three generations of small girls, responded with a senile tinkle that was half a squeak. Sister Cecilia may have caught a peculiar touch of depression in the labored repetition as she was passing the music-room. A sudden impulse led her to the door, though the sound made her sensitive nerves wince. It was the duty of her subordinates to supervise the practice of beginners. They seldom came in contact with the Sister whose fame reached far beyond the convent walls, within which her gently autocratic sway in the department of music was supreme. It was her province to criticise the more advanced pupils, to train the voices of the nuns, to direct the convent choir, and, in what leisure remained from these occupations, to devote herself to the composition of songs. The concert stage and half the drawing-rooms of America were familiar with many of them. They were published anonymously, but the identity of the composer was an open secret, and the convent was the richer for her work. As time passed, she was exempted from many of the routine duties, that she might give herself effectively to the music she loved, and put on paper the masses and aves that welled up in her heart. The pupils adored her. They were not sure she knew of their existence, for her usual mood was one of serene abstraction, but they loved her none the less loyally for her seeming aloofness from them.
"Half the time," said May Iverson on one occasion, "you'd think she didn't know we were alive! But be in trouble and there isn't one of the Sisters more sympathetic. She is something you have to live up to."
Sister Cecilia was the especial friend of the small children in the convent. Their companionship did not disturb her musical reveries, and they followed her about in the garden and through the corridors, drawn to her by some subtle sympathy which neither she nor they could analyze, yet which they felt to the core of their sensitive little hearts.
"She spoils them," said Sister Philomene, tersely; but there was no proof of this unless her popularity with them. Now, as she stood at the door of the tiny room, her soft eyes had an unusually quizzical gleam. She had known by the dreary, recurrent thump she heard that some infant was in trouble, but had not suspected how deep the abyss of woe until she looked at the picture before her. Ernestine sat practising her dreary exercise. Unmindful of the protests of the yellow keys, she pounded away with dogged energy. Rebellious tears were on her fat cheeks, but her German braids flapped upon her back through the vigor of her efforts. Her plump legs were far too short to reach the floor, but from time to time they made abortive dives towards the pedals through some dim artistic purpose. On her feet were stout German boots, with several inches of heavy woollen stockings showing between them and the sombre frock above. A stiffly starched white pinafore lightened the effect, and the child's yellow hair, blue eyes, and fair Teutonic skin brought all the sunlight to a focus in the corner where she labored. Care weighed upon her brow, and while the nun looked the big tears dropped from her cheeks and splashed on the stained keys; but with unflinching courage Ernestine, aged seven, worked on. Something in her attitude, and the faithful efforts of the chubby fingers, touched the Sister, used though she was to such sad sights. Twenty years of teaching and cloistered seclusion had not dried up the fountain of sympathy in her bosom. She laid a hand on the stiff braids, and, at the touch, the stoical figure relaxed and the unhappy infant looked up as one to whom the deliverer had come. The nun sat down beside her and pinched her pink cheek.
"Is it so very hard?" she asked, lightly. "Or is it because the sun is bright and some of the children are playing in the garden? If that is it, every little girl who ever played the piano has felt as you do, and some of those who are enjoying themselves now will be practising by and by, you know, when you are having your sunshine and play."
She wiped Ernestine's eyes with her handkerchief as she spoke, and talked on cheerfully, ignoring the pathetic sniffles that punctuated her remarks. "Or is it Heimweh?" she asked. "You are a little girl from Germany, are you not? And Sister Patience is your music teacher? She told me of you. She says you practise faithfully, and that some day you will be a good musician."
The child gulped heavily at this alluring prospect.
"I must," she said, dismally. "My mother has said so. My mother sings—oh, nobody sings like my mother. And I want her—I want that I see her now."
Her lips trembled again, and an outburst seemed imminent. The nun lifted her quickly off the stool and stood up. She felt a sudden and strong interest in the forlorn baby.
"If your mother sings," she said, "her little girl must learn to play her accompaniments, of course. But you have worked enough to day. We will find Sister Patience and tell her you need amusement and fresh air, and ask her if she will not excuse you. If she consents, I will find some nice little girl for you to play with. To-morrow you will not be so homesick."
May Iverson's sharp eyes saw the two as they walked down the long corridor that led to the garden. She smiled to herself as she looked after them.
"I wondered how long it would take to bring those two together," she said to the class-mate who was with her; "the child of the greatest living contralto and the nun to whom music is the breath of life. I don't believe Sister Cecilia knows who the child is," she added, "for Ernestine came only last week. But some law has drawn them together, as I knew it would. Now Ernestine will be a dear little link between the finest musician in the Order and one of the most famous singers in the world. Madame Holstein is singing at the Metropolitan Opera-House in New York now," she continued, expansively. "Later, you know, she is to sing in the West. She has sent her little girl here for a few months because she will not keep her in hotels. I am simply existing until I hear her in Le Prophète. Fidès is her best rôle. Fancy how Sister Cecilia would love to hear her," she continued, regretfully. "Poor, dear Cecilia, who lives for music and never hears any but what we have in this convent! It's good, of course, but not to be compared with the singing of great artists like Madame Holstein. She has all that nature and art and years of the best European training can give. New York has gone mad over her. Last Friday night, when she sang Fidès, she was called before the curtain eight times! The newspapers are full of her, and I have shown Sister Cecilia all the press notices during the opera season. Reverend Mother wishes her to see them, as the criticisms help her in her musical work. When she discovers Ernestine's last name and knows she is the child of Holstein—" Miss Iverson stopped and smiled in sweet anticipation. Then she caught her friend around the waist and waltzed her lightly along the polished floor.
"Do you know," she exclaimed, when they stopped, "I have discovered a secret about Sister Cecilia? She is starving for music. That seems absurd, doesn't it, when she lives in an atmosphere of it all the time. But I think I know what she wants she is hungry for a great orchestra, or a really wonderful human voice. Sister Edgar, whose voice promised much, died, you know. That almost broke Cecilia's heart. And now, when she reads these notices I give her, and when I describe to her the singing I hear when we go to the opera, it is pathetic to see her face. Several times her eyes have filled with tears. I shall enjoy telling her who Ernestine is."
The revelation was not long delayed, for she met Sister Cecilia in the corridor several hours later, and was rewarded by the light that flashed in the nun's eyes as she told her story.
"Madame Holstein has only this one child," said May, "and she could not live away from her; so she brought her to this country when she came for the season. Ernestine is a dear thing, and her mother wishes to have her where she can see her every month or two. I know all this, because my sister, Mrs. George Verbeck, is a friend of Madame Holstein's. They met in Germany, and Grace is to entertain her when she comes here in February. I simply cannot wait, for, of course, I shall meet her."
The nun smiled.
"Dear Miss Iverson," she said, gently, "I wonder how the world will treat you when you go out into it with that boundless enthusiasm of yours. I am afraid you will have many disappointments and disillusions."
May looked after her a little resentfully as she went down the hall. "She actually thinks," she murmured, "that she knows more about life than I do." The reflection cheered Miss Iverson, who sighed in happy contemplation of her vast experience during two summer vacations.
Ernestine soon grew accustomed to her new surroundings, and went through the day with placid contentment on her brow. There were attractive small girls around her, and had she not a fascinating new friend, "The Sister Cecilia," as she called her, who took her for walks in the garden and told her stories and, best of all, listened to Ernestine s own stories of her mother? It was a singular friendship, and the quiet nun heard strange tales of travel and music and musicians and great concerts—vivid little word-pictures unconsciously painted by the child against the gray background of the cloister. Madame Holstein had travelled far with her chubby little girl, and Ernestine had turned wide-open, intelligent eyes on all she saw. Flooding the picture was an atmosphere of German home life. Herr Holstein, the husband and father, was an eminent scholar, held in Germany by his duties as professor in a large university. Sister Cecilia saw his letters to his child, and liked the simple, fatherly spirit they breathed. They were written in English, and Ernestine was exhorted to perfect herself in that tongue, during the opportunities afforded her so plentifully.
The two strangers whom she had never seen became vividly familiar figures in the nun's life. She saw the quiet professor, living among his books, loving his wife and child in his matter-of-fact fashion, keeping them in mind and heart, yet bearing with much philosophy their absence from him. And far from him, in the scenes she called up, was the radiant figure of his wife, "the greatest contralto in the world," sweeping on in her brilliant and triumphant career, winning fame and wealth and countless hearts by the magic of her glorious voice. She was a dignified and noble woman, if one might judge by the picture in Ernestine's little locket and those in the leather case that was her greatest treasure. Some of the photographs, taken in various operatic rôles, made the nun turn away with a troubled look in her eyes. These costumes, this acting—surely, they could not be right. Yet that voice—that marvellous voice which God had given the woman—the world must be the better for that. Oh, if she herself could hear it! If once, just once before she died, she could hear a great voice developed to its highest possibilities. For years the longing had been with her. Now it grew and strengthened by this thought-association with the woman who had become the personification of the ideal in her life—still as remote, alas! as if that ideal had never taken form.
Her heart felt heavy at the thought, and her smooth brow clouded. Ernestine, who was chattering at her side on the subject dearest to her, laid her cheek suddenly against the Sister's hand.
"Ach, but I wish you could hear my mother sing," she said. "I wish—I wish it more than anything."
The outspoken expression of the longing in her own heart, the touch of the little cheek—perhaps, too, the strain of many rehearsals of a holiday musical programme—had a singular effect on the nun. She tried to speak and failed. Her lips trembled, and the soft eyes behind her glasses filled. The child looked at her, startled, uncomprehending. A phenomenon had occurred. It could not be—and yet it was. Sister Cecilia was troubled—was sad! Ernestine's little world took on a new coloring, strangely sombre. The Sister, the beautiful and kind Sister whom she so dearly loved, was unhappy, or ill, or tired. What to do for her? A sudden realization of the futility of the sympathy of a little girl settled upon Ernestine. At home, when she was tired, her mother sang to her. Here in this lonely convent, when her dolls were ill, she sang to them. Assuredly, singing was the remedy for those who were sad. Yet who should sing to the Sister Cecilia? The child meditated silently. Sister Cecilia, again mistress of herself, smilingly took Ernestine's hand and led her down the hall.
"Thank you, dear," she said, brightly. "It would be a great pleasure to hear your mother sing, but you know we do not go to concerts or operas."
The grasp of the small hand in her own suddenly tightened. Under the mass of yellow hair much thinking had been going on, and at the Sister's words the music-loving atom trotting at her side was conscious of an inspiration. A smile enlarged Ernestine's round face, but she said nothing. She was a child of intelligence and sturdy German reserve.
Two months later "the Sister Cecilia" sat in her private music-room, putting on paper the notes of a melody that had rung in her ears for days. It was Saturday afternoon, and that wing of the great building was deserted. A February storm of sleet and snow beat upon the windows, but the nun heard nothing of it. Beside her a grand piano stood open, and she vibrated between the instrument and her writing-table, playing a few bars of her music, then writing rapidly with her near-sighted eyes close to the paper. It was not singular that she failed to hear the soft beat of a little hand on the outside of the heavy door—a child's tentative rap. It was repeated, and followed by three distinct strokes from knuckles of a very different kind. Then the door opened, and Ernestine flew into the room, impetuously pulling with her a tall, blond woman, wrapped in heavy furs. The child was radiant. Every dimple was on exhibition, and her eyes danced as she whirled her companion towards the table from which the nun had hastily risen. It did not need the resemblance between the two to tell Sister Cecilia who her distinguished visitor was, The first words she spoke did that, and the rich tones made the nun's heart beat faster. Madame Holstein spoke English correctly and rapidly, but with a marked foreign accent.
"The Sister Cecilia, is it not?" she said. "It is a great pleasure to me to thank you for your kindness to my lonely little girl. Ernestine has written much of you. I think we share her heart among us—you and I and the dear father in Germany."
"You are most kind," said the nun, gently, "but I have really done little for the child that calls for gratitude. She is good and industrious, and I think she is overcoming her loneliness as she knows us better."
She looked up at the other woman as she spoke with a sweet shyness in her glance. It was the musician's tribute to the genius of the singer. Something in it touched the visitor.
"You will allow me to remain, will you not, a little while?" she asked as she took the chair the nun indicated. "I have had the pleasure of meeting the Reverend Mother, as my little girl calls her. She was good enough to let me come to you in this informal way."
She settled herself comfortably as she spoke, and, loosening her furs, threw them over the back of her chair. They made a rich setting for her superb blond coloring. Her child, standing beside her, nestled radiantly in the curve of the maternal arm. Sister Cecilia's breath came a little faster as she studied the picture, her hands demurely folded in her lap.
"You must know, Sister," added the singer, "that I have known of you long before my little Ernestine wrote of you. Your name I did not know, or where you were, but your songs—yes, I knew what we musicians all know—that hidden away in some convent a Sister with a soul for music was giving beautiful songs to the world. Many of them I have sung at my concerts and recitals, always with applause of tears. To-day I asked your Mother Superior if she knew the musician, and she told me it was you—you who have been so kind to my baby. Thus, you see, for two things I must thank you—for your songs and for your kindness to my little one."
A lump came into Sister Cecilia's throat. She could not speak. The singer saw and understood. She took off her gloves and walked to the piano.
"Because you are so kind," she added, smiling, "I ask something more of you. I wish to sing several of your songs to you, that you may tell me if I interpret them rightly. Your 'Vesper Song' every one sings differently. Yet it is always beautiful; they cannot spoil it."
She struck the opening chords. Ernestine sat down on the floor beside the piano-stool, close enough to lay her cheek against her mother's skirt. Sister Cecilia rose as if hypnotized, and leaned against the piano, facing the singer. She was white. Madame Holstein smiled back at her with perfect comprehension of the tumult under the calm exterior she presented.
"By the way," she said, "I asked the Reverend Mother if I may sing to you, and she said yes, most graciously. My little girl wished it, and I longed to do it."
She began the "Vesper Song," and as the first wonderful notes filled the room, Sister Cecilia dropped her black-veiled head on her folded arms. Here was the supreme moment for which she longed—come to her at last by the grace of God. How good He was! For this—was this her music? This great, soft, golden river of melody that flowed around her? Had she even so small a share in it as the composer's part? Had she actually written this exquisite prayer that bore one upward on triumphant wings of faith and hope to Heaven itself? She trembled.
On the floor sat little Ernestine in sphinx-like silence, her short legs straight before her, her blond head shining in the rich dark folds of her mother's gown. Outside, the storm, gaining hourly in fury, hurled great masses of snow against the window-panes. The short winter afternoon was coming to an end, and heavy shadows were already forming in the corners of the music-room. The great singer sang on, adapting her selections to the silent auditor before her; and the nun listened with no thought of time or place or person, with consciousness of nothing in the world except the marvellous art, the glorious voice of the woman, this idol of thousands, who had turned from them all for a little time to sing to her alone.
Madame Holstein whirled about on the piano-stool, and at the sound the nun started and looked as if she had been suddenly recalled to earth. She had not said one word, but her attitude was more eloquent than thunders of applause. Madame Holstein smiled as she looked in her startled eyes.
"Now," she said, with a fascinating abruptness, "I shall sing to you some operatic music—something from 'Le Prophète.' Fidès—I may say it to you frankly—is my best rôle. You do not know the story—no? Fidès is the mother of the prophet. In her part is the gamut of a mother's love—the tenderness, the triumph, the sorrow, the suffering, the forgiveness—a mother's heart set to music, one might say, dear Sister. See, you shall take this chair a little out of the way; and you, my lambkin, shall remove yourself on your fat legs to a nice corner. Mother is going to do an opera for Sister Cecilia—acting, recitative, arias, situations, and all except the hot, glaring footlights. And I will play some of the other parts for you, Sister. Thus you will get an idea of the music and the opera as a whole."
She moved about the room energetically as she spoke, pushing the chairs out of the way, arranging a mise-en-scène to please her, and hastily outlining the story of the opera to the nun as she worked. Her eyes were as bright and her cheeks as flushed as those of her little girl. It was a new experience for the famous prima donna—this impromptu performance in the music-room of the great cloister, and she enjoyed it. No vast audience had ever roused in her the sensation that filled her now. Holstein, like many of her class, was spoiled, capricious, and unreasonable, but the best that was in her came to the surface as she faced those two—her daughter and the nun. She knew that she was giving to the silent singer of the cloister a supreme hour of life.
"First," she said, as she took her place at the piano again, "we will have the great aria in the second act—Ah, mon fils. I will play the accompaniment here, for there is little action. We have only the proud old mother standing behind her son's chair blessing him for saving her life, though to do it he gave up the woman he loved. He sits at a little table with his head on his arms, and she sings:
"Ah, mon fils, ah, mon fils,
Sois béni.
Ta pauvre mère
Te fus plus chère
Que ta Bertha."
Never had the great singer sung as she sang then. The nun held her breath as the glorious voice sobbed itself into silence. And by some trick of imagination—or who shall say how or why?—before Sister Cecilia's eyes rose a vast, bare stage, a table with a broken man drooping over it, an old mother singing her heart out at his side. Tears fell from the nun's eyes on her tightly clasped hands that lay in her lap, but she was unconscious of them.
"Now you hear the 'Alms Song,'" said the singer. "Here Fidès thinks her son is dead, and begs in the street for money that she may buy masses for the repose of his soul."
The agonizing cry poured out:
"Donnez, donnez, pour une pauvre âme, ouvrez lui le paradis …
Donnez, donnez à la pauvre femme,
Qui prie, hélas! pour son fils."
In the narrow street of the quaint old town the white-haired, broken-hearted mother begged of the passers-by. The nun saw it all, felt it, with the double intensity of religious and musical ecstasy. Almost hidden in the deep shadows of a corner of the room she leaned forward, drinking it in, and lost in it. To the supremest possible extent was she following every shade of the music, every element in the dramatic situations, every beauty of that voice.
"Act fourth," said the singer, softly, "the great scene in the temple where Jean denies his mother." She sang:
"Qui je suis?
Qui je suis? moi?
Je suis, hélas! Je suis la pauvre femme
Qui t'a nourri, t'apporté dans ses bras."
To the right stood the stately figure of the prophet in his white robes, with his followers around him. The music of the wonderful march that preceded the scene still echoed faintly in the ear. But who could hear it, who could see the prophet and his great train when this music flowed from the lips of his old mother on the left? Madame Holstein looked at the nun's face as she sang, and was satisfied with what she saw there. She was responding to a unique inspiration, and in this bare convent room, with a black-veiled nun held in absolute possession by her voice, she gave herself to her singing with no husbanding of force. It was a new and thrilling triumph. Little Ernestine was placidly sleeping in her corner, but her one listener was affording the famous singer such appreciation as she never had from audience before. She could feel the soul of the woman set apart from the world quiver under the tones with which she charged it.
"There are but two more," she said, "and the best is the last, I think. For here is Fidès, singing alone as she awaits her fate in the gloomy crypt where they have cast her under the cathedral of Miinster."
"O toi qui m'abandonnes, mon coeur est désarmé …
Ta mère te pardonne. Adieu."
"When she sees him, she forgives him, of course," murmured the singer, playing softly Jean's part in the duet that followed. "She forgives him, and she comes back to die with him at the end, with the final, maternal cry of her big, loving heart.
"Moi, qui viens te pardonner et mourir avec toi …
Ah, viens, divine flamme, vers Dieu qui nous réclame,
Porter notre âme, libre de ses erreurs."
The last strain shuddered into silence. The storm, which had seemed tamed to a listening silence, awoke and howled with greater fury. It was almost night. Across the darkening waste of snow that lay in the garden beneath lights appeared, twinkling in the windows of distant wings of the old convent. Madame Holstein walked to the corner where the nun sat, and stood smilingly looking down upon her. Instinctive courtesy roused the Sister from her trance, and she, too, rose, looking at the other woman with eyes that said what her tongue could not speak. Ernestine still slumbered in shameless peacefulness in her corner, her rosy cheek resting against the unsympathetic polished floor. Her mother went to her, bent down and lifted her in her arms. The child was a perceptible burden, but she bore it as lightly and as firmly as a sheet of music when she sang.
"I am afraid my fat baby has lost a little of mother's singing—the singing for which she has been so very hungry for two months," she said, mischievously. "And now she must be roused to take her bread and milk and drive to the hotel. I must have her there with me while I am in the city," she added, a little shamefacedly. "Perhaps it is wrong, but I have a companion who will take good care of her when I am not home. And you know, Sister, when I come in at night, I wish her in my bed, waiting for me. Oh, the longing for her sometimes, the hunger to feel her dear little body in my arms—" She stopped suddenly, and looked down at her sleeping child with an expression on her face that all the maternal music of Fidès had not brought there.
They left the room and went down the corridor together, Madame Holstein still carrying her little girl. The nun walked beside them, answering the singer's light remarks, and thanking her in her sweet, shy way for the music of the afternoon. She was still in a daze, and said little. But the other woman understood.
Hours after the nun had gone to her cell that night, she lay, her eyes open on the darkness, listening to the music that swelled within the four bare walls. Somewhere in the great city outside the silent convent Madame Holstein was singing—singing to thousands of music lovers. She would have a great triumph, no doubt; the brilliant audience would call her out again and again, as those in the East had done. The wonder of it, the glory of it, that one human voice could sway so many!
Yet, somehow, the picture the nun took with her when she at last fell asleep was not the radiant figure of the great artist smiling her thanks before the curtain, nor the grandly maternal figure of Fidès. It was the mother look that had lit Frau Holstein's eyes as she bent over the small, plump, German maid whom she had gathered up in her strong arms—her child, sung to sleep by its mother's voice.