Honor Bright. Richards Laura Elizabeth Howe
hair: moreover it was hair with a story to it. Maman had bought it in Rome, from a woman whose daughter had just entered a convent, and had her beautiful hair cut off. The woman wept, and assured Mrs. Bright that there was no such hair in Rome. Most of it had been purchased by two noble Princesses whom age had deprived of their own chevelure; there was but this little tress left. She had thought to preserve it as a memento of her child, but for the puppazza of so charming a donzella as the – finally – she named a price, and Fiordispina received her head of hair, in place of the bit of fuzzy lamb’s wool which had disfigured her pretty head.
Honor looked long and tenderly at the doll; then, dipping her hand into the pitcher of water that stood on the commode close by, she sprinkled some crystal drops on the calm bisque face.
“Tiens!” she said. “She weeps, my Fiordispina! how lovely she is in affliction, Stephanie! If I dressed her in mourning, but deep, you understand – do you think I might keep her? But no! I have resolved. The sacrifice is made!”
She produced two neat box beds, and laid Fiordispina, serenely smiling through her tears, in one, while Stephanie tucked Angélique snugly in the other. They were covered with their own little satin quilts, embroidered with their names; the boxes were closed and tied with satin ribbon.
“The sacrifice is made!” repeated Honor. “It is accomplished. Don’t tell the other girls!”
And she burst into tears, and wept on Stephanie’s shoulder.
CHAPTER II
HOW HONOR FOUND HER NEW NAME: AND HOW THEY LIVED AT THE PENSION MADELEINE
“Black and red!” said Patricia Desmond. “You look like a Baltimore oriole, Honor!”
“What is that?” asked Vivette. “Bal-ti-moriole? Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?”
“Baltimore – oriole! Roll your ‘r’ twice, Vivi! More – ori-ole!”
“Moro-morio – bah! That does not say itself, Patricia. Moriole, that is prettier, not so?”
“Have it your own way! It’s a bird, and Honor looks like one in her black dress, that’s all. She moves like a bird too; ‘flit’ is the word there, Vivi.”
“Fleet?” Vivette repeated carefully. “Is that co-rect, Patricia?”
Patricia yawned; Vivette was rather tiresome with her English.
“‘Fleet’ will do,” she said. “She’s that too. No, I can’t explain: I’m busy, Vivette.”
“Bee-sy? Like a bee, is that, Patricia? Trés occupée, n’est-ce pas?”
“It does; and if you don’t go away, Vivette, I’ll show you with a hatpin what a bee does!”
“Tiens!” murmured Vivette; “none the less, ‘Moriole’ is pretty, and far more facile to say than ‘Honor’!”
That was how Honor came to be called “Moriole” among the girls; the name clung long after the black dress had been laid aside.
Two years passed; years of calm, peaceful, happy days. Two years of study in the gray classroom, with its desks and blackboards, and its estrade where Madame Madeleine or Soeur Séraphine sat benevolently watching, knitting or rosary in hand, ready to encourage or reprove, as need should arise. They were sisters, the two ladies of the Pension Madeleine, though, as the girls often said, no one would have thought it. Madame Madeleine was the elder by many years. She was more like a robin than one would have thought a person could be; round and rosy, with bright black eyes and a nose as sharp as a robin’s bill. She wore black always, with a little white knitted shoulder shawl; and flat shoes of black cloth which she made herself, no one knew why.
Soeur Séraphine was slender and beautiful, so beautiful in her gray dress and white coif, that every new girl longed to dress like her, and all the girls made up romances about her, no one of which was true. Both ladies were “good as bread,” and everybody loved them, even people who loved no one else; old Cruchon, the milkman, for example, who announced boldly that he hated all human kind.
Two years of récreation in the garden, with its high box hedges, and its brick-paved alleys from which the girls were set once a week to remove the weeds and mosses that came sprouting up between the small bright red bricks. (Thus they learned, Madame would explain, the ceaseless industry and perseverance of Nature, overcoming every obstacle; besides strengthening the muscles of the back in a manner altogether special.)
It was a delightful garden, with its square plots of flowers and vegetables, alternating along both sides of the broad central allée which ran its entire length; its fruit trees fastened primly to the brick walls, “like one’s hair in curl-papers,” as Patricia said; its currant and gooseberry bushes, and the great grapevines that buried the lower wall in a mass of heavy green.
The grande allée was not bricked, but was covered with sand, white and firm and delightful to run on. Was it not rolled every morning by Margoton, daughter of Anak, the gigantic gardener and chorewoman? Here the girls might run at will (within bounds of health, prudence, and good taste, as Madame explained) either for mere pleasure and exercise, or by way of preparation for the Courses, which were held here; the races for the Pommes d’Atalante, the little gilded apples which were more coveted than any other school prize. Of this more hereafter.
Two years of quiet evenings in Madame’s own parlor, the dim, pleasant room with its dark shining floor and old tapestries, its wonderful chandelier of Venetian glass and the round convex mirror that was so good (said Soeur Séraphine) for repressing the sin of vanity in the breast of the Young Person. We sat upright on cross-stitch tabourets, and knitted or embroidered, while Madame or the Sister read aloud, “Télémaque,” or “Paul et Virginie,” or “La Tulipe Noire.”
It was a happy time. Dull, some of the girls found it; Stephanie, for example, who pined for excitement; Rose-Marie, who was desperately homesick for Aigues-Mortes (thought by some the dullest place in Europe); Loulou, who considered all study a forlorn waste of time.
Honor loved it all, and was happy; but as Madame Madeleine frankly said, Honor would be happy anywhere.
“She carries her world with her!” Madame would shrug her kind shoulders under their little white shawl. “We are but scenery, ma mie!”
Whereupon Soeur Séraphine would sigh and murmur, “Poor Honor! poor dear child!” and say a special prayer to Ste. Gêneviève for her favorite pupil.
There were ten of them: three Americans, Patricia Desmond, Maria Patterson, and Honor herself, the rest French or French-Swiss. Rose-Marie was the oldest and had been there longest; poor Rose-Marie, so good, so dull, the despair of all except Soeur Séraphine, who never despaired of any one. Loulou was the youngest, a little mouse-like girl afflicted with a devouring curiosity, which was always getting her into scrapes: scrapes, for which Stephanie, who, I am sorry to say, was somewhat similarly afflicted, was apt to be partly responsible.
Stephanie was pretty, lively, sentimental, and always in love with somebody. She had tried worshipping Patricia, when she first came, but that, Patricia intimated to her quietly, was a thing she could not endure, and the sooner she, Stephanie, dropped it, the better for all concerned. Since then there had been little love lost between the two girls. Stephanie transferred her adoration to Honor, who took it simply, as she took most things, and thought it was wonderful of Stephanie to care for her.
Vivette was pretty, too, – indeed, most of the girls were pretty, a fact which gave Soeur Séraphine more pleasure than she felt it quite right to take in anything so temporary and ensnaring as flesh and blood. But, she would reflect, Vivette, for all her beauty, was serious. Tiens! If she should prove to have a Vocation! When this thought first came to her, Soeur Séraphine felt her heart sink in a strange and certainly a very sinful manner. She loved her vocation; for herself, it had been a heavenly refuge from certain tragic sorrows of her youth. When her convent had been broken up a few years ago, she had been at first like a homeless bird, till the good elder sister, long widowed, had come to her, and folded her in strong, tender arms, and taken her