The Argosy — page 377: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

356 The Village Blacksmith. locked, and happily the key was not in the lock. She searched in the hall and in the portress’s little room, but she could not find it; and at last she seemed to accept the fact that escape that way was impossible. ‘Then she remembered in her sleep that she could get into the garden by a side door, and mechanically she turned to go towards it, forgetting that there was no exit from the high walled-in garden to the road. Her one need seemed to be to get outside the convent into the open air; and turning into the enclosure, oblivious of the fact that it was forbidden ground, she walked down the cloisters towards the garden door. As she walked down the empty cloister, the distant sound of the nuns’ voices reciting a psalm as they returned from their night office filled the air, but the sound did not reach Vera’s sleeping ears. Every sense and every nerve were concentrated on one object, namely, to reach the open air. Suddenly, as she turned a corner and entered the corridor which led from the chapel, she came face to face with the long procession of nuns, looking very ghostly in the dimly-lighted corridor, wrapped in their long black cloaks and walking in pairs, their hands folded under their scapulars ; but Vera did not see them. She walked on in the centre of the corridor till she reached the advancing procession, which divided somewhat abruptly to let her pass. Some of the frightened nuns thought they were meeting the ghost of one of their community long since dead; some of them recognised Vera, in spite of her habit and the strange look in her open eyes; but all were too well disciplined to speak in the cloisters, where silence was the rule. So she passed unhindered down the long lines of veiled figures until she reached the Prioress, who, startled as she was, could scarcely contain her delight at being a witness among many others of Vera’s somnambulistic powers. “It is Miss Tempest walking in her sleep ; we must follow her,” whispered the Prioress to the nun at her side; and turning round they left the other nuns to go back to their beds, while they followed where Vera chose to lead them. On went Vera, her long golden hair streaming in heavy masses down her back long past her waist, down the now dark cloister ; for the nuns had extinguished the gas as they passed, and her solitary candle only made the darkness visible. She glided past the chapel from which the nuns had just emerged, and then turned down another long corridor at the end of which was the door into the garden. Here she stopped and tried to open the door, but this too was locked and the key was not in the lock. Vera rattled the handle in vain, and then she put the lighted candle down on the floor and with both her little white hands drew back all the heavy bolts, and then tried in vain to open the locked door. Failing, she wrung her hands in despair, crying out as she did so: ‘‘ Arthur! Arthur! the door is locked! I can’t come to you! Oh, what shall I do !—what shall I do!” Eomichbooks.co