WHICH INTRODUCES THE HEROINE’S GODMOTHER
If Philomène had not actually a fairy godmother, she had at least the
nearest possible approach to one. To begin with, Godmother was
beautiful. She had the red hair that artists love, a wild-rose
complexion, and a gentle, even voice, which never scolded and never
sneered; she had cool white hands with twinkling rings, and her dresses
made a stately silken frou-frou on the stairs, bringing with them a
faint fragrance of lavender and old-world pot-pourri.
She had a dear little country house called the Cushats, which stood
among pinewoods where pigeons cooed to each other all day long, and the
sea was not far off. Here the summer holidays were spent by Philomène,
“little cushat” as Godmother called her at times, for, as the Danish
proverb says, “a dear child has many names.” She would sit by the hour
in the oak-panelled drawing-room, strumming on the quaint old spinet, or
in the window-seat reading, while the bees murmured perpetually in the
blossoming lime-tree outside. The garden was full of what are usually
called old-fashioned flowers, though for my own part I should be slow to
connect anything quite so tiresome as fashion, with anything quite so
sweet as flowers. There the snowdrops came at Candlemas, and the
daffodils on Lady Day, and there was a whole big hedge of the rosemary
that Shakespeare loved.
Besides the Cushats, Godmother had a house in London, where there were
broad flights of stairs with shallow steps, and vistas of reception
rooms with polished floors and beautiful pictures and cabinets filled
with eastern curios. Godmother’s own boudoir was a remote hushed corner,
where in midwinter forced lilac drugged the air with subtle sweetness.
It was here that Philomène often took tea with her, and when full
justice had been done to the toast and cakes, Isolde would take her seat
in a low chair before the fire, and Philomène, curling herself up on the
hearth-rug, much as Queen Mab might have done had she been invited,
would lay her clasped hands in her godmother’s lap, and begin to “want
to know.”
“Godmother,” she had said on one of these occasions, “I want to know if
it is cruel to keep caged birds. Do you remember when you took me to
church with you a few Sundays ago, and they went round singing the
Litany? Well, just as the choir-men passed me they were saying, ‘and to
show thy pity upon all prisoners and captives,’ and I thought at once of
Master Mustardseed.”
“But Master Mustardseed came to you of his own accord,” replied
Godmother in her kind, low voice, “and I think a canary might find it
very difficult to fend for himself if you set him free in England. All
the same, when you are grown up, you need never keep any caged birds if
you do not want to.”
“Well then, you know the picture in the schoolroom with the baby in it,
and the bird pecking at the ear of corn,” continued Philomène. “I had
just made up such a nice story about it all, when Miss Mills told me
that it was a ‘Flight into Egypt,’ and that I ought not to make a play
of it. But how was I to know? They hadn’t any halos. And, O Godmother, I
had just planned that the ugly idol had enchanted a prince and princess
and had turned them into the donkey and the bird, and that the grass and
the corn they were eating would turn them back again. Then I asked Miss
Mills what the idol and the bird really did mean, but she could not tell
me. She only said she supposed it must be some silly legend. Whenever
Miss Mills does not know the answer to what I ask her, she says it must
be a silly legend. What do they mean, Godmother?”
“The picture is a modern one,” said Isolde, “that is why the Holy Family
are painted without halos, and Miss Mills was quite right about its
being a legend. Your mother once told me all the different things that
the painter had tried to express in his picture. The smoke above the
trees is supposed to come from an inn, where the inn-keeper and his wife
have just refused to give shelter to the travellers, and it is said that
their children’s children are the gipsies, who have now no settled home
or shelter of their own. Then there is another story that when the idols
of Egypt recognized the true God, they fell down and were broken. The
bird with the outspread wings is the human soul, and the Lord is feeding
it with the Bread of Life.”
“Still you don’t think the Holy Family will mind my having made up the
other story about them, do you?” inquired Philomène anxiously. But
Godmother only shook her head and smiled.
Philomène certainly asked a great many questions, but then Isolde was
never tired of answering them. Yet though she loved her goddaughter
dearly, it was not entirely for her own sake. For she was Rachel’s
child.
Rachel and Isolde had known each other almost all their lives. As little
children they strung daisy chains and made cowslip balls together, as
school-girls they helped each other with their compositions on Simon de
Montfort and the pleasures of a country walk, and when they had grown to
womanhood, Rachel’s marriage in no way lessened their friendship. It was
while she lay dying that she confided her baby to the love of her
friend. “Be good to her, beloved, as you have been to me, and I should
like her to be called Isolde Philomène—Isolde.”
A portrait of Rachel in her wedding-dress hung in Isolde’s boudoir, and
Philomène had grown to love the sweet face and the white folds of the
train. On entering the room her first glance was always for godmother,
and the second for her mother’s portrait.