“Iphigenia,” said Ludovic Argent in London that evening.
His mother looked distressed.
“My dearest boy, I do wish you wouldn’t call her that. It would make
Rosamund more unhappy than she is already, if she heard you, and,
besides, dear little Frances isn’t in the least like any heathen
goddess of that sort. Not that I quite know what Iphigenia ever did,
but I’m sure from your tone that it was something dreadful, and enough
to expel her from any decent religious order.”
“She was only very young--and innocent--and sacrificed,” said Ludovic.
“Just as I say!” untruly remarked Lady Argent, in a tone of triumph.
“_Most_ unlike Frances, who is as happy as she can be, and made her
sacrifice entirely of her own free will, as you perfectly well know.
Unless, Ludovic, you want to make me think that you still believe in
those shocking old myths of nuns being walled up alive and lured into
convents because of their fortunes, which one knows perfectly well
never happened at all, even in the Middle Ages, let alone nowadays with
Government inspections and sanitary improvements and everything.”
“No, I don’t think they’re walling her up, mother,” Ludovic allowed,
with the shadow of a smile crossing his habitually melancholy face.
“But when you say she’s made her sacrifice of her own free will--well,
she doesn’t yet know what it is that she’s giving up, does she?”
“Perhaps,” said Lady Argent with a sort of wistful decision that gave
unwonted lucidity to her utterance, “perhaps she knows what she’s
gaining, better than what she’s giving up, Ludovic.”
Ludovic found no reply.
Presently he asked: “Where is Miss Grantham?”
“I sent her upstairs as soon as we got back. Ludovic, I wish I knew
what to do for her. She minds this dreadfully, poor child, and it’s so
difficult to make her see it from a Catholic point of view. She was
very, very good and brave, for fear of distressing her sister, but she
kept on getting whiter and whiter, and in a way it was really a relief
when we got away from the convent, and she could relax that dreadful
strain.”
“It’s hard on her.”
“Dreadfully,” said Lady Argent, with tears in her eyes. “You see, what
can one say to comfort her? Talking about the Will of God seems such a
mockery, when she isn’t a Catholic.”
“My dear mother! Catholics haven’t got a monopoly of the Will of God.”
“I never for a moment said they had, Ludovic!” cried his mother
agitatedly. “The rain falleth upon the just and the unjust, and all
that, as I _perfectly_ well know, but all I meant was that poor dear
Rosamund can’t be expected to look upon it as being the Will of God at
all. It just seems to her a sort of fanatical idea of making oneself as
miserable as possible.”
“Unfortunately,” said her son dryly, “the misery isn’t confined to the
fanatic. Other people suffer for his act, and have, as you may say, no
compensating belief in the reward to follow.”
“That,” said Lady Argent very earnestly, “is the worst part of it.
I mean, knowing that one is making the people one loves suffer. If
there’s one thing absolutely certain, Ludovic, it is that Frances minds
infinitely more for Rosamund’s sake than for her own--in fact, of
course, she doesn’t mind at all, as far as she herself is concerned,
since she’s deliberately chosen it. But you know what a little
tender-hearted thing she is, and how devoted they’ve always been--and
then you talk about her making Rosamund suffer! which, of course, she’s
doing, poor little dear, but you may be sure it’s every bit as bad for
her.”
“It seems to be a vicious circle,” remarked Ludovic grimly.
He began to limp up and down the length of the room, slowly.
The relation between Rosamund and Frances had always been a thought
that could move him profoundly, for reasons which he had never sought
to analyze. Perhaps it was the memory of the two children who had been
brought across the valley to see his mother by Mrs. Tregaskis. At all
events he could recall at will, and always with that sensation of acute
and impotent compassion, the child Rosamund who had crouched on the
ground to listen outside a closed door.
He thought of her now.
“Mother,” he demanded abruptly, “let me know how it stands. Has she
taken any vows yet?”
“Oh no. This was only her _prise d’habit_. She gets her religious name,
you know, and all her hair is cut off--not that the Prior really did
cut it with those blunt old scissors under her veil--quite impossible.
It must have been properly done afterwards.”
“Then she could still change her mind?”
“Yes, if she wanted to. She won’t take even her first vows for another
year, and then they’ll only be temporary ones. The Church is very
prudent in these matters, Ludovic.”
“I dare say,” said Ludovic, with no marked conviction in his tones.
“Well, at all events, she’s not bound herself down yet, and she’s very
young. Would there be any difficulty about her coming away if she
wanted to?”
“Of course not, my dear boy. Don’t suggest anything so preposterous.
Anybody would think,” said Lady Argent plaintively, “that you were like
Sir Walter Scott or somebody dreadful of that kind, who always wrote
as though the Church was a most barbarous institution, and convents
and monasteries only good for extermination. Of course they would
let Frances go in a minute if she wasn’t happy. It’s a question of
_vocation_.”
“Well,” said Ludovic hopefully, “there’s still a chance, then, that she
may find she’s mistaken her vocation.”
“Yes,” said Lady Argent reluctantly, “and I’m afraid that Rosamund is
building on that. She keeps saying: ‘It can’t last--it’s only a phase.
Francie will come away again.’ But, indeed, Ludovic, I don’t think she
will.”
“If it’s any comfort to her sister, mother, I should let her think it.
Anyhow, it gives her time to become more reconciled to the idea, before
the whole thing is made irrevocable.”
Lady Argent shook her head, and said that dear Ludovic knew nothing
about it, and what was the use of living in a fool’s paradise, though
of course one couldn’t exactly say that poor Rosamund was in any sort
of paradise just now, but she ended by following her son’s advice and
allowing Rosamund to dwell on the thought that sooner or later Frances
would relinquish her convent life.
Ludovic, however, observant and speculative, came to the conclusion,
during the few days she spent with them in London, that there was no
conviction in Rosamund’s assertion that sooner or later her sister
would return to her.
He would have liked to talk to Rosamund, the instinct of compassion
within him reminding him strangely of their first meeting in the Wye
Valley days.
But she hardly appeared to be conscious of his existence, and Ludovic
was too intuitive not to be aware that her every faculty was still
absorbed in Frances, and Frances only.
On the evening before she left London, however, Ludovic obtained a few
words with Rosamund.
He found her in the hall, looking wistfully at the letters which had
just come in by the last post.
She looked up with a faint smile at the sound of his crutch upon the
tiles.
“It’s very foolish, but I keep thinking that I shall have a letter
from Frances,” she said. “And all the time I know quite well she isn’t
allowed to write more than once a week--and even that is only supposed
to be a very special concession.”
“In Heaven’s name, why? What _is_ the object of it all?”
She looked at him with a shade more colour in her face as though she
was grateful for his vehemence.
“I can’t really see any object in it, myself, but from their point of
view it’s--it’s self-sacrifice, and so it becomes desirable.”
“To propitiate a Being whom they call the God of Love?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. You see,” said Rosamund, “it’s only the
personal application that matters to me. Cousin Bertha says I am very
egotistical, and I think it’s true. Nothing seems to matter to me _at
all_, except just Frances and me, now. Nothing else seems in the least
real. Once I thought something else was, but it was only a mistake. It
didn’t really get down to bedrock at all--not half so much as with one
little-finger-ache of Frances.’ I suppose everyone has something which
is realest in the world, besides which other things simply don’t count.”
“That’s quite true,” said Ludovic, wondering if it was a relief to
her to talk. “The true secret of life has always seemed to me to lie
in the focussing of that one especial thing which is the most real to
each of us. So many people don’t know what it is, or they may know,
and wilfully blind themselves because it is contrary to a conventional
ideal.”
“I would much rather have thought that Morris had broken my heart and
spoilt my whole life, than that he was merely an incident,” murmured
Rosamund, as though to herself. “That was a conventional ideal.”
Ludovic was struck by the fundamental sincerity of her outlook. He
looked at her tired, downcast face and said nothing.
“But now,” she told him, gazing straight at him, “I know that nothing
in my life has mattered at all, so far except just Frances and the
ordinary primitive facts of our being sisters, and having been children
together.”
“I think,” said Ludovic gently, “that the ordinary primitive facts are
the ones that one does come back to in the long run, always, as the
things that matter most.”
“Frances hasn’t.”
“She is very young,” said Ludovic pitifully. “Don’t you think she may
change her mind?”
“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Rosamund. “If I didn’t think that, day and night,
I should go mad. If I thought it would go on like this always--I
couldn’t bear it.”
Ludovic knew that nothing goes on always, that the strongest, swiftest
tide knows but its ebb and flow, but he would not tell her so then.
“Don’t you think she will come away?” she asked him urgently, as though
she could not bear the thought that his silence might imply a dissent.
“I hope with all my heart that she may, for her sake and for yours,”
he said gravely. “But--if you knew she was happy there, and wanted to
stay?”
“I don’t know what would happen then,” she said. “It’s as though my
mind stopped, when I think of that. I just can’t imagine any further.”
She covered her eyes with her hand, and then turned slowly to go
upstairs.
Ludovic saw that she had forgotten his presence.
He stood looking after her rather wistfully, and suddenly she turned
and came back to him.
“Good-night,” she said rather breathlessly. “You are the only person
who has seemed to understand at all.”
He was left with a strange sense of having found the child Rosamund
again, and with an absolute conviction that, in spite of all her
assertions as to Frances’ return to the world, she yet knew them to be
vain.
Nevertheless, Rosamund clung passionately to those assertions, both
then and on her return to Porthlew. They seemed in some strange,
inadequate way, to protect her from Bertha’s regretful philosophy and
resignation, and from Minnie’s bland assumptions and consolations.
“After all, we live and learn, and it takes all sorts to make a world.
That’s why it’s such a queer one, I suppose. At least, it’s not the
world, so much as the people in it.”
Thus Miss Blandflower, surpassing herself. And adding, with regretful
shakings of the head:
“Poor dear little Frances! But I suppose it’s as it will be, you know.”
“Minnie, my dear woman, you’re a fool,” said Mrs. Tregaskis bluntly.
“What on earth can you possibly mean by ‘it’s as it will be’? And if
you _do_ mean anything, of what consolation is it to this poor little
_mater dolorosa_ here?”
She laid her hand kindly on Rosamund’s shoulder.
Miss Blandflower had lived with Mrs. Tregaskis for a number of years,
had a whole-hearted adoration for her, and was not at all sensitive.
Neither was this the first time that her dear Mrs. Tregaskis, with
playful candour, had called her a fool. She therefore smiled with great
placidity, and said deprecatingly:
“Dear Mrs. Tregaskis! I always say you’re such a purist--always
catching one up. I’m afraid I’m dreadfully slipshod in my way of
speaking sometimes--but while there’s life there’s hope. You may yet
cure me, in my old age.”
“I doubt it very much, Minnie,” said Bertha briskly, to which Miss
Blandflower thoughtfully rejoined:
“I doubt it, said the carpenter, and shed a bitter tear,” which saying
Bertha had so long regarded as part of Minnie’s stock equipment that
she scarcely heard it, and addressed herself to Rosamund again.
“Well now, daughter mine, I want to hear all about the child.”
Mrs. Tregaskis had sometimes employed this proprietary form of address
in speaking to Rosamund since Hazel’s marriage. She seldom used the
words lightly, however, but as though to denote some deeper sympathy or
kindness.
Rosamund looked at her unintelligently.
Her head felt stupefied from the tears she had shed, violently and
uncontrollably, during the few days she had spent with Lady Argent, and
she was far more physically shaken by the strength of her undisciplined
emotions than she realized.
On the night of her return to Porthlew, Cousin Bertie had said very
kindly: “I see how it is, my child,” and had sent her to bed at once,
and come up twice to see that Rosamund had all she wanted, and was
really going to sleep. She had asked no questions, only saying: “You
shall tell me all about it to-morrow.”
And now to-morrow had come, and Rosamund, who had slept heavily and
dreamlessly until after nine o’clock, was to tell them all that had
happened during her brief stay at the convent, all the details about
Frances that her little circle wanted to know, give them all the loving
messages that Frances had sent.
She wished dully that she could apply some kind of spur to her brain,
which felt oddly and inexplicably incapable of transmitting into images
any impression of the convent she had visited. Even her tongue felt
curiously weighted, as though speech were an almost impossible effort.
“Come,” said her guardian encouragingly, “how does the little thing
like it? Her letters don’t tell one very much, but perhaps that isn’t
altogether her fault.”
“No, I don’t think it is.”
“Ah,” said Miss Bandflower, shaking her head, “I always thought those
letters of hers were not what I call _spontaneous_. Like being in
prison for her, isn’t it--practically?”
Rosamund whitened, and Frederick Tregaskis remarked in a detached tone:
“I suppose that by ‘practically’ you merely mean, like every other
woman, ‘theoretically.’”
“He! he! he!” giggled Minnie nervously, as she invariably did when
addressed by Frederick, thereby causing him to cast upon her an
infuriated glance of contempt, as he relapsed into his habitual silence.
“Do you think she’s happy?” asked Bertha, looking sharply up from her
knitting.
“She said she was, and that she felt in the right place.”
“A place for everything and everything in its place,” muttered Minnie.
“Ah well!”
“H’m! She evidently knows better than the Almighty then, since the
place _He_ put her into was Porthlew, in my opinion. However, she’s
like so many of her generation--finding it easier to serve abroad than
to be served at home. Poor little girl! Did she look well, Rosamund?”
“Fairly.”
“Only fairly?”
“She’s less thin than she used to be, but her eyes looked tired, I
thought.”
“That sounds like nerves,” said Miss Blandflower, shaking her head with
a sapient expression.
She had persisted in looking upon Frances as a victim to “nerves” ever
since she had first heard of her wishing to leave Porthlew for the
convent.
“Want of sleep, probably,” said Frederick.
A dull pang went through Rosamund at the words, though they only
confirmed her own sick apprehensions and surmises, and she said
apathetically:
“Yes. They get up at five every morning, always.”
“Yes, my dear, but they go to bed early, don’t they?” sensibly remarked
Mrs. Tregaskis.
“About half-past nine, I think. That’s when they all leave the chapel.”
“Oh, well, there you are. It doesn’t hurt anyone to get up early
if they go to bed early enough. It’s the sleep that you get before
midnight that counts, you know,” said Mrs. Tregaskis comfortably.
“‘Early to bed and early to rise
Makes little folks healthy, wealthy, and wise,’”
added Miss Blandflower encouragingly. She was generally late for
breakfast herself, but more from innate unpunctuality than because she
failed to rise between seven and eight o’clock every morning.
“Well, Rosamund, dear, can’t you tell us a little something about the
ceremony? Was it pretty?”
“Yes, I think it was, Cousin Bertie.”
Rosamund racked her brains. If only she did not feel utter inability to
speak!
Once or twice before in her life this same sensation, which she could
only translate into physical terms by telling herself that her tongue
felt as though it were weighted, had assailed her.
She thought of it as a sort of partial paralysis, and something of the
blankness of her sensations was reflected in her speechless fixity of
gaze. Her guardian looked at her.
“Now, look here, old lady,” she suddenly said with all her
characteristic authoritative kindness in her voice, “I don’t want to
drag this out of you bit by bit, if you feel it’s rather more than you
can stand just yet. But remember that Frances is my child as well as
your sister, and we all love her and want to hear about her. I don’t
approve of what’s she’s done, and I don’t choose to go and countenance
a performance of which I dislike the idea as much as I do that
wedding-dress business. But I was glad and willing that you should go,
as you know, and I want news of her--so do we all. Now, Rosamund, if
you’re too sore to talk about any of it, just say so, and we’ll try to
make allowances and wait until you can overcome yourself a little for
the sake of other people. But once for all--I’m not going to pump you.”
Mrs. Tregaskis set her lips in a very determined way indeed, and
knitted vigorously, and Miss Blandflower, seizing upon her last words,
repeated vaguely: “It is the pump, the village pump.”
Rosamund sought for words desperately.
She evolved at last a halting, stammered, lifeless account of the
_prise d’habit_, of Mrs. Mulholland’s officiousness, of the afternoon
in the garden with Frances, and the interview with the novice-mistress.
“They’re satisfied with her, then?”
“Oh yes. The nuns told Lady Argent that Frances was _trés docile--tout
a fait l’habitude de l’obéissance_.”
“Aha!” laughed Bertha. “She owes something to her wicked old heathen
guardian, after all, then. I venture to think that _l’habitude de
l’obéissance_ was picked up at Porthlew.”
“Nonsense,” was the contribution of Mrs. Tregaskis’ husband to the
conversation. “Frances was submissive by nature, and it would have cost
her a great deal more to disobey than to give in.”
Frederick was too much apt to speak of his wife’s departed protégée
in the past tense, but Rosamund shot him a look of gratitude for the
understanding which his speech seemed to denote.
“She may have been submissive, Frederick,” his wife said quietly, “but
you don’t have to look very far to see that Frances was self-righteous
enough to blind her to her own self-will. Look at the way she left this
house.”
“She thought she was doing right,” said Rosamund quickly.
“I know that perfectly well. I understand Frances, Rosamund, quite as
well as you do--better, perhaps, since I’m an experienced old lady
who’s seen something of human nature. But that’s neither here nor
there. We’ve discussed the ethics of the case often enough. The child’s
taken her own way, and I want to hear something about how she’s getting
on.”
“I think she’s happy,” said Rosamund rather doggedly. Bertha looked
doubtful, and said with rather a curt laugh: “Well, I suppose getting
one’s own way makes up for a good deal.”
“Undoubtedly,” observed her husband. “You can see a striking example of
the advantageous results of self-will in our daughter Hazel, Bertha.”
Mrs. Tregaskis, who never made any reference to that side of Hazel’s
marriage which was oftenest in her thoughts, flushed her heavy
infrequent red and remained silent.
Miss Blandflower looked frightened.
“I am afraid the day will come,” she remarked courageously, “when
Hazel, as well as poor dear little Frances, will wish she hadn’t taken
her own way and ... and flown in the face----” Her voice trailed away
feebly.
Lady Marleswood had become yearly more radiantly prosperous and happy
since her marriage, but Minnie still clung faithfully to the thought
of the day that would come, even while rejoicing admiringly at the
occasional glimpses vouchsafed to Porthlew of Hazel and her happiness.
Bertha Tregaskis broke the silence abruptly.
“Did you give her my message about her money affairs, Rosamund, and
what does she want to do?”
“She said she would have to make a will after she comes of age, when
she takes her vows. It seems to be quite a usual thing for nuns to do.”
“I dare say,” snorted Frederick. “Supervised by the Mother Superior, I
presume?”
“I suppose so,” said his wife shortly. “I don’t imagine they’ll turn up
their noses at three hundred a year.”
“Perhaps she’ll have left before then,” said Miss Blandflower
hopefully, and Rosamund, far from exalted as her opinion generally was
of Minnie’s prognostications, looked at her gratefully.
“Listen to my words of wisdom, dear, and you’ll see I’m right,”
declared Minnie, encouraged by any unwonted signs of attention, so
few of which ever came her way. “_I_ undercumstumble our little
Francesca--we shall see her trotting home one of these days, you mark
my words.”
Little though Porthlew was in the habit of marking Miss Blandflower’s
words, they brought a shred of comfort to Rosamund.
She was striving with passionate intensity to persuade herself that
Frances would leave the convent before taking vows there, and that her
desire for the religious life was only a phase.
Even when the months went on and her sister’s letters gave no sign of a
possible return, Rosamund told herself that in the next letter Frances
would ask to be taken away. She could not face any other possibility,
and felt, as she had told Ludovic, as though her very imagination
stopped at, and could never take in, the prospect of a future without
Frances, with Frances permanently established in a strange, new life
where one would never know anything of her inner existence, and might
not even be told if she were ill or unhappy.
The thought to her was unendurable.
She had no natural tendency towards religion, and very little belief in
any beneficent Deity, but she took to a sort of frenzied praying, that
the God whom Frances worshipped might reject her sacrifice.
The material aspects of convent life, as Rosamund had seen them during
her day at the convent, began to obsess her. She obtained books that
told of the lives of nuns, the foundations of religious orders, and the
rule prevailing there. The accounts of some of the physical austerities
practised by the more ascetic orders turned her sick, and her nights
began to be haunted by visions of Frances, starved and emaciated,
bleeding under the self-imposed lash of a knotted scourge.
“I am exaggerating--I am going mad,” Rosamund told herself. “Frances is
well and happy--her letters say so.”
“_But her letters are read before they reach me._”
She writhed at the thought.
Her very ignorance of convent life added to the sense of horror which
was gradually taking possession of her imagination.
She looked back upon the days when she and Frances and Hazel had been
children together as at some incredible other life, full of a security
so supreme that it had been undreamed of by any of them.
In vain Rosamund told herself, with a piteous attempt at readjusting
her focus upon life, that change was only development, that alteration
was bound to mark the inevitable way of progress.
“Not this way,” her anguish protested wildly. “Not this way. Hazel has
cut herself off to a certain extent by her own voluntary act, but at
least she is happy and free--and my Francie--how do I know her to be
either?”
Only two things stood out saliently in the darkness which encompassed
Rosamund’s soul: her resolution not to add to the cost of Frances’
sacrifice by any pleadings of her own, and her anguished trembling hope
that Frances might yet relinquish that way which seemed so fraught with
suffering for them both.