“Let me see your face,” she insisted, and put her thin hand under my
chin.
“It is a pretty and an innocent one,” she declared. “How came you,
child, in the position in which Father Pope found you?”
I told her how I had been stolen by the sweep, and had escaped from
him rather than seem to concur in the violence offered to my religion.
“It was an ingenious and a courageous act,” she said, gently kindling;
“was it not, Father?”
The bear snorted, dissent or commendation--it was all one.
“Ask her about her mother,” he growled.
“True,” said the lady, with a gesture of involuntary repulsion, for
which she the moment after atoned with a caress.
“She had been a Sister in the Hospital of St. Magdalen, Father Pope
tells me,” she said very low. “She had returned there to expiate
her--her”--
“No,” I broke in.
“You told me so,” roared the priest.
“I didn’t,” I said, half crying. “You were looking at your book all
the time I confessed.”
Madame Sophia could not restrain a smile.
“Fie, Father!” she said. “I admit it does not sound the least probable
part of the child’s experiences.”
But she sobered again in a moment.
“She did not return?” she asked. “Then”--
“She is dead,” I whispered.
After all, I believed it was true; that she could not have survived
the wreck of all things which my abduction must have meant to her. The
gentlewoman gave a gasp of pity and self-rebuke, and enfolded me in
her arms.
“Forgive me!” she cried. “O, I was cruel! The poor lost lamb! So
white, so helpless, so delivered to the wolves! But”--she bethought
herself--“where was this?-- And your unhappy father?”
“He had taken me to Brighthelmston,” I stammered; “he was not of our
religion--of any. He made me dance before the pretty prince, and would
have given me to him, but that the sweep whom he fought stole me out
of revenge first.”
The priest and the lady exchanged looks.
“Am I justified?” she asked. “The peril, the iniquity! O, surely,
Father--surely!”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Write to the Magdalens first,” said he, “and verify it.”
She thought a little, then addressed me again.
“And if I do, would you like to make your home here in the meantime,
Diana?”
The strain had been very severe. I fell on my knees before her,
weeping. I knew, from what my governess had once told me, that les
Madelonnettes must confirm the worst of my story.
“O, madam,” I cried, “if you would train me in goodness and piety!”
She kissed me, then looked up, her immobile face quite transfigured.
“Perhaps,” she thrilled, “some day, perhaps some day to fill the place
and vindicate the vows of the poor weak apostate who gave you life!”
“Write to the Magdalens,” growled Father Pope.
VII.
I AM PUT AWAY IN CAMPHOR
I cannot hold Lady Sophia altogether irresponsible for the loss to
the Calendar of a very promising saint. I entered Wellcot enthusiastic
to devote the rest of my days to the practices of piety and
self-renunciation, and I was moved to this resolve not least by the
example my benefactress seemed to offer me of the most perfect
detachment from the world. Alas! I was too soon to realise how the
chaste aloofness of a mind may mean only a vanity so sensitive, and an
irritability so nervous, as for ever to be on their defence against
unwarranted approaches. I had thought her serenely above the
littlenesses of life; and all the time she only sat on a level with
them, but apart, in alarm lest her moral distinction should be held to
justify familiarities with her social. The folded wings of piety may
be used to conceal some uncelestial humours. I had supposed, at least,
that passion was the remotest from her temperament; and there even I
was wrong, as you shall learn.
She wrote, in accordance with Father Pope’s advice, to the Superioress
of the sisterhood to which my mother had belonged. I confess, for all
my confidence, I awaited the answer in some trepidation. It fulfilled,
however, when it came, my best expectations. The charitable Mother
confirmed the story of her former postulant’s recreancy and flight
with a profligate man of fashion--whither, she had never concerned
herself to inquire. The woman, in leaving the convent gates, she said,
had died to her--to all, save the lord of hell, who, she was rejoiced
now to hear, had so soon claimed and secured his own. She would
command a Magnificat that night in praise of the eternal chastity; and
there her interest in the matter ended. She wrote in French, with much
Pharisaic unction, which betrayed, nevertheless, its underlying gall.
Madam quoted to me only so much (I found an opportunity later to read
the whole) as appeared to justify her in the course upon which she was
resolved--my present adoption, that was to say, by her, for the sake
of my soul. I was becomingly meek and grateful in placing myself
unreservedly in her hands; and in this manner began my
self-obliterating martyrdom of five long years in the placid nunnery
of Wellcot.
For a time I was very happy, until a ripening intelligence revealed to
me by degrees the limitations of my moral and material surroundings. I
have no intention to detail the processes of that growth. I can
hardly, indeed, claim an independent life until detached from its dull
experiences. It is enough here briefly to review them.
My first warning disillusionment was the knowledge, to my infinite
disgust, that Father Pope was to remain a permanency in the asylum to
which accident had translated him. Whether his former patrons seized
this opportunity--in the first reactionary days after riot--to rid
themselves of an ungainly incubus, or whether--which is more
probable--he himself manœuvred for transference to new
hunting-grounds, not of souls, but grubs, I do not know. Anyhow, his
baggage being his book, the change was easy, and at Wellcot he
remained, titular chaplain to the Lady Sophia, but positive to a
community of nuns across the valley, who were her most cherished
protégées, and to whose ranks I, in the first blind fervour of my
redemption, unprovisionally dedicated myself.
I had not been long settled before, speculating on the relationship
between Shole and Wellcot-Herring, I began to wonder if I was destined
ever to see again the young gentleman who had so insulted me. Perhaps,
I thought, I might help by my example, and even persuasion, to wean
him from his evil courses. However, the opportunity was not to be
given me, as it appeared he was not sufficiently in love with his
aunt’s ways to pay her even the periodic courtesy of a visit. But his
father the earl came occasionally, and from him I was bent upon
discovering whether or not my image was entirely effaced from the
son’s remembrance.
Happening to meet him alone in the gardens one day, I was actually
emboldened to beg him to convey a message from me to the viscount that
I forgave him.
He stopped, and looked at me with admiration; then took my chin in his
hand.
“I shall do nothing of the sort, Miss Presumption,” he said, in his
thin, ironic voice. “But I’m not so particular for myself. You shall
give me all of your confidences that you like.”
“Thank you,” I said saucily; “I will choose a handsomer to fill the
place of my papa.”
“Was he so handsome?” says he, grinning.
“He was the most beautiful man in the world,” I answered.
“Well, I can believe it,” he said. “But not so handsome as my brother
George, hey?”
“Fifty thousand times,” I said.
“And fifty thousand times better?”
“I don’t know. He was good enough for me.”
“That I can well believe,” he chuckled; then took a turn or two and
came back.
“Harkee, missy,” says he, “I’m not going to peach on you, whatever you
say, so you can be as free as air with me. Only promise not to make me
jealous of my own son, and we’ll be fast friends some day.” And with a
laugh, he left me.
I hated him instinctively, and longed for the time when I could set my
wits to discompose him. He was a widower, and socially and politically
a man of bad character; and it should have been madam’s duty to see
that we were not brought into contact. But she could conceive no evil
of the head of her house.
The brother, the good one, came near us no more than the viscount;
which, nevertheless, did not trouble me, because I owed him a debt,
and he was too poor in purse and reputation to expect me to liquidate
it. Little Patty, after her manner, loved this unfortunate, whom she
had seen often in former days, before his character went over some
racing transaction, which ruined him and made him shy of his
familiars. Her loyalty was proof against the worst. Where she was
pledged, she never dropped away, and her heart had the truest instinct
for finding and attaching itself to what was lovable in another. She
adored nobility of mind, and was always my most faithful little
adherent. I came early to discover that her origin was none of the
most select, and on this account, perhaps, condescended to her more
than I should. She repaid me with a blind devotion and admiration
which were sometimes more affecting than diplomatic; and, before I had
been at Wellcot a year, would have followed me at a word to shame or
death, in very despite of her duty to her patroness. But by then, I
think, she was coming with me to recognise certain flaws in the
character of her former divinity.
It was from her in the first instance that I learned all that she knew
of the family history: How my lord was a brute and libertine, who had
done his wife to death, and was hated and feared of all, unless,
perhaps, by the old dirty astrologer on the hill, who was his kinsman
and Naboth and defier in one, holding the “Folly” in fee simple, as he
did, from a scientific ancestor, and persistently refusing to be
coaxed or bought out of it. How my lady, as pious as her brother was
worldly, had embraced the Romish doctrine many years before, and had
not scrupled, on the Jesuit principle, to procure herself through his
most questionable political relations a virtual exemption from the
penalties which attached to the open exercise of her religion. How,
trading on this connection, she had planted in Wellcot-Herring a
community of the “Sisters of Perpetual Invocation,” whose munificent
patroness and dupe (Heaven forgive me! They were certainly very
plausible little sybarites) she had constituted herself. How the
honourable Mr. Rowe, his lordship’s younger brother, was suspected of
royal blood in his veins, and was only spared the scandal of proof so
long as his nephew, the Viscount Salted, kept him out of the
succession. How, in fine,--and this was where my interest was most
intimately engaged,--her ladyship had once had an _affaire de cœur_
with a Mr. de Crespigny, an artist, who came to paint her portrait,
and who left it on the canvas half finished, being given, it was
whispered, his congé in reluctant return for his insensibility to the
proselytising advances of his sitter.
From little Patty I extracted all this _chronique scandaleuse_, and if
she enlightened me in her own inimitable bashful way, blundering
prettily on the truth out of innocence, I was not so backward even
then as to be imposed upon by half-revelations, or to refrain from
construing them on my own account into the language of experience.
And so I entered on my new life, having, to endear its strangeness,
and soon, alas! its monotony to me, the most loving, simple-minded
little comrade one might imagine. From the first my position, like my
friend’s, was undefined. We were not adopted daughters, or servants,
or companions to madam, but a sort of pious pensioners on her bounty.
She claimed some personal menial duties of us, which might be likened
to those exacted of ladies of a royal bed-chamber. As was befitting
with so great a princess, we might approach and handle her, but
reverently as one might uncover a reliquary of sanctified bones. And,
indeed, she was little else. For myself, I did not much care. My eyes
and ears served me for all her case, howsoever little of her intimacy
was vouchsafed me.
I often put her to bed after supper and prayers, when she would love
to engage me in little drony dialectics on faith. We had amicable
contests of wit, God save me! on the qualities which endeared our
favourite saints to us. I observed that the male beatitudes were her
choice. Her room was hung with as many “Fathers” as a fribble’s is
with Madonnas of the opera-house. The ways of piety are strange. I was
no _dévote_, alas! like madam, yet I should have been abashed to go
to bed in such company.
But, indeed, there was no disputing with her principles. Faith was her
covering argument in everything. She wore it like a garment,
high-necked and impenetrable; only, to my taste, it was none the more
becoming for being fitted over broken stay-bones. Then, too, she moved
so stately by faith, that I had often speculated why her heels should
be trodden over, until I discovered that she had bandy legs. Truly
faith, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. I attribute it to her
that mine came so soon to be in myself. I have never had reason to be
ashamed of anything it hid; only instinct tells me to be more
particular about my garters than my scapular. If the Lady Susannah
Rowe had found herself being spied upon by the Elders, she would have
snatched and donned the latter, and had complete faith in its shelter.
That may be grace, but it is not graceful, I think. Since the first
mother started the fashions, there has been every obligation on us to
consult appearances; and I at least, though never more worldly than
the most, have persistently declined to let Faith make an ostrich of
me.
She used often to send me to the convent across the valley with
messages to the nuns; and I was early in discovering that I was the
more welcomed by them when a little offering of fowls or hothouse
grapes accompanied me. Then I could gain indulgences as many as I
wanted for my peccadilloes--up to twenty at least for a couple of fat
gallinas--and perhaps rather presumed upon my purgatory in
consequence.
This community was a praying order and eternally vowed from washing,
as a personal indelicacy; or from stepping beyond its convent gates,
as a first _faux pas_ into the world; or from ministering to any needs
but its own; or, in short, from being of any practical use on the
earth whatever, save as an authorised agency for the distribution of
“indulgences.” A natural consequence of all of which was that it grew
to be a very pot-bellied little community, as tight-skinned and ruddy
as the pears on its own south wall, and, through its Superioress, as
knowing a judge as any of old port and early asparagus. The bell that
prostrated it on its fat little knees to Angelus was the same that
rang it to dinner. The throat of the thing was hoarse with the steam
of rich pasties and salmis of game that rose from the convent kitchen
hard by. It had mushroom pits and a peach-hung pleasaunce, and,
indeed, by the help of my lady, was altogether as epicurean a little
company for saints’ feast days as could be gathered. The devil, it is
certain, sets up his tent in an empty stomach. He would have found
close quarters, as was proper, in the Convent of Perpetual Invocation.
I will say for the Sisters that I never heard a cross word among them.
Now, to have the command of indulgences, for feast days, and for
dispensations from fast, in such a neat little paradise as theirs,
seemed to me at the first a very desirable thing. Only I hoped that by
the time I was ripe for the novitiate, the chaplain would have been
replaced by one more personable. The Mother had, in common decency, to
undertake to instruct me and Patty by and by in the articles of our
creed, and Father Pope, complete gentleman, to conduct our secular
finishing. We never saw any other man, except village chawbacons and,
at rare intervals, the foxy earl. It was a deadly life. I could not
have endured it but for the society of my sweet little _adoratrice_.
She grew up the dearest thing, with the face of a Christian
shepherdess. One saw lambs, not babies, in her eyes. Holding her
little kind hand in memory, I pass over four years of this
self-obliteration, until I awaken to find myself in my seventeenth
year.
VIII.
I MEET MR. NOEL DE CRESPIGNY
Life without the male element is worse than being limited to shop
windows for the fashions. We can read with patience in a nunnery of
the modes, but not of marrying and giving in marriage. Still, I will
ask any candid critic to judge if an utmost desperation could have
induced me to a conduct, with an accusation of which madam inaugurated
the series of misunderstandings which came to arise between us--an
attempted corruption of Father Pope, to wit! The whole truth of this
fantastic invention is as follows.
When I was near fifteen I had begun to grow troubled in my conscience
as to my Confirmation. How could I face the cloister, an uncertified
soldier of my creed? The chaplain had seemed kinder to me of late; or
perhaps it would be truer to say, less bearishly unapproachable. To be
sure, he could not always be adamant to the natural graces it was his
business to help adorn. And, in proportion as he relaxed, I was moved
to conciliate him with fifty little winning attentions, to which he
could not be altogether insensible. I found plausible excuses for his
confounding entomology with theology, citing the “little Bedesman of
Christ” in vindication of the Nature God. I learned to rear clammy
grubs in pots of earth, that I might surprise him with the
results--beautiful winged creatures which I likened to the souls
emancipated under his tutelage. I discovered, or invented, a hundred
symbols for his hagiology. I sewed buttons on his coat, and brushed
his great hat, with actual reverence for the moth which had settled in
it from the brain below. Was it my fault if the ridiculous creature
misconstrued all these little wistful _égards_? I sought my way only
by him, as one might propitiate a surly but indispensable guide, and
in my utter innocence took his morose silences, and the scowling
suspicion which grew in his eyes, for some late dawn of sympathy, some
increased consideration, if not tenderness, towards the pupil whom he
was conscious of his heart having maligned. How cruelly my trust was
abused, will show in an interview to which madam unexpectedly summoned
me.
“Diana,” she said--she was seated knitting a comforter for the monster
himself, and her lips, as she bent over her work, had a mechanical but
rather shaky smile on them--“have you a daughter’s regard for our good
chaplain?”
“O yes, madam!” I answered, wondering what was to come.
“Yet it is not a daughter’s part to indite love sonnets to her
Father,” she said steadily, without looking up.
I stared, and flushed, and burst into tears. She also reddened, and
produced a paper from her pocket.
“Is this yours?” she demanded. “He found it slipped into his breviary.
It appears to me to bear only one construction.”
“And what is that, madam?” I asked coldly. My little outbreak had been
mastered as soon as vented. My heart blazed with anger over this
outrageous Cymon in a cassock.
“I put the question to you,” she said, her thin bosom heaving a
little. “If it is as I suspect, I should blush to name it.”
“Blush rather for yourself,” I said, in the same chill tone, “to plant
the slander in a young girl’s soul. I will be a Catholic no more.”
She rose, pale and agitated.
“Do you know what you say?” she breathed in fear. “_You!_
self-dedicated to the cloister!”
“I renounce the pledge!” I cried, in a sudden burst of passion. “I
will no longer believe what Father Pope believes, or confess again to
him anything but lies, since those are what he likes to trade in.”
“Hush!” she said, aghast at my fury. Her hands trembled, fluttering
the paper. “Hush! Be calm! You say things you cannot mean. God forgive
you the threat of such apostasy!”
“And you,” I cried, still stormily, “such a witness against a poor
child’s character.”
“No, no,” she entreated, almost abjectly, “I wish only the truth.
Father Pope wishes only the truth. Tell me frankly, do you recognise
these lines?”
With a great effort I subdued my emotion, and took the paper frigidly
from her hand. It was folded at the following verse, which I had to
bite my lips, pretending to read:--
“Thrice happy she who from thy kindling eye
Shall draw some spark to illuminate her breast,
A wistful wanderer between earth and sky,
With doubts of love’s true haven sore oppressed.”
“Do you recognise them?” she repeated.
“Yes, madam,” I acknowledged, looking up between reserve and defiance.
“You do?” she murmured, taken aback. “And it is your hand?”
“No, madam,” I answered quietly. “It is Miss Grant’s, but disguised.”
She echoed the word, at once incredulous, and fearful of exciting
another outbreak by appearing so.
“Disguised! For what purpose? And to whom addressed?”
“To me,” I answered. “It was part of a game between us; but we will
play it no more.”
She echoed in amazement, “A game!” Then asked faintly, “What game?”
“I was the Hermit of the Rocks,” I said, “and Miss Grant the Princess
Camilla, who wrote to consult me as to her vocation, whether for the
cloister or for marriage with a pious young gentleman.”
It was an inspiration, which I had no sooner uttered than I feared for
my rashness. But I need not have. Madam, as her slow perceptives
kindled, grew one shine of happy intelligence.
“A game!” she repeated, smiling holy-motherly over the decorous
innocence of our inventions. “Well, I will say it was a very proper
one, though a little ambiguous in the articles of love to be addressed
to a hermit. But how came it in the chaplain’s book, child?”
I confessed that I had had the curiosity to read in the Father’s
breviary, and must unwittingly have left the paper there for a marker.
She kissed me then, and, while deprecating my inquisitiveness in
matters which did not concern me, apologised very handsomely, I will
say, for having so traduced me on a shred of evidence.
“It shall be a lesson to me, and a penance,” she said. “But, child, go
now and retract your wicked recantation, before perhaps the devil
shall claim you to your sin.”
“It was very hard, madam,” I said, still rebellious. “Why, being
disguised, should Father Pope have decided as of course that the
verses were mine?”
“Ah!” she said, blushing and embarrassed. “That I do not know--I
think; but little Patty is no genius.”
The moment I was free, I hurried palpitating to my friend, and
confessed all, and implored her, by the love between us, to play her
part in the little innocent deception I had practised. She gazed at me
with her sweet shocked eyes, as if I were inviting her to murder.
“You really meant them for him, for Father Pope?” she whispered, half
choking. “O, Diana! It was blasphemy!”
“It was,” I said, “to waste the Princess Camilla on such a block.”
Then, as my friend still cried out, I knelt, and took her waist
prisoner in my arms, and begged to her.
“I am not like you, darling. I pine and pinch in this cold air. If it
was not for you, you little warm thing, I should run away with Giles,
the handsome stable-boy.”
“Don’t,” she wept. “You don’t mean it. Say you only intended it for a
joke!”
“Of course I only meant it for a joke,” I said, urging her; “though
it’s true I believed the creature was expecting it of me. But ’tis a
joke that will cost me dear if you don’t back me.”
“O!” she cried, despairing, “I do, I will. But how can I ever pretend
to have wrote them, when that cat rhymes with lap is the best I know
of verse.”
“You little dear,” I said, laughing in sheer love of her artlessness.
“Pretend nothing, but hold your tongue.”
That she would have done for me, I think, though they racked her to
confess; and all might yet have gone well, had not the Lady Sophia,
meddlesome like most self-righteous consciences, sent for her to
question if, after all, her simple verses might not have been the
instinctive expression of _her_ leaning towards the cloister. My poor
transparent angel managed to articulate a panic denial of any such
tendency; though, indeed, there was no need to, to any but a
blindworm. If ever little maid was built for loving, or to lay her
pretty hair in a puddle for some rogue to reach heaven by, it was she.
The sense of guilt would confound her, however; and, what between her
duty to madam and her loyalty to me, she must have answered her
examination so ambiguously as to raise some new doubts and suspicions
in the minds of her inquisitors.
She flew back to me with very red eyes, and a fresh horror of the
imposition she was forced to practise.
“I will never, never tell,” she sobbed, “though they tear me to
pieces. But O, Diana! I don’t want to be a nun.”
I comforted her, though furious with the others for their Jesuitical
practices on her innocence.
“Wait,” I cried, “and I will pay them both out! What right had they,
after what I said, to try and torture a lie out of you? Don’t fear for
the convent, child. I pledge my word you shall have a husband and
fifty children, nun or no nun.”
“I want no husband,” she answered, blushing and clinging to me, “and
no lover but you.”
I have taken pains to record her fond little reply, in view of an
odious charge, once concocted to my injury, of my having traded upon
my friend’s faith in me to rob her heart of its dearest possession.
That, indeed, was, then and always, no less than her loved Diana, of
whom none was ever permitted by her to take precedence. Any sacrifice
which was designed to maintain those mutual relations she thought too
cheap for discussion.
One result, however, of her “questioning” was that madam’s attitude
towards me was thenceforth marked by a reserve and jealousy which,
inasmuch as I was unconscious of having done anything to merit it,
served only to prejudice me against a religion which could be used for
a cloak to so much hypocrisy. I grew quickly disenamoured of my
supposed vocation, and decided that faith, which seemed largely a
matter of digestion, could be better realised through independence. In
short, in the world I could reach beatitude through twenty
self-indulgences to one in the convent; and, such being the case, and
my constitution perfect, it seemed folly to take the short way.
Madam seized an early opportunity after this to inquire into my plans
for retiring from the world and taking the veil. I confessed to her,
in reply, that her late suspicions had engendered in me thoughts, a
sense of grievance, inimical to my right contemplation of so momentous
a sacrifice. She was very much shocked and troubled, and recommended
me a stricter observance of all those self-obliterating virtues which
are such a comfort to those who don’t practise them. She rebuked my
pride; she prescribed fasting and discipline and maceration--tortures
which would have killed a dray-man--in order to lower and submit my
system to its final severance from the world. She would have had me at
her mercy before she drove in the knife; only, unluckily for her, my
constitution was impregnable. It flourished equally whether on bread
and water or _vol au vent_; and, finally, she surrendered to it. I
rather liked a little pious game we played, called the Moral Lotto, in
which the discs were sins, and those left uncovered at the end
entailed an obligation on the losers to maintain a particular guard
against the temptations they expressed. Though we all, in the end,
must have been warned through the calendar, from simony to
powder-puffs, I believe the contest was so sanctified to her by
intention that she read a design of Heaven in every missing counter;
and the fact that I generally won, did more than many assurances to
convince her that I was perhaps after all not so black as she had
painted me.
But, between me and Father Pope, after that little _malentendu_, there
was no quarter asked or given. He treated me with a persistent coarse
rudeness, and I retaliated with all the interest of wit I dared. I
dropped blobs of wax on his spectacles; left his Hagiology open under
a drip from the ceiling; put crumbs of cheese in his cabinets of moth
to tempt the mice in; and confessed his own most obvious sins to him
as mine, for which I accepted furious penances as meekly as a lamb. He
hated me, and I contrived at least to give him a substantial reason
for such an abuse of his cloth.
Now, I will mention one only other little incident before I pass on to
the subject of this chapter. I was playing in Wellcot attics on a
certain wet afternoon with Patty, when I discovered a locked Bluebeard
chamber.
“What is it?” I said; but she did not know. I tried the handle; I
peered vainly into the keyhole; finally, I took a pin from my hair,
and contrived a little pick of it.
“O, what are you going to do?” whispered the child, quite scared.
“Get in, if I can,” said I.
“Don’t!” she said, horrified. “If we are shut out, ’tis for a reason.”
“Of course,” I answered. “And it’s no good looking for it on this side
of the door.”
She clasped her hands in a little paralysis of curiosity while I
worked. It was a simple lock, and I was successful. As the door swung
open, we saw before us a sky-lit room, wedged under the slope of the
roof, and quite empty save for a framed picture, which leaned to the
wall back outwards. Patty uttered a tiny cry--
“O, Diana! It’s the portrait!”
In a moment, all excitement, we stole in a-tiptoe. The place was very
still and ghostly. Only on the dusty canvas itself lay a melancholy
grid of light. Palpitating in our sense of guilt, we turned the frame
round, let it drop softly back again; and there, before our eyes,
bloomed a smiling, wistful face. The light, which had saddened it in
reverse, was quickened now to an illuminating glory. It greeted and
dimpled to us--the face of a dead woman risen.
A dead woman. Had she ever lived? I could not believe it, thinking of
that unsympathetic _dévote_ downstairs.
“Was she _ever_ like that?” I whispered.
“She was beautiful,” murmured Patty fervently. “I remember him
painting this.”
“And going away, and leaving it unfinished?” said I: for, indeed, the
portrait was but sketched in, though masterly in its promise.
“Yes,” said the little girl, gulping. “And I never supposed what had
become of it till now.”
It seemed incredible, the change that but a few envious years had
wrought. Had love done this thing before me? Or could love forsaken so
warp the loveliness which Love himself had created? It gave me a new
little thrill of respect for the humanised Sophia; because, whatever
the truth of her face, a man had been found to see this beauty in it.
“She was St. Cecilia,” whispered Patty. “There is the harp in her
lap.”
It was without strings--an unborn music. Perhaps the Christian lady
had declined to accept a pagan Muse for midwife, and had temporised
with her would-be deliverer, hoping to convert him. If so, she had
played her cards badly. I wondered if the man had been a
fortune-hunter. But in that event Madame Sophia would certainly be
Madame de Crespigny.
Whatever the case, however, the picture made a deep impression on me,
and from my first moment of seeing it I was haunted by the desire to
become myself the subject of such a master’s devotion. _Ma vue et mes
minauderies firent tout-à-coup tourner la girouette._ For the first
time I felt myself a woman, encumbered with the heavy responsibilities
of her sex.
One day--it was some eighteen months later--returning from a
commission to the convent, I walked straight into the presence of the
original of the picture and its painter. Yes, that is the truth. He
had run faith at last to earth, it seemed, and, armed with it, was
returned to add the strings to the abortive harp, and perfect the
ancient harmony. I could have thought that, to do so, he had need of
faith indeed; until, looking at madam, I started in sheer wonder. She
was transfigured--rejuvenated. The happiest light--bashful, coy,
defiant, and surrendering its defiance--was in her eyes. She was more
like a wife in the first wonder of motherhood than the starved
_religieuse_ of yesterday.
And the cause! Ah, my Alcide! The creature rose upon my entrance, and
I could have laughed in the face of my own befooled ideal. I had
thought of Raphael and the Fornarina; and, behold! a slack,
half-drowned-looking figure, with an expression, and conduct of its
limbs, as if it were just risen gasping from a pond--there he stood,
no sort of natural fowl at all, but a freak of genius like a
five-legged calf at a fair.
“He! he!” giggled he, and held himself as if he were waiting to be
told what to do next.
He was tall, it is true; and there was a good deal of him, mostly
gnarled bone, if that counted to his credit. His forehead, streaked
with dark hair turning grey, was strong and ample, and in itself
something of a feature; but, mercy! the loose indetermination of his
lower lip, and the way it overhung, foolish and disproportionate as an
elephant’s, the little folded chin! As I stared, too mortified for
manners, he returned my gaze, suddenly startled, it seemed, into a
speechlessness so stertorous that little Patty, who had entered with
and stood behind me, fell back a step in confusion.
“Ah!” he exclaimed at that, chuckling, “and is hee-ar the little girl
I knew?”
He spoke, when he did at last, drawlingly, and ended, as was his way,
by wrinkling his thin hooked nose and hee-hawing a little laugh
through it.
“She is grown, is she not?” said madam, answering for Patty, to whom
he had referred, though indeed his eyes were all the time on me. Her
voice was so changed and soft, I hardly recognised it.
“She is grown,” he said. “She is become, it appears, a double cherry.”
“No,” said madam seriously, “the other is a second little foundling of
my care, and destined to God’s--_our_ God’s” (she added
coyly)--“service, de Crespigny.”
She had no sense of humour, the dear creature. The next moment,
noticing the direction of his gaze, with a little frown she bade us
begone to our books.
We fled, and, once remote, I turned, with a tragi-hysteric stamp, upon
my companion.
“Patience! And is that donkey _him_?”
“It is Mr. Noel de Crespigny,” she said, amazed. “He is not-- O,
Diana, do you really think him”--
“Hee-haw!” I broke in, with a little passion of laughter; and then
fury overcame me.
“How dared she,” I stormed, “how dared she tell him that lie about
me?”
“What lie?” said poor Patty.
“Why, to claim me to her worship of a golden ass,” I cried.
“It was a calf,” said my friend, bewildered.