I breathed quickly, standing before him.
“Father, that is soon done. I will go with you.”
“With me—with me?” he complained, stamping distracted. “Where to?”
“Anywhere from here,” I pleaded. “You can’t stop. The whole country’s up, and a second time, if they come, you’ll be caught.”
Snorting with agitation, he took off his spectacles to wipe them.
“It’s quite impossible,” he said. “I know of only one asylum beyond, and that”—
With a quick little snatch I ravished the glasses from his hand, and, running away with them, hid behind a chimney. For a minute or two he raved round, stumbling, and grabbing at the air, and finally tripped over his book and subsided, quite prostrate, upon the roof.
“Little sweep!” he panted, in a trembling voice. “My daughter—child of Magdalen—where are you?”
I held my breath; and he went on, in broken sentences—
“Come back—give me my glasses—where are you?—I believe all you say—What! will you give me up, and the Calendar unfinished?”
Then, as I still did not answer, “Holy saints! The little devil has hobbled me, and I shall be caught and martyred.”—A longish pause—“In manus tuas, Domine, com— I wonder if in Paradise—the scarce copper—h’m!”
He began to gnaw his knuckles, with a sort of pleased abstraction over the thought. It would never do. I came out of my hiding.
“Will you take me with you?” I repeated.
“O, it’s you?” he cried, with a start. “Where are my glasses?”
“In my hand.”
“Will you return them to me?”
“Will you let me go with you?”
“Scandalous!”
“I will carry the book.”
“Pooh!”
“I will walk behind.”
“Pish!”
“If anything happens to me, then”—
“Fah!” he interposed; and then added, “What could happen to you?”
“Do you suppose I shall stay in these clothes?” I said. “I shall return to be a girl; and what am I to do then, without someone to protect and help me back to my parents?”
“That’s nothing to me,” he said.
“Good-bye,” said I.
He scrambled to his feet with a roar: “Give me back my glasses!”
I stood quite still, making no sound. He thought I had really gone this time, and began taking little strides hither and thither, and throwing his arms about. Suddenly he stopped, sweating with agitation.
“Are you there?” he said.
I did not answer. He hopped from leg to leg, pulling with one hand at the other, as if at a tight glove.
“Child!” he cried, “you’re a good child—a perfect little sweep. You shall come—do you hear?—if we ever get off this roof. We’ll escape by the woods—nobody will see us there together—and I can catch some arguses (lasiommata ægeria) that will be in season.”
The very rudeness of the creature nominated by Fate to be my warden gave me a feeling of confidence. Here was a shepherd’s dog ugly enough to frighten away the wolf himself, should he cross us in the shape of my master. I thrilled to have secured his promise, which, for all his boorishness, and perhaps because of it, I had faith in. The dark pit was already half bridged in my foolish young imagination, and I dreamed of alighting on the farther side—to what? Not, indeed, to the old melancholy life of the cottage near the Steine. For all my sad experience, I never entertained that prospect for one moment. I was but now in my eleventh year, yet some instinct informed me that the dead—amongst whom, surely, I must be written—should not return if they would avoid the mortification of home truths; that broken threads cannot be made one again, and leave no scar. Perhaps the spirit of vagabondage even had entered a little into my blood. In any case, it was the breezy security of my father’s, not my mother’s, protection to which I hurried in thought, with this reverent cur for escort.
As for him, accounting for his presence on the roof, he growled out to me once after this, in order to still my inquisitive importunity, while I still held the spectacles in pledge, that he had indeed taken the alarm that morning, with the rest of the family to whom he was spiritual director; but that, remembering his book left behind, he had insisted upon quitting the general flight and returning for it—with what awkward results for the steward had appeared, though, as a fact, I believe the poor man recovered later. Now, I was to understand, he had the intention, if he could make good his escape, to seek asylum, while the storm blew over, with a lady, a co-religionist and connection of his patrons, who lived distant a two days’ journey on foot. And so, having grudgingly informed me, he subsided into his unsavoury self, and would speak no more.
I did not much care, once being put in possession of the facts and the chances they afforded me. No one, it was evident, guessed at our retreat; and, for the rest, I was content to bide my time, and the opportunity I foresaw of impressing even this dull animal with a revelation of the pretty romance he had undertaken to squire.
Evening fell, and we were still sitting there. Not a footstep sounded in the house beneath us; not a voice but the birds’ came from the garden. Presently, emboldened by the quiet, I went softly climbing and investigating, finding the trap-door by way of which the chaplain had ascended, and peeping between the gables and over the roof ridges. So far as I could see, nothing human was stirring in all the placid demesne. The sundial on the lawn, the arbour in the corner, the brook embroidering the low trees, like a ribbon run through lace, were things inanimate in a painted picture. But there was something in their voiceless watchfulness that made me long to open the door, as it were, and run into the air. I was not born, like my mother, for cloisteral seclusions.
I was passing my companion once soft-footed, when he startled me by demanding, suddenly and savagely, “What’s your name?”
“Diana, please,” I answered, in a flutter.
“Diana—Please!” he protested crossly. “Fah! Diana Please don’t please”—and he subsided into himself again.
But he had christened me. I had gone lacking nothing but a name of my own hitherto and here was one given me, apt and pat. From that moment I became Diana Please.
The very sense of its possession made me forward.
“Aren’t we safe now?” I said, “or are you going to stop here all night?”
He looked up at me hurriedly, and, scowling, motioned me away from him. Then, without a word, he snatched his book, rose, and striding to the trap-door, began to descend. I followed him closely. The way led by a flight of steps in the walls to a cupboard under the main stairs where they rose from the hall. We emerged from darkness into a wide echoing twilight. For the first time the thought of my master secreted somewhere, watchful and waiting for me, sent my spirits reeling. I slunk against the wall.
“Where was it?” demanded my companion brusquely.
I stared at him. He stamped his foot, so that the noise resounded horribly through the empty house.
“The steward!” he cried. “Where did they leave him?”
“By the door,” I whispered, trembling—“out there.”
It was still ajar. He hurried to it, looked out, went out, returned after a minute or two, and slammed the oak thunderously.
“There are trails of blood down the steps. He has been removed, or has removed himself,” he said, and began immediately to ascend the stairs.
“O, where are you going?” I cried fearfully.
“To bed,” he snapped.
“To bed!”
I clung to his coat-tails. There was a sort of nightmare struggle between us, up as far as the first landing. There he rent himself away, and, leaving me sprawling, banged and locked himself into a room. I crouched on the mat outside, sobbing and imploring. “What am I to do? Where am I to go?”
He answered not a word to my pleading. Presently I heard him snoring, and—would you believe it?—the gross carnival of sound was heavenly music in my ears. In all that vast loneliness it was my only human stay and comfort. O, my Alcide! To think of thy Diane owing her reason to the grunting of a hog.
It was a terrible night. I dared not move—scarcely breathe. But fear and exhaustion at last overcame me, and I slept.
I awoke to sweet, soundless daylight. The look and smell of sunshine restored me in a moment to myself. I had not been disturbed. The house was utterly abandoned. I arose, resolved at once to put into effect the plan I had formed. A little memory of something I had noticed yesterday was urging me. I fled softly upstairs. Signs of the raid met me at every turn: broken crucifixes, torn vestments, scattered Hosts—up and down they lay, trodden into dirty rubbish by the swarming footsteps. There had been, I believe, no secular looting, unless, as was probable, by my master, who would be sure, on that account, to have withdrawn himself remote from consequences. I had nothing to fear from him. I looked for a room where I had seen some children’s clothes scattered, and finding it still undisturbed, quickly selected from among the litter the simplest outfit I could adapt in mind to my figure.
A common watch lay ticking on a table. I examined it—scarce five o’clock—lingered, hesitated, and left it where it was. I had not yet come to thieve, even had it been less bulky for my juvenile fob. Hastily I snatched soap and towels from a washing-stand, and holding the clothes so as not to soil them against my own, stole out. There was not water enough in all the house for my cleansing. My spirit rushed to the little river I had seen gleaming under the trees.
At the back of the hall I found a low window, unlatched it, and dropped into the garden. A light fog was spread abroad, which, dripping from the trees, alarmed me with a thought of unseen things moving near. But presently a bird piped close above my head, with a note of reassurance, and I slipped on and made my way stealthily towards the river until I heard it gurgling; and in a moment later I came upon it.
There, with only the wild things in the grass to scare my modesty, I made my bath. The ecstasy of it, as all that foul husk slipped off, and was carried from me down the stream! The joy to recover my near-forgotten self, the thing of pink and pearl, from its long mourning! The wonder, and the strangeness of that reincarnation to a maturer estate! I was not, like the Sleeping Beauty, to renew my old, but to awake to a newer self—a different from the Diana from whom I had departed nine months before. It seemed incredible; and still when I was washed as white as a lamb, I must sluice, and relather, and sluice again, to convince myself that no stain of my horrible livery remained. Then, at last, I came out, and dried and dressed myself hurriedly; and so, being secure, sat awhile on the bank to let my hair sun. It had never been but roughly clipped since that first cruel shearing, and now was down to my collar, thick and golden. I could see it in the water glass, when I bent over, reflected like a dim glory, and I nodded and laughed to the picture in my delight, and was only sorry presently to bind it about gipsy fashion with the silk handkerchief I had brought down with me for the purpose. But time was moving, and so must I be. I rose, and returned to the house.
I heard a shuffling on the stairs as I re-entered by the window, and in a moment, tripping lightly, came upon Father Pope descending. He had his great book under his arm, and he tiptoed with a sort of scared effort to hush the creaking of his tell-tale shoes. He gave a guilty start on seeing me standing smiling before him, and stumbled and caught himself erect by the banisters, frowning at me.
I did not speak. I stood dumbly to let him canvass the transformation; but the creature had no nerve of sentiment in all his dull anatomy.
“What do you want?” he said; “who are you?”
I could see he only fenced with the truth to recover himself. I dropped him a pretty little curtsey.
“Diana, please,” I said.
I was in trepidation that he would deny me, as I was convinced he had designed to give me the slip; and, though for policy’s sake I must propitiate him, I hated the creature for his treachery. But, despite his being a Jesuit, he was too crude a wit for the double part.
“Humph!” he growled. “I was wondering what had become of you,”—which, no doubt, was true enough.
He glowered at me dislikingly; then bidding me wait for him, stalked off into the gloom of passages, from which he presently re-emerged with a bagful of bread and biscuit ends which he had collected.
“I have no money,” he said. “You must manage with your share of these or nothing. If you look for better, it must be out of my company.”
“What does for you, will do for me, Father,” I said meekly; but nothing would disarm his churlishness.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” said he. “I could do very well without you, to begin with.”
I dropped my eyes.
“Now, then, bestir yourself,” he bullied. “If you’re to come at all, come before the world’s awake.”
He strode off, and I followed, through shuttered glooms, and along silent corridors to a distant part of the building, emerging from a door in which we found ourselves in a close shrubbery-walk going up towards woods. Very soon the comforting screen of trees was about us, and the peril of watchful enemies surpassed. We pushed on without rest or pause. My spirit and my feet danced together. It was all so free and fragrant, and the rapture of my new emancipation was like a second sight. Fays and sweet things seemed to melt before me round green corners, or overhead among the branches, leaving a scent of the unknown world in their footsteps. I sang low, I laughed to the birds, I seemed incapable of weariness. And, indeed, my late training served me in good stead, for this clerical Caliban had no mercy on my tender limbs. He desired only the least excuse to shake me off, and I would not gratify him with one.
All day he led me south by wood and common, avoiding the living places where men were like to be alert on the new Crusade. We hardly exchanged a word, as he swung on with the gait of a camel; but in the end it was he who succumbed first. The weight of his great folio crushed him—that is the truth. He called a halt in an unfrequented copse, and flung himself exhausted on the grass.
“Go, find yourself a lodging,” he said. “I will sleep here.”
I did not dare cross him. I crept away; but only so far as a low thorn tree, mounting into which I could easily hold him in view. But I need not have feared. The poor wretch was sunk in fatigue, and incapable of further effort. He had an odious night, I am sure, while I, from my late habits, slept as securely as in an arm-chair.
Early next morning we were afoot again. My companion, mouldy-cheeked and limping, greeted me with a scowl.
“What have I not suffered of humiliation as a priest,” he said, “to have thee breathing in the same wood!”
The world must have been an insufficient dormitory to this misogynist.
At noon, having wandered for hours through forest so green, so profound, that its deer-haunted vistas seemed the very byways to the infinite, we came out suddenly, when half faint with toil and hunger, upon the foot of a low hill, on whose summit was a queer octagonal stone tower, crowned with a dome like a pepper-box. My companion sputtered anathema upon seeing it, and stood stock still.
“What is it, Father?” I whispered, creeping up to him.
“We’ve overshot the mark, that’s all,” he growled, conceding a point to civility. “Here’s Shole beyond; and I aimed at no farther than Wellcot-Herring. Well, we must go over as the shortest way,” and he began to mount the slope.
I followed him, emboldened to ask, “What’s this we’re coming to?”
“Rupert’s Folly,” he answered viciously. “Old Lousy’s spy-house.”
“What’s he?” I asked.
He gave a rude laugh.
“He’s an itch on the skin of my lord that he can’t scratch away;” and, with these coarse, enigmatic words, he motioned me to fall behind.
The tower sprouted clean from the grass. Reaching and skirting it, I had occasion barely to notice a figure seated under a low door against its farther angle, before the liveliest prospect below engaged all my attention. The hill went down on this side into a wide valley, in the midst of whose trees and pastures, dominating a tiny village with forge and tavern, stood a great old house of grey stone. On the green before, as we could see, was a merry-making: sports, and dancing, and long tables spread, and a vast broaching of casks. And the villagers in their ribbons were all there, so that my eyes and my heart danced to see them.
But my companion stood looking down with a most venomous expression.
“Fah! A nest of heretics!” he muttered. “What golden calf are they met to worship?”
“The red herring’s spawn, good sir,” said the voice of the creature behind us. I turned and stared at him for the first time. He sat sucking at a long pipe at the open door of the tower—the filthiest little scrub you could imagine. His face was like old crumpled parchment, his crafty eyes floated in rheum, and he scratched a dusty tag of beard down upon his breast as he leered at us.
“What! Lousy John,” said the priest. “Is it our heir of all the Herrings come of age?”
“Ay,” said the old wretch. “Nephew Salted. You know him? Ay, ay. You should be the man Pope, of course, by your rudeness? Go down to your whore of Babylon, sir. She mingles with yonder company.”
“You’d have me into the range of your burning-glass, hey?” said the priest, with a snort between laughter and contempt.
The other smoked on unperturbed.
“All in good time, priest,” he said. “I’m not for anticipatin’ the devil. Is that his scriptures you’re a-carryin’ to propagate?”
My companion uttered a furious exclamation, and, hugging his book, shuffled out of range. Most like a woman, he could not bear to have his spiteful humour returned upon him.
I understood nothing of all this, of course, and was standing bewildered, when the old obscenity beckoned me.
“See,” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth and pointing with the scarlet tongue of it: “a beautiful landscape, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” I faltered.
“Ah!” said he. “I’ll tell you—just you, mind. I don’t take a-many into my confidence. It’s the beauty of pain, child; a local inflammation in the system.”
I murmured something, and he chuckled.
“They call this tower ‘Rupert’s Folly,’” he said privately; “and I laugh, settin’ up here in my shell. D’ye think they’d laugh too, if they guessed where the smut came from that blasted of their crops?”
“From you?” I whispered.
He bent over, and pointed upwards. For the first time I noticed that the muzzle of a telescope projected from the little dome on the roof. While I was gazing, I suddenly felt my wrist in the clutch of his apish claw.
“Hush!” he said. “It’s there I gathers my star-powder, and discharges it where I will. I’m Briareus, the last of the Uranids, left behind to rack the world to all eternity for its presumption.”
He let me go, squinting and nodding at me. I backed from him in horror. Nothing was plain to me but that here was one of those astrologic demons who delight to bring heaven close that they may measure our remoteness from it, and to cast away poor souls amidst the eternal silences. That he seemed to rave was nothing. Such inhumanity is in itself a madness.
“Ay,” he chuckled, hugging himself in a secret way, “you didn’t expect that, did you? You must be a god to lust in pain. Why, lord, child! the earth would be drab all over but for its galls and breakings. See where I’ve set a withered crop among the green; see where I’ve teased the soil to scarlet—a blazing core of fever. I know the World, the wanton. So long as she can cover her cancer with a ribbon, she’ll smile. By and by I shall set a spark to the west, and burn up the day’s rubbish. Look when the sun drops, and you’ll see it a little point of white, and afterwards a bonfire.”
I backed still farther.
“Lord!” he cried, doubling with laughter, “what headaches I’ve projected into their beer-barrels down there! What poison laid on the lasses’ lips! I shall have some fine incense of sufferin’ risin’ to me to-morrow! What, you’re goin’, are you? Down into the fire, hey? A pretty little faggot to mend its blazin’!” And he kneaded his hands rapturously between his knees.
I saw the priest had disappeared over the crest, and, half crying, pursued him. He turned on me angrily as I came up.
“Now,” said he, adjusting his spectacles to glare through them, “if that old carrion speaks truth, I come to an end with you.” He gripped my shoulder. “Hold your tongue, d’you hear? Not a word of us till we find out how the land lies.”
He dropped his hold, on a sudden thought, to my elbow, and, with a muttered menace, marched me down the hill.
At the bottom, in a little lane, with hedges to screen it from the view beyond, we came unexpectedly upon a lady gathering wild flowers. She started violently upon observing my companion, and dropped her nosegay. He accosted her, with a manner of gruff civility, and here it was somehow that, as they broke into talk of an urgent nature, we got separated.
The festivities were to celebrate the majority of the Viscount Salted, only son to Hardrough, fourth Earl of Herring, Baron Rowe of Shole and Wellcot-Herring, Warden of the Cinque Ports, and official Verderer of the Forest of Down. The Lady Sophia Rowe, aunt to the young gentleman, had driven over from Wellcot—her estate in tail female, and distant from Shole by road seven miles—to lend her saintly countenance to the gathering, and it was she whom Father Pope, steering his course erroneously for Shole instead of Wellcot-Herring, had fortuitously encountered culling wild flowers in her brother’s lordlier demesne.
The Lady Sophia was, unlike her orthodox kinsman, a convert to the Catholic from the Established Church, and within her limits, and because of them, a zealous fanatic. In her one saw acutely demonstrated the denaturalising power of creed. Gentle as a dove by temperament, there was no crime but self-destruction which she would not have gloried in to justify hers. She would have thought the world well lost to save her own soul, colourless as that dear little article was. Though she was modesty incarnate, her self-importance in this respect was amazing. She schemed through all the virtues for the apotheosis of Lady Sophia, and she called her scheming the vindication of truth, which she held to be a Romish monopoly. She would have made me a nun, as part of it, and taken all the credit with Heaven. I can hardly regret that she was foiled. I love truth as well as any woman, only, being a woman, à contre-cœur, and not a saint, for me it must be coloured, and in the newest shades. To ask me to love it for its own sake is to ask me to be a dowd; and, for all my respect for Lady Sophia, I have never fancied a heaven of dowds.
When we alighted on her, she was by great good chance withdrawn from her company, and communing with Nature for relaxation. Flowers, to her, were sanctified of the altar, so bringing her faith and her inclinations into line. She was terribly agitated over her encounter with Father Pope, whom she knew, and over his peril, which she exaggerated. The shock of intolerance was hardly extended to Shole; but she had heard, by private despatch, of her Dulwich kinsfolk’s flight, and of the chaplain’s eccentric desertion, and all the day had tormented herself with fears of the fate which he had invited to befall him. Now, while they were engaged in earnest discussion, eschewing for the moment all thought of me, I was driven by curiosity to steal down the lane, till, through a gap in the hedge, I was able to observe at close hand the lively scene that was enacting on the green below.
It had certainly looked prettier from the hill. I saw links of red-faced oafs sway roaring across the turf, and whip themselves in mere drunken impulse about any mock-bashful hoyden who stood, feigning unconsciousness, in their path. I saw blowzed, over-fed women, dragging squalling babies, struggle vainly to be included in the amorous capture, and when they failed or were ignored, vindicate their outraged respectability in coarse recriminations. I saw farmers, seated under trees, weep fuddled tears because they could hold no more, and stuffed children, crying for nothing so much as breath. I had been drawn, as was natural to me, by the bait of gaiety and life, and this was my reward. The ground between the booths was strewed with trampled fragments of bread and meat, and sodden with rejected ale. It was a fair, with all the licence of a day gathered into an hour.
I don’t know how long I had been standing, absorbed in contemplation of this Gehenna, and of the stately mansion across the green, on whose terraces a gay company, gathered to see the beasts feed, was clearly distinguishable, when a sound of hoofs coming up the lane behind me brought me to myself; and almost immediately three horsemen, with very flushed faces, rode into view, and, perceiving me, halted. One was a fox-featured gentleman, in fulvous cloth; one, good-humoured and quiet, wore a grey coat; and the third was resplendent all over, and as drunk as Chloe. He, at the first sight of me, tumbled rather than dismounted from his horse, and, forsaking the reins, which the grey gentleman caught, came staggering upon me.
“Hey, my vitals!” he lisped, “whom the devil have we here?”
He was quite young, and like a pretty toy, with a spangled coat in the Maccaroni Club style, a great bow at his neck, and ribbons to his knees. But he frightened me with the stare in his glazed eyes; and as he advanced, I backed into the hedge.
“I was only looking,” I fluttered. “I didn’t mean any harm. Please let me go.”
“Harm!” he exclaimed, with a tipsy crow. “O, but you’re trespassing, missy, and must give an hic-count of yourself. Come ’long, now, before my lord.”
I saw the eldest of the three regarding us from his saddle with a sort of mordant humour, and the sudden recognition of his state made my heart leap. Red, and lank-jawed, and vicious, he sat watching us as a fox might watch his cub negotiating the helpless struggles of a lamb. He always had a fine appetite for such occasions, and could sin very sweetly by proxy, could Hardrough.
“Wounds, my lord!” cried the boy, “is this a larsh surprise for me you’ve ’ranged? Besh preshent of all the day. Come cock-horse, child, and we’ll kiss a-riding.”
He put an arm about me. For all my distress, the musky contact of him, so precious after my long degradation, seemed half to drug me from resistance. I struggled feebly to push him away.
“Get on with your gallophic,” said he, addressing his companions knowingly. “I’ll follerer by-m-by.”
“Come, Salted,” cried the grey gentleman suddenly, in a laughing, half-vexed way. “Remember what’s due to your guests, child, now and to be. Come along and ride yourself sober, as you engaged.”
“Shober, nunky! shober, you cake!” sputtered the fool. “Shober ’nough yourself to wa’t me go on and break my neck—hey, my lord?”
He leered tipsily to the earl his father, who grinned, and blinked his red eyes.
“Let him be, George,” said the nobleman. “Damme, the boy’s not fit to ride a broomstick. You’re precious anxious for the gipsy, brother. I’d as lief you was concerned for your nephew.”
“And so I am,” says the other hotly. “’Tis foul so to take advantage of a stranger and a child. Call your cub off, sir,” says he, “if I’m not to take a whip to him.”
He gathered his reins in, and twitched his heels. He was bronzed and comely, a man of thirty or so, younger by ten years than the earl. He, the latter, had turned quite white. A frost seemed to have pinched his cheeks. In another moment, I believe, he would have drawn his riding-switch across the handsome face, but in that moment I was aware of a lady hurrying up, and I broke from my captor, and fled to meet her.
“Help me!” I cried. “Don’t let him hurt me!”
She received me very kindly. She was a tall and colourless figure, gentle in mien but with a bad complexion—the lady, in short, in whose company I had left Father Pope.
“Hardwick! George!” she whispered, in an outraged voice.
The earl pushed up to her, with a snigger.
“There, Sophy,” said he. “What are you doin’ here? But I’m glad you’ve come. Is this here your protégée? Well, take the little baggage away, that was near bringing us to words about her.”
“Words!” she said. “This child!”
“O,” he exclaimed, “that’s all one! Come, boy!”
She detained him some minutes, murmuring to him as he bent down. At the end he rose, grinning at me.
“What!” says he—“the sly old crow! Be sure the little sweep wasn’t fathered by a black cassock before you adopt her.”
She started back, flushing scarlet.
“Hardrough!” she said; “I ask you to go on.”
“Well, I will,” said he, with a little breathless laugh, “and carry your secret, sister, safe in my keepin’.”
He half wheeled, and in an ironic voice summoned the young viscount. The boy got to his horse as sulky as sin. In another minute the three gentlemen were ridden out of sight.
The moment they had disappeared the lady turned to me.
“Why didn’t you keep by your friend?” she asked, rather sharply. “From what he tells me, you are in need of one.”
I hung my head and broke into sobs. She was softened immediately.
“There,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be harsh; but discretion was so necessary. Will you come with me—I am the Lady Sophia Rowe—and we can discuss your case in safety at home? But every instant means peril, and we must hasten.”
I suffered her to hurry me up the lane. Her gait took no grace from urgency, being awkward as with most over-tall women, and the worse to view because she was reckless how she raised her skirts. In a little we came round a curve that swept beyond the limits of the green; and here, under some trees, we found her coach, which had been ordered round earlier, with the priest and his great folio ensconced glowering in it. In a moment we were in, and rolling along quiet country roads. The noise of the fairing died behind us. The world of new peace and beatitude lay before. For seven miles we sped soberly on, deeper and deeper into the pleasant hush, that was broken only by the incessant confidential murmuring of my companions.
At last, taking a road high above a little village bowered in trees, we turned between beautiful scrolled gates into a drive that seemed to me to pierce gardens as enchanting as the hanging ones of Babylon. There were soft lawns and placid groves of timber, with lofty rookeries. There were vivid parterres, and terraces stooping to blue depths, wheredown a little silver brook bubbled through mists of foliage. There were rose bowers, and great jars, like Plenty’s horn, brimming petunias. There was a mossy fountain, with lilies and goldfish, and a baby Triton in the midst spurting a jet to heaven. There were grassy walks, and beyond their vistas the eternal solace of distance. And, dominating all, there was the house.
At least it seemed less to command than to partake of the serenity of which it was the habitable nucleus—the human nest in the garden. It stood before us, not suddenly, but in quiet revelation, a simple old structure of red brick, unlaboured with ornament, unweighted of stone, a pleasant home for happiness set on a wide level platform of grass and gravel. My eyes had hardly accepted it before my heart.
We alighted into a fragrant hall, and madam led me at once into a large low room with windows bent upon a heavenly prospect of woods and meadows; and there, bidding me await her until she could come and talk with me, shut me in, and withdrew.
I had not stood many minutes, in a silent dream of wonder and expectation, when the door opened softly again, and a little girl stole in. She was about my own age, or somewhat older, and very dark and pretty, but with foolish large eyes like a dog’s. For some moments she stared at me, wondering, without a smile, then came and touched my hand.
“Madam sent me,” she said. “I live here. I am her adoption child. Are you come to stay?”
I shook my head, bewildered.
“O,” she whispered, “I hope so. I have no little friend at all, and you are so pretty.”
“I have golden hair,” I said. “We can’t all be the same. But yours at least is very curly. What is your name?”
“Patience Grant,” she said. “My mother died in the convent, and I have no father. I am not allowed to play with the village children. What is your name?”
I told her “Diana Please.”
“It is a nice name,” she said. “Did your mother too die in the convent? I am very happy here, but I shall be happier if you come.”
Lady Sophia had entered softly while she spoke.
“Hush, Patty!” said she, with a smile. “And run away now.”
The child went, looking wistfully back. Ah, mignonnette, ma petite à jamais mémorable, toi que j’aime sans discontinuer! How wert thou to me from the first the most attached of little dogs!
Madam drew me into a window, and looked earnestly into my eyes. As she held me, Father Pope entered and stood near, my morose and baleful inquisitor.
“Do you like my home?” she said, in her level, toneless voice. The labour of lifting it seemed always constitutionally beyond her.
I clasped my hands. “O, madam,” I said, “I could be a very good Catholic here!”
She smiled, in a surprised way, then looked grave. I waited in a fever of expectation for her to speak again. I had already decided that I would wish to be adopted like Patience, in whom I seemed to foresee a little adoring vassal, so welcome after my own long slavery, and that I must be adroit to gain my point. Brighthelmston, with its questionable potentialities, had darkened in contrast with this paradise. I felt even that it would not be good for me to return there; that I was destined for a virtuous, if not a devout life. It is no contradiction that I had not thought so an hour before. Our moral development is intermittent. Its phases of growth are inspirations of adaptation to circumstance. A fever made of Francis of Assisi a saint out of a profligate. These high lawns had revealed to me the pit from which I had escaped.
Lady Sophia looked very sweet and grave.
“Or anywhere, I hope,” she said. “Faith is not a question of surroundings.”
I was not so sure of that; but I held my tongue, hanging my head.
“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.
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.
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:—