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 tres docile — tout a fait I’habitude de I’obeissance.”
“Aha!” laughed Bertha. “She owes something to her wicked old heathen guardian, after all, then. I venture to think that l’habitude de I’obeissance 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 a
ge, 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.
XXV
AT Pensevern, Mrs. Severing had received one of her son’s infrequent, and generally ill-timed, suggestions of a return to the parental roof.
“Will join you in London,” was Nina’s immediate telegraphic reply.
She did not definitely assure herself that she wished to preclude, as far as might be, the possibility of a rapprochement between her son and Rosamund Grantham, but situations in which Nina Severing did not play the principal role were ever distasteful to her, and she gracefully eluded the possibility of involving herself in such a situation by a murmured fear that Morris would find Pensevern and the depths of the country too uneventful.
Having skilfully guarded against events which might serve to vary the uneventful, Nina felt able to rejoice in the self-sacrifice of leaving “the beloved country and God’s own peace and quiet there” in favour of the Ritz Hotel.
Morris, within twenty-four hours of her arrival there, disconcerted her by inquiring, with a piercing glance, whether Rosamund was at Porthlew.
Nina raised her eyebrows.
“Of course,” she said easily. “Why should she be anywhere else? She always is at Porthlew.”
“I heard she was in London with the Argents the other day.”
“The other day! What nonsense you talk, Morris.
Rosamund spent two or three nights with them just about Easter-time, so as to go down to poor little Frances’ ceremony, whatever it was.”
“What a shame it is to let a little thing like that go and shut herself up for life,” said Morris warmly.
Nina immediately looked pained.
“There are one or two ways of looking at it,” she said slowly. “I don’t like to hear you making sweeping assertions like that, Morris, especially when you know nothing about the matter. It doesn’t matter when you only say it to me, of course, though it’s neither very polite nor very dutiful, but I should dislike it very much if anyone else were to hear you laying down the law as you sometimes do.”
Morris was aware that there were indeed few things that his mother disliked more than to hear him express an independent opinion on any subject whatever, and he consequently said, with a decision of manner that almost bordered upon violence: “My dear mother, there really can’t be two opinions about the question of a child of eighteen or nineteen being allowed to take vows which will bind her to a life of that sort. It’s simply iniquitous.”
“You talk like a child, Morris!” exclaimed his parent, pale with annoyance. “But it only makes me laugh, a little sadly, to hear you. You’ll feel so very differently in a few years’ time.”
“I doubt it,” declared Morris easily. “A friend of mine — no one whom you’d know, mother dear — has gone into that sort of thing a good deal, and is thinking of being a Trappist monk. We’ve naturally had a good deal of discussion on the subject.”
Nina gazed at her son with a freezing eye. It gave her the most acute sensation of annoyance every time that she realized afresh in him the self-opinionated arrogance which he derived from her.
“My poor boy,” she said at last, “you don’t really suppose, do you, that your discussion of any of the real things of life can count for anything? Why, your opinions have no more value, to those of us who know, than the little idle chirpings of a baby bird that thinks it knows how to fly without waiting to be taught.”
The vigour of this trenchant simile carried Nina sublimely past its ornithological inexactitude, and she recovered her poise of mind.
“Little Frances will have a very beautiful, peaceful, sheltered life,” she observed thoughtfully. “She has shirked all the responsibility, all the sorrow and suffering, that others have to face. She will never grow up — life will always be a soft, childish, happy dream for her. It’s a very easy way out.”
Morris gazed at her with the expression which both of them felt to pertain to one who knew better.
“That remains open to question,” he enunciated with thoughtful deliberation. “To those outside, the idle, the rich, the thoughtless, it may seem a sheltered life in a garden of roses — but what about the vigils and fastings and scourgings, mother?”
“Morris,” inquired his mother coldly, “what have you been reading?”
Her son left the room in a fury.
That night at dinner he refused several courses with an air of asceticism, and drank only water, feeling that in some subtle manner this abstemiousness justified his attitude of the morning. Nina, perfectly foll
owing the workings of this strange law, remained serenely unmoved.
The astonishing ease with which Nina and Morris invariably penetrated one another’s poses was perhaps due less to years of practice than to the fundamental similarity of their methods and outlook.
It was no surprise to Morris Severing, although it irritated him very considerably, when two days later, Nina exclaimed over her correspondence in impassioned accents: “Bertie Tregaskis is miserable about Frances — miserable! And no wonder. The child has written that she isn’t well — has been in the infirmary or something — some kind of epidemic, I imagine, as the Superior is ill too, which seems to be all that Frances writes about. She gives no details about herself, and persists in declaring that she’s perfectly happy and doesn’t want to come away. It’s scandalous.”
“What is?” coldly inquired Morris, who had not forgotten Nina’s recent reception of his views on the cloistered life.
“This convent system. I’ve a very good mind...”
Nina assumed an aspect of deep consideration and of a preoccupation which Morris did not judge sufficiently deep to prevent his gazing with ostentatious inattention out of the window.
“A very good mind,” Nina repeated, and paused. Morris took advantage of the pause, which his parent obviously desired broken by a question, to light a cigarette with every appearance of deliberation and in perfect silence.
But Mrs. Severing’s determinations were not easily baffled.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, and thereby with great skill bridging over the pause, “I’m not at all sure I oughtn’t to go down there myself.”
Morris raised his eyebrows, an exercise ever effectual in conveying to his mother various undutiful sentiments which could not easily have been put into words.
“To Porthlew, mother?” he inquired, aware that she meant to the convent.
“Why do you say ‘to Porthlew,’ Morris, when you know perfectly well that I don’t mean that at all? Your affectation is unbearable, and no one but your mother would put up with it. I’m forbearing and long-suffering with you, because you’re my son, but who else in the world, do you suppose, would have patience with your endless petty insincerities and your insolent manners?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 85