“I remember saying when I was a child,” said Marguerite, “that if I were a nun, I’d pray all the time for people to be happy. I said I’d pray all day and all night for everyone, birds and animals and people and the whole world, just to be happy.”
“It seems that even then you were aware of your vocation,” said Reverend Mother. “And I remember that I also, when I first saw you, was aware of it. ‘Une vraie religieuse,’ I said of you.”
Marguerite looked up, startled, her eyes widening. Then she got up, reaching for her cloak. This was traveling far too quickly. It was enough, for now, to know herself a normal creature following a normal path. It was enough to be bathed in this serene and radiant happiness.
“Is it wrong to feel as happy as I do now?” she asked.
“Why should it be wrong? Happiness is your birthright, and those who pray with joy pray with power. Happiness is only sin when it springs from delight in self rather than in God.”
Reverend Mother had got up also, for she was too wise a woman to say more now upon the subject that had suddenly become the subject next her heart.
“You will be amused to hear that twenty-two years ago you caused me to found an orphanage that has been a perpetual nuisance to me ever since,” she said lightly.
“I caused you to found an orphanage?” asked the astonished Marguerite.
The two tall women stood facing each other in the sunlight that shone through the west windows. It had gathered the brightness of the sea up into its own light, and their two pale worn faces shone each to the other as though radiantly alight. They loved each other in that moment. They understood each other as only those understand who have suffered the same pain.
“Tell me about it, please,” said Marguerite, and Reverend Mother told her. “You might hear of a suitable house,” she finished.
“Yes,” said Marguerite, “I might. Indeed, I will. I’ll not rest till I’ve found it for you.”
“Thank you,” said Reverend Mother. “Come and see me again when you have found it. Now I’ll take you down to the chapel, for I don’t doubt you’ll like to look again at the scene of your youthful escapade. The west door is always kept open now. I often spend my meditation hour on the ledge of rock under the statue of the Madonna.”
“Mère Madeleine who let me in that day is still alive?” asked Marguerite, as they went down the worn stone steps to the chapel door.
“She’s still alive, poor soul, but very old and rather wandering in her wits, and something of a trial to us all. She says the good God must have forgotten to call her home, and we are all inclined to agree with her. You shall see her next time you come. Now I will leave you here in the chapel. Stay as long as you like, and then let yourself out. Good-by, my daughter. Allez en paix, vivez en paix, el que le Dieu de Paix vous bénisse.”
Her slim, cool hand touched Marguerite’s cheek for a moment, and then she was gone. What beautiful hands she has, thought Marguerite, beautiful, indolent hands. Who was she before she became a nun? A very great lady, surely, born to luxury. It cannot have been easy for her to take the holy habit of religion.
Then she lifted the latch of the chapel door and went in, greeted by the remembered musty smell of antiquity, incense and lilies. It all looked just the same, dim and most powerfully old, with the faint light from the deep-set windows touching the dull gold and dim blues and crimsons of statues and embroideries. The sanctuary lamp burned before the altar, and a motionless nun knelt praying before the statue of the Holy Child. Marguerite stood and looked about her for a moment, attentively, comparing reality with memory and finding them less divergent than usual, for with the passing of the years the place had lost for her neither its awe nor its welcoming homeliness. Then she went out through the door of the tower and stood on the ledge of rock beneath the great, worn statue of the Madonna and Child, looking westward out to sea. There was no mist today, and the horizon line was drawn straight and clear against the sky. Beyond it, at the other side of the mighty ocean, were William and Marianne. Yet though their bodies were hundreds of miles away, their souls seemed very near to hers. They sought the same thing, and their trinity of search made up a unity. “A threefold cord shall not be broken,” William had said. No, it should not. She went back into the chapel and knelt down to pray for them.
Chapter II
1
Marguerite sat upon the floor of the dismantled parlor and wondered what to do with the three last worldly possessions that she had not yet disposed of. She held them in her lap, a sampler, a wooden mouse, and a string of carved beads, and couldn’t imagine what to do with them. Ten months had gone by, and beyond the windows the garden burned in the afterglow of a summer sunset. It was the last evening of her life in the world. Tomorrow she would receive the holy habit of religion in the Chapel of Notre Dame du Castel, and a few days later, accompanied by three other novices, she would set sail for France to spend the time of her novitiate in Paris. Perhaps she would one day be sent back to her beloved Island, perhaps she would never see it again. Perhaps she would never see Reverend Mother again, whom she now loved more than anyone else in the world except William. The saying good-by to old friends, and to the houses and the streets and the bays of the little Island that had been her world since babyhood, had been very bitter, and for the last week she had scarcely slept for weeping, but this evening she was at peace, and worrying about nothing at all except this trivial, ridiculous problem of what to do with a sampler, a mouse, and a necklace. Her letter from William she was taking with her, folded inside the little book Reverend Mother had given her. That, she thought, did not rank among the worldly possessions she had renounced, but the sampler, the mouse, and the necklace most certainly did, and she could not turn up at the door of the convent with them clasped to her bosom.
Her first step had been an unsuccessful search for a house for the orphanage, and then the decision to offer Reverend Mother No. 3 Le Paradis. She could scarcely afford to live there by herself, for Octavius, with his love of comfort and display, had always spent nearly everything that he earned and had left very little money to his daughters. And the arrangement had provided for Charlotte, who as a Catholic had been delighted with the suggestion that she should stay on as cook to the orphanage. Her boys were old enough now to go out to work, and her two little girls could don the blue dresses and bonnets and cloaks and attach themselves to the tail of the crocodile that walked two by two to Mass on Sundays. Marguerite would have liked to sell No. 3 outright to the Order, but the house and the furniture had been left jointly to her and Marianne, and when she asked Marianne’s permission to do this it was refused in an extremely dictatorial and Marianne-ish letter. “Certainly not,” Marianne had written. “Let the house by all means, if you can get a good price for it, but do not sell, for I shall probably be requiring it in my own old age.” How could she possibly ever require it? Marguerite had wondered. William had said it would never be possible for him to return to the Island. Well, no doubt Marianne would manage things to her liking somehow. She always did. “And be certain you do get a good price for it,” Marianne’s letter had gone on. “You must not let it for less than its value. I enclose a list of the furniture and china I should like you to keep, and the rest you may sell. And I insist, my dear sister, that you do sell, and for a fair price. I do not wish you to part with articles of value as gifts to friends. Your tendency to lavish and wholly unnecessary giving, which merely tends to embarrass the recipient, was one which caused pain to dear Mamma and Papa and should not be indulged. I refer, of course, only to those articles which have been left to us both conjointly. In the case of your own personal possessions I have of course no right to command you, though I could by no means approve the sale of the lacquer desk that Aunt Louise gave you, or your Chinese workbox, or, of course, any of your jewelry. You have, I know, never cared for jewelry, but you must remember that you now have a niece.”
So slow were the posts
that Marguerite had not received this letter until a month ago. But she needed no reminder about her niece. She thought lovingly of little Marguerite Véronique every moment of the day and night, and all her personal treasures were now lodged in the bank, waiting until that young lady should be of age to claim them. And the furniture and china Marianne wanted kept was in store, and the rest sold, and the house let to Reverend Mother’s Order at a rent so low that Marguerite thought with compunction of poor William, who would doubtless have a bad time of it when Marianne got the news. And perhaps William would also have a bad time when Marianne heard that her sister had become not only a Catholic but a nun as well. But Marguerite had no idea how her sister would react to that piece of news. . . . It was just possible that she might be glad. . . . And what would William think of the step she was taking? She did not know that either. She had written the news in a letter beginning, “My beloved Brother and Sister,” and ending with the words, “I picture you in every detail of your daily living and think of you surrounded by strange birds and beasts and butterflies that make a necklace of beauty about your day. I shall pray fervently for your happiness. Though you are so far away, the bond between us is very strong, and a threefold cord shall not be broken. You have my love and devotion always. I think of you day and night. Marguerite.” The repetition of his own words would tell William that she had received his letter.
Now for the last, small, funny odds and ends. She spread out the sampler and looked at it, laughing at the rows of stiff little potted trees hung with golden fruit, that were a child’s conception of the sheltered fairy-tale garden of childhood, and at the border of the stars of Paradise whose points it had been so difficult to get clear and plain, and that “Au nom de Dieu soit,” worked in crooked scarlet cross-stitch, without which no Island peasant began a new piece of work. Then she stopped smiling and wrapped up the sampler in its silver paper again. It was queer that her end should have been so present in her beginning. And there was the mouse with the gay pink sticking-plaster ears and the ribald expression that William had made for love of her twenty-two years ago, and the necklace carved with the strange shapes and symbols of a far country. Here, surely, were the three of them again, the adventurer, the lover, the nun, the three searchers, the threefold cord that would not be broken. “You’re being absurdly fanciful,” Marguerite told herself severely. And then she put the sampler and William’s two gifts into a cedarwood box of her mother’s that she had meant to give to Charlotte, and stowed it away at the back of a dark cupboard beside the fireplace. This solution of her problem was a poor one, she realized, in fact it was no solution at all, but she did not want to destroy her treasures and she could not think what else to do.
2
Even the most well-trained minds are guilty occasionally of the most ridiculous and lamentable wanderings at the most unsuitable moments. Next day, as she knelt with the other novices in the Chapel of Notre Dame du Castel, clothed in the black serge gown and the white linen wimple, the holy habit of religion that would be hers now until she died, with the sweet, high voices of the nuns rising about her in the Kyrie eleison, she opened her eyes suddenly and saw a mouse run across the chapel floor. It was an exceptionally comic mouse, with a very long tail, and Marguerite, at this most solemn moment of her whole life, had to cover her face with her hands to extinguish an irrepressible giggle. And then, thick and fast, her girlhood’s memories came tumbling about her. It was a stormy day, and the rushing, mighty wind that was sweeping in from the sea beyond the convent walls, the tumult of it almost drowning the chanting of the nuns, took her back easily to another stormy day, and the wind was banging the door of the Le Paradis garden shut behind her and Marianne, and she was running over the cobbles of Green Dolphin Street and chasing her brown beaver bonnet with the pink ribbons up the narrow passage of the Ozannes’ house. And then she was running into the Doctor’s arms, and he was picking her up and carrying her into the parlor, and there was William in his gay, mad green clothes standing laughing in front of the fire. And then she was sewing her sampler in the parlor, with William’s mouse hidden in the folds of her dress, and then she was weeping stormily because Marianne and William had had some wonderful adventure together and had not taken her. And then she was racing over the sands with William, climbing with him up the slippery sides of Le Petit Aiguillon, holding out her arms to him at the top. Then she was La Môme, crowned with the chaplet of flowers, and William was lifting her to her feet and kissing her beneath the canopy of pink and white lilies. And then, the last memory of all, she stood beside William on the Orion, her hand trembling in his, and heard the quiet water murmuring against the ship’s hull and the harp-thrumming of the breeze in the rigging over her head, and knew that from ages past she had loved this man and would forever continue to love him. They were one flesh, one mind, one soul, a unity that nothing could divide; but just as William leaned toward her to tell her something, there was an interruption and the words were never said. . . . And now she was here, doing the banal, the melodramatic, the obvious thing that women had been doing for centuries, and renouncing the world because a man had renounced her. . . . Only that was not the whole of it. By whatever devious and humiliating steps she had come to this place, she had nevertheless come to the right place. Clothed in these austere garments, with the cold wind rushing by outside this old fastness of the spirit built high up among the clouds, facing a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, she was at home. A surge of joy went through her. If the wind was tearing the golden fruit off the trim little trees in their tidy pots, it was, with the perpetual sweep of its wings, burnishing the stars. “Au nom de Dieu soit.”
BOOK III: The World’s End
Part 1 Véronique
See with what simplicity
This nymph begins her golden days!
ANDREW MARVELL.
Chapter I
1
Véronique sat upon a small three-legged stool under the pohutakawa tree in the garden and stitched placidly at a cross-stitch kettle holder for Mamma’s birthday. She had designed it herself, her inspiration being the tattooing on Nat’s chest. Her life was full of wonderful things, and one of them was undoubtedly Nat’s tattooing. The kettle holder had an anchor in one corner, a heart pierced by an arrow in another, a mermaid in the third, a dolphin in the fourth, and a ship in full sail in the middle. Nat, his chest bared, had sat upon an upturned bucket as model while Papa had sketched the design for her upon the canvas, but the stitching was being executed entirely by herself in scarlet wool upon a blue background. Mamma knew nothing about it at all. It was to be a complete surprise. She would like it, Véronique knew, because of its being copied from Nat’s chest. For Mamma loved Nat as much as Véronique did herself, and she did not seem to mind how much Véronique loved Nat, or Nat Véronique. This was pleasant. If she was sitting on Nat’s knee, he did not have to put her down suddenly when he heard Mamma coming, as Papa and Uncle Haruru did, because Mamma did not lift her eyebrows or make her mouth go tight when she saw Véronique on Nat’s knee, she only laughed and was pleased. The whole of life was different when Mamma was pleased. Though she was only seven years old, rising eight, Véronique had already learned how to direct her life to that end, just as Papa and Uncle Haruru did. Nat didn’t have to try so hard to please Mamma because all that he did and said was generally right in her eyes, just as what Véronique and Papa and Uncle Haruru did and said was generally wrong. And as for Old Nick, he never tried to please Mamma because he didn’t care about anything at all except eating and saying what he thought in a loud voice. Hine-Moa, who lived in the village of raupo houses in the forest beyond the palisade, and came sometimes to help Mamma with the housework, was rather like Old Nick in that she too did not mind Mamma. In her dealings with Mamma she was fortunate in that she was a Maori. This meant that when Mamma told her to do something she did not want to do, she could pretend she did not understand a word of English, and when she wanted to insult Mamma she could d
o it very fast in a native dialect of which Mamma understood nothing at all except the tone of voice. No, neither Nat nor Old Nick nor Hine-Moa minded Mamma, and neither did Uncle Haruru, really, though for all their sakes he was always very careful not to make her annoyed. . . . It was only Papa and Véronique who minded. . . . But they loved Mamma, so Papa was always telling Véronique. She was a wonderful woman and they loved her very dearly.
It was natural to Véronique to love people very dearly. She was made that way. She looked up now to see which of these six people, who made up her whole world, were safely within call. Nat was quite close, weeding Mamma’s flower border. She could see his bent back and red cap.
“Nat,” she called, “I’m doing the mermaid’s tail.”
Nat’s head, its baldness covered by a red nightcap that Mamma had knitted as an exact replica of one Nat had lost in the wreck, lifted itself above the bushes. He straightened himself and grinned at her, then bent again to his work, hissing softly through his teeth, as he always did when he was feeling affectionate and happy. Véronique hissed in reply. They had developed a sort of hissing language, he and she. No one else could understand a word of it, but they were quite comprehensible to each other.
“Old Nick,” said Véronique, “I’m doing the mermaid’s tail.”
He had been let out of his cage and was sitting just above her in the pohutakawa tree, eating a sweet potato. “Oh, my,” he said, winked an eye at her, and went on eating the potato.
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