Chapter XXXVII: The Crisis Approaching

While Oswald went about the streets so lightly, and thought so pleasantly of his prospects, another mind, still more agitated than that of Cara, was turning over and over all he had done for the last five or six weeks, and all that he might be about to do in the future. Agnes in her convent, with all her routine of duties--with the little tinkling bell continually calling her to one thing or another, to matins or evensong, to ‘meditation,’ to this service or that, to choir practice, to dinner and tea and recreation--carried a tumult of fancies about with her, which no one, except perhaps Sister Mary Jane, guessed. Oswald would have stood aghast could he have seen into that little ocean of excited feeling, where the waves rose higher and higher as the hours went on, and sometimes a swelling tide almost swept the thinker herself away--though indeed he would have been so unable to understand it that the inspection would probably have taught him little. How easily he took all this, which was so tremendous to her! and that not only because of the difference between man and woman, but because of the fundamental difference in temperament, which was greater still. Agnes had known but little that was lovely or pleasant in her life. Her rectory-home was neither; her father and mother and brothers and sisters were all vulgar and commonplace, struggling for existence, and for such privileges as it contained, one against another, and against the world, each grumbling at the indulgences the other managed to secure. The parish and its poor--and its rich, who were not much more attractive--had been all the world she had known; and the only beings who had crossed her horizon, who were not struggling like her own people, in the sordid race of existence, to get something, whatever it might be, were the Sisters in the House, and such a gentle retired person as Miss Cherry, who was not fighting for anything, who was ready to yield to anyone, and whose mild existence was evidently not pervaded by that constant recollection of self which filled up all the life of the others. This was what had brought the visionary girl into the House, which was sordid, too, in its details, though not in its spirit. Then there had been suddenly presented to her, just as she settled down to the work of the House, an image of something new, something more spontaneous, more easy in generosity, more noble in liberality than anything she had ever encountered. What did it matter that this type of nobleness was a handsome young man? Visionary Agnes, in the daring of her youth, saw no harm, but rather a beautiful fitness, in the fact that this revelation of the ideal should have all that was best in external as well as in more important things. He had stopped short--no doubt with all the brilliant world, which she did not know, waiting for him, arrested till he should rejoin it--to carry the wounded child to the hospital. He had left those mysterious glories of life, day after day and week after week, to go and ask for little Emmy. How wonderful this was! The devotion of Sister Mary Jane, the loving-kindness of Miss Cherry, faded before such an example; for they had not the world at their feet as this young paladin evidently had.

This was how the first chapter of the story came about. It opened her eyes (Agnes thought) to nobleness undreamed of, and for the first few weeks the universe itself had grown more bright to her. Could it be possible, then, that in ‘the world’ itself, which the Sisters had abjured--in that splendid glorious ‘society’ which even ascetic books spoke of as something too full of enhancements and seductions to be resisted by any but the most heroic, there were still opportunities of living the highest unselfish life, to the glory of God and the comfort of man? When Agnes found that this ideal hero of hers had thoughts less exalted in his bosom--that so small a motive as the wish to see herself and talk to her, had something to do with his devotion to the orphan, her visionary mind received a shock. Probably, had Oswald’s enthusiasm been for another, she would have been permanently disquieted by the discovery; but there is something strangely conciliatory in the fact that it is one’s self who is admired and followed. Such trivial emotions detract from the perfection of an ideal character; but still it is a much more easy thing to forgive your own lover than anyone else’s. And the more he sought her, the more Agnes’s heart, in spite of herself, inclined towards the man who could be thus moved. The ideal stole away, but so insensibly, in rose-coloured clouds, that she had not discovered the departure of her first admiration and wonder before something else stole in. It was not all goodness, nobleness, Christian charity, perhaps, that moved him; but what was it? Love, which in its way is divine too. Only after this altogether new influence had made itself felt did doubts appear, making a chaos in her mind. Were his sentiments as true as she had first thought? Was it right to counterfeit goodness, even in the name of love? Was not, after all, the life of the Sisters, the life of sacrifice, more noble than the other smiling life, of which he was the emblem? Was it not a mean thing to go back from that, and all one’s high thoughts of it, to the common romance of a story-book? Might not this romance lead back again to those vulgar beaten paths out of which Agnes had supposed herself to have escaped? And, ah! was it true after all? this was the refrain which kept coming back. Was it love and not levity? Was he seeking her seriously, in honour and truth; or was it possible that he was not noble at all, seeking her only for his own amusement? These thoughts shook Agnes to the bottom of her soul. They were like convulsions passing over her, tearing her spirit asunder. She went on with her work and all her religious exercises, and nobody found out how curiously unaware of what she was doing the girl was; living in a dream, performing mechanically all outside functions. Who does know, of those who are most near to us, what is going on in our minds? And not a calm Sister, not a little orphan in the House, would have been more incapable of comprehending, than was Oswald--to whom it would have seemed impossible--that anything in the world could produce so much emotion. Not only was it incomprehensible to him, but he could not even have found it out; and that his conduct should move either Agnes or Cara to this passionate suffering was an idea out of his grasp altogether. He would have been astounded, and more than astounded, had he been able to see into these two strange phases of unknown existence, which he could not have realised; but yet he was interested as warmly as his nature permitted. He was ‘in love;’ he was ready to do a great deal to secure to himself the girl he loved. He was ready to proceed to the most unmistakable conclusions, to commit himself, to blazon his love to the eyes of day. Perhaps even the sense that it was in his power to do this, without waiting for a keynote from anyone else, had something to do with his perfect calm.

After this, however, the departure of Emmy brought a new phase to the strange wooing. There was no reason now why Agnes should go out alone; and watchful Sister Mary Jane, who was not satisfied with the shape the affair was taking, exercised an undisclosed surveillance over her young disciple. Things ‘of the world,’ like love and marriage, are out of the way of professed Sisters, Anglican or otherwise; but Sister Mary Jane had long recognised that Agnes Burchell had not a ‘vocation,’ and she was a woman, though she was a Sister, and had a soft spot in her heart which would have made her not inexorable to an incipient romance. But why didn’t he ask me about her friends? Sister Mary Jane said to herself. This seemed to her the test by which Oswald was to be known, and he had borne its application badly. Accordingly she watched over Agnes with double zeal, scarcely letting her out of her own sight. Someone was always ready to accompany her, when she went out; and even in the daily procession of the school-girls Agnes was never left alone. Here, however, Oswald was just as much in advance of everything Agnes could have thought of, as she was in advance of him in intensity of feeling. Nothing could exceed the cleverness, the patience, the pertinacity with which he baffled this attempt to shut him out from her. He would not be shut out; he haunted the neighbourhood like the air they breathed. The door seemed never to open but he was within reach, and Agnes never went to a window without seeing him. He passed the procession as it went demurely along the street; he was present somewhere when it came out, and when it went in; whenever Agnes was visible he was there. This might have been the most intolerable persecution, enough to drive the victim crazy; but oddly enough it did not produce this effect. On the contrary, the sense of his constant presence near her, watching her perpetually, became like an intoxication to Agnes. She went about more and more like a person in a dream. To feel that when you lift your eyes you will most probably see a handsome face full of tender interest, anxiously waiting to secure your answering glance, and beautiful eyes full of love and eagerness watching you wherever you go, is not a thing which produces a very displeasing effect upon the mind of a girl. He could not approach her directly, had not a chance of speaking to her; but he never gave her time to forget him. The excitement of this pursuit delighted Oswald. It would have pleased him, even had he been much less truly touched by genuine love than he was, so far as that love can be considered genuine which springs from the sudden impression made by a fair face, and which has no foundation (to speak of) of personal knowledge or intimate acquaintance. As this, however, is what is called love by the great majority of the world, we need not apologise for Oswald’s sentiment, which was quite real and very engrossing. But it suited his character admirably to carry it on in this way. He enjoyed the sensation of foiling all precautions, and conveying by a glance, by the taking off of his hat, by his mere appearance, as much as other men do by chapters of more practical wooing. Agnes, after a week or two of such treatment, began to forget all her doubts, and to feel herself floated upwards into a visionary world, a kind of poetical paradise, in which the true knight worships and the fair lady responds at a saintly distance, infinitely above him yet beneath him, half angelic yet half parasitic, owing to his worship the greater part of her grandeur. She made a little feeble resistance, now and then, saying to herself that she did not know him, that he did not know her; asking herself how could this interchange of glances and the dozen words they had spoken to each other form any foundation for ‘friendship,’ which in the trouble of her mind was what she chose to call it? But such arguments do not count for much in the mind of a girl who feels and knows that all her comings and goings are marked by adoring eyes, that some instinct guides her lover across her path whenever she leaves the shelter of her home, and that his love is great enough to encounter perpetual fatigue and trouble, and to make him give up his entire leisure to the chance of seeing her. If it ever gleamed across her mind that he might have found out an easier way by making love to her parents, and that this would at once have delivered them both from all possibility of misunderstanding, the idea faded as quickly as it entered, driven away by the next appearance of Oswald’s reverential salutation, his eager glance, his apparently accidental presence. Sister Mary Jane very seldom went with the procession, and it was not etiquette to talk of what was seen or heard outside, and the Superior of the House was so occupied as to be beyond the possibility of gossip. So that she did not hear of the daily appearance of the intruder. Sister Catherine was short-sighted, and very much taken up with the demeanour of the girls. If she remarked him at all with her dim eyes, she took it for granted that he lived in the neighbourhood and was going to his occupation, whatever it might be, when the girls went out for their walk. ‘I don’t keep up the practice of recognising the people I knew in the world,’ she said on one occasion, seeing somebody taking off his hat. ‘Never mind whether it was for you or for me; it is best to take no notice--unless, indeed, with real friends.’ But she did not mention the incident to the Superior, and Agnes, though she trembled, said nothing. The daily encounter was like wine in her veins. It intoxicated her with a curious dreamy intoxication of the spirit. Her head was in the clouds as she walked, and she did not know which was real--the curious life which she passed like a dream in the House, or that glimpse of freedom and light and sunshine which she had abroad, light in which he stood enshrined like the young Saint Michael in the painted window. By degrees that moment of encounter became the principal fact in the day. Who was she to resist this fanciful, delicate worship? and Agnes did not know that it was to him no visionary reverential distant worship, but the most amusing and seductive pursuit in the world.

It was evident, however, that this could not go on indefinitely without coming to some conclusion. A few weeks stole by; Oswald did not tire, and Agnes grew more and more self-absorbed. She struggled, but ineffectually, against the sweet, strange fascination which rapt her out of the vulgar world altogether, in which she still went on mechanically doing her duties, very good to the children, very submissive and sweet to the Sisters, caring for nothing so much as to sit still in a corner and muse and dream when her work was done. Agnes felt herself a very unsatisfactory person all these weeks. She was ashamed to think how little her heart was in her work, although she did it to all appearance more dutifully than ever. All her little disquiet was over. She bore the dulness of routine like an angel, because of this visionary refuge of dreams which she had; but with all this outward sweetness Agnes felt that in her early days in the House, when her heart rebelled at the details, but was warm as an enthusiast’s in the spirit of the place, she was more true than now. Now she was patient, docile, gentle with everybody, and when she had an opportunity of quiet would stroll into the little rude chapel with its bare walls--for what; for prayer? She had gone there to pray for strength many a time when her patience was nearly at an end before; but now what visions stole unwittingly yet too sweetly upon her dreamy soul, what words imagined or remembered kept echoing in her ears! Poor Agnes, how happy she was and how miserable! Good Sister Catherine, short-sighted and dull, wondered over the young teacher’s growth in grace, and whispered to the Superior that a great work was going on, and that their young helper would soon devote herself, as they had done, and join them altogether in their work. But Sister Mary Jane, who was wise, shook her head. She saw something in the dreamer’s eyes which did not mean devotion. And oh, how guilty poor Agnes felt when, stealing out of chapel where her prayers had so soon melted away into those musings, she encountered the blue eyes which Oswald had thought too beautiful not to be merciful as well! Agnes trembled daily to be asked, ‘What are you thinking of?’ What was she thinking of? how could she tell anyone--much less Sister Mary Jane? It was shameful, terrible, to carry such thoughts into such a place. How she had fallen off from the first fervour, the early enthusiasm of self-devotion! to what was that devotion now turned aside? Alas! alas! But, all the same, in external matters the change was for the better. The more pious of the girls thought her a true Agnes, fit votary of the saint who bears the lamb. They hoped she would keep that gentle name and be Sister Agnes when she was professed.

Thus Agnes got an altogether fictitious reputation while Oswald carried on his wooing; and summer came, and the long evenings grew more and more akin to dreams. Oswald did what few men of his class would do for love or anything else--went without his dinner, evening after evening. In the hot days the girls had their walk later; and, as soon as he found this out, love and the excitement of pursuit and the determination to succeed, persuaded him, between them, to this sublime point of self-sacrifice. After a while he was rewarded. And this was how it came about.

It was June; the summer had expanded until the days were almost at their longest, and, as the season had all through been a very warm and bright one, everything was in its perfection of summer beauty. Oswald had seen the school procession trip in one evening by the door of the House, leaving behind all the lovely glow of a summer sunset. He turned round and walked away towards that brilliant western blaze with a sigh; twilight was in his face, which the golden light caught aslant and glorified. It was getting on to the wistful moment of the day when the excitement of the sun’s departure is over, and Nature, too, sighs in exhaustion and gentle sadness; and it was the wistful moment for the lover, his lady just disappeared out of sight, and the impossibility of following her, speaking to her, getting any point of connection with her, overwhelming his mind. Was this how it was always to be; never to get any further; never to do anything but wait and gaze and salute her as she passed; was this to be all? Rather indeed this for her, than anything with another! But yet the days were long, and it is dreary always to wait:

When there suddenly appeared against the blaze in the west a black poke-bonnet, the ugliest of its kind. He pricked up his ears and quickened his steps. How he could think it might be she whom he had just seen to disappear at the convent door, I don’t understand; but his heart began to beat and his steps quickened as if by magic. Nothing short, however, of a novel adaptation of the great Indian juggling trick could have brought Agnes there. She was, on the contrary, safe in the House, superintending the girls who were getting ready for tea, with the sweetest angelic smile upon her face. The girls were hot from their walk, tired and troublesome and noisy; but Agnes bore with them like a saint--did not hear them, indeed, having retired into her private chapel and place of musing. But if it was not Agnes, if indeed it was someone as unlike Agnes as could be conceived, Agnes herself could scarcely have been so desirable to meet. It was the old porteress of the House, the lay Sister who had several times accompanied her on her expeditions to the hospital. A sudden inspiration came to Oswald. There could be nothing improper in addressing her, a perfectly safe person to whom his interest in little Emmy could bear nothing but the most natural and genuine aspect. He hastened up to her with anxious looks and asked how the little patient was, and if any news of her had been received at the House.

‘Oh, bless you, sir, yes!’ said the lay Sister; ‘she’s been very bad, but now she’s better. She won’t be a long liver, that child. She’s very delicate, but come when it will the little lamb is prepared. She is the piousest child I ever came across.’

‘Do you mean to say she is dying?’ said Oswald, alarmed in spite of himself.

‘Oh, no, sir! Some time, I make no doubt, but not now; but she has been that delicate--you could blow her away with a puff of wind. So she has never come back. Indeed, I hear the teacher of the third division, that’s Miss Burchell--you’ve seen her--the one as always went to the hospital----’

‘Oh, yes, I have seen her!’

‘Delicate, too, sir. I’m not easy deceived, and I saw in a moment as she was not fit for the work.’

‘Is she ill?’ said Oswald, all tremulous and excited, feeling disposed to rush forthwith to the House without rhyme or reason, and carry her off.

‘Oh, no, sir; not at all! But Sister Mary Jane, she’s the Superior----’

‘Yes, yes; I know.’

‘She thinks that she’d be the better for a change, and so, as she wants to send some more children to the Sanatorium, she’s made up her mind to send her, for she’d be a deal the better she says of a little sea air herself.’

‘Ah!’ said Oswald, ‘_she_ who is going to the Sanatorium is Sister Mary Jane?’

‘Not at all, sir, oh no, the one that is going is Miss Burchell. Sister Mary Jane is the Superior, and she thinks it will do her good and take off her thoughts.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Oswald, gravely. ‘When does Miss Burchell go? you might ask her from me to remember me to little Emmy; when does she go!’

‘To-morrow, sir. I am sure, sir, you’re very good to think so much about such a little thing as that; but she _is_ a dear little thing. I have understood, sir, that it was you that paid for her going----’

‘That is a trifle, Sister----’

‘Oh, I am not called Sister,’ said the porteress, blushing with pleasure, ‘I am not a lady like the rest. I am only in the House to open the door and to do the chars; but if I was the Superior I could not be more interested for little Emmy. Bless you, sir, she is the piousest little thing! And thank you, sir, for your goodness to her; that child’s prayers will bring down a blessing on you.’

‘Amen!’ said Oswald, himself feeling much more pious than usual. ‘I want it badly enough----’

‘And I’ll tell Miss Burchell to give Emily your love----’

‘On second thoughts,’ said Oswald, astutely, ‘it will be better not to say anything about it. The Sister Superior might not like a stranger to send messages.’

‘That is very true,’ said the lay Sister, perceiving all at once that she too might have come in for a rebuke; and after this she ran on into sundry communications about Sister Catherine who was newly arrived and not quite up to the work. ‘For them that know such ladies as Sister Mary Jane and Miss Burchell is naturally particular,’ said the porteress.

‘Very naturally,’ said Oswald, with fervour. He asked her to put a sovereign for him into the poor-box at the chapel door, and then sent her off well pleased, while he turned back in great haste to prepare for his going. Here was his opportunity at last.