Chapter VII: I Am Put Away in Camphor

I cannot hold Lady Sophia altogether irresponsible for the loss to the Calendar of a very promising saint. I entered Wellcot enthusiastic to devote the rest of my days to the practices of piety and self-renunciation, and I was moved to this resolve not least by the example my benefactress seemed to offer me of the most perfect detachment from the world. Alas! I was too soon to realise how the chaste aloofness of a mind may mean only a vanity so sensitive, and an irritability so nervous, as for ever to be on their defence against unwarranted approaches. I had thought her serenely above the littlenesses of life; and all the time she only sat on a level with them, but apart, in alarm lest her moral distinction should be held to justify familiarities with her social. The folded wings of piety may be used to conceal some uncelestial humours. I had supposed, at least, that passion was the remotest from her temperament; and there even I was wrong, as you shall learn.

She wrote, in accordance with Father Pope’s advice, to the Superioress of the sisterhood to which my mother had belonged. I confess, for all my confidence, I awaited the answer in some trepidation. It fulfilled, however, when it came, my best expectations. The charitable Mother confirmed the story of her former postulant’s recreancy and flight with a profligate man of fashion--whither, she had never concerned herself to inquire. The woman, in leaving the convent gates, she said, had died to her--to all, save the lord of hell, who, she was rejoiced now to hear, had so soon claimed and secured his own. She would command a Magnificat that night in praise of the eternal chastity; and there her interest in the matter ended. She wrote in French, with much Pharisaic unction, which betrayed, nevertheless, its underlying gall. Madam quoted to me only so much (I found an opportunity later to read the whole) as appeared to justify her in the course upon which she was resolved--my present adoption, that was to say, by her, for the sake of my soul. I was becomingly meek and grateful in placing myself unreservedly in her hands; and in this manner began my self-obliterating martyrdom of five long years in the placid nunnery of Wellcot.

For a time I was very happy, until a ripening intelligence revealed to me by degrees the limitations of my moral and material surroundings. I have no intention to detail the processes of that growth. I can hardly, indeed, claim an independent life until detached from its dull experiences. It is enough here briefly to review them.

My first warning disillusionment was the knowledge, to my infinite disgust, that Father Pope was to remain a permanency in the asylum to which accident had translated him. Whether his former patrons seized this opportunity--in the first reactionary days after riot--to rid themselves of an ungainly incubus, or whether--which is more probable--he himself manœuvred for transference to new hunting-grounds, not of souls, but grubs, I do not know. Anyhow, his baggage being his book, the change was easy, and at Wellcot he remained, titular chaplain to the Lady Sophia, but positive to a community of nuns across the valley, who were her most cherished protégées, and to whose ranks I, in the first blind fervour of my redemption, unprovisionally dedicated myself.

I had not been long settled before, speculating on the relationship between Shole and Wellcot-Herring, I began to wonder if I was destined ever to see again the young gentleman who had so insulted me. Perhaps, I thought, I might help by my example, and even persuasion, to wean him from his evil courses. However, the opportunity was not to be given me, as it appeared he was not sufficiently in love with his aunt’s ways to pay her even the periodic courtesy of a visit. But his father the earl came occasionally, and from him I was bent upon discovering whether or not my image was entirely effaced from the son’s remembrance.

Happening to meet him alone in the gardens one day, I was actually emboldened to beg him to convey a message from me to the viscount that I forgave him.

He stopped, and looked at me with admiration; then took my chin in his hand.

“I shall do nothing of the sort, Miss Presumption,” he said, in his thin, ironic voice. “But I’m not so particular for myself. You shall give me all of your confidences that you like.”

“Thank you,” I said saucily; “I will choose a handsomer to fill the place of my papa.”

“Was he so handsome?” says he, grinning.

“He was the most beautiful man in the world,” I answered.

“Well, I can believe it,” he said. “But not so handsome as my brother George, hey?”

“Fifty thousand times,” I said.

“And fifty thousand times better?”

“I don’t know. He was good enough for me.”

“That I can well believe,” he chuckled; then took a turn or two and came back.

“Harkee, missy,” says he, “I’m not going to peach on you, whatever you say, so you can be as free as air with me. Only promise not to make me jealous of my own son, and we’ll be fast friends some day.” And with a laugh, he left me.

I hated him instinctively, and longed for the time when I could set my wits to discompose him. He was a widower, and socially and politically a man of bad character; and it should have been madam’s duty to see that we were not brought into contact. But she could conceive no evil of the head of her house.

The brother, the good one, came near us no more than the viscount; which, nevertheless, did not trouble me, because I owed him a debt, and he was too poor in purse and reputation to expect me to liquidate it. Little Patty, after her manner, loved this unfortunate, whom she had seen often in former days, before his character went over some racing transaction, which ruined him and made him shy of his familiars. Her loyalty was proof against the worst. Where she was pledged, she never dropped away, and her heart had the truest instinct for finding and attaching itself to what was lovable in another. She adored nobility of mind, and was always my most faithful little adherent. I came early to discover that her origin was none of the most select, and on this account, perhaps, condescended to her more than I should. She repaid me with a blind devotion and admiration which were sometimes more affecting than diplomatic; and, before I had been at Wellcot a year, would have followed me at a word to shame or death, in very despite of her duty to her patroness. But by then, I think, she was coming with me to recognise certain flaws in the character of her former divinity.

It was from her in the first instance that I learned all that she knew of the family history: How my lord was a brute and libertine, who had done his wife to death, and was hated and feared of all, unless, perhaps, by the old dirty astrologer on the hill, who was his kinsman and Naboth and defier in one, holding the “Folly” in fee simple, as he did, from a scientific ancestor, and persistently refusing to be coaxed or bought out of it. How my lady, as pious as her brother was worldly, had embraced the Romish doctrine many years before, and had not scrupled, on the Jesuit principle, to procure herself through his most questionable political relations a virtual exemption from the penalties which attached to the open exercise of her religion. How, trading on this connection, she had planted in Wellcot-Herring a community of the “Sisters of Perpetual Invocation,” whose munificent patroness and dupe (Heaven forgive me! They were certainly very plausible little sybarites) she had constituted herself. How the honourable Mr. Rowe, his lordship’s younger brother, was suspected of royal blood in his veins, and was only spared the scandal of proof so long as his nephew, the Viscount Salted, kept him out of the succession. How, in fine,--and this was where my interest was most intimately engaged,--her ladyship had once had an _affaire de cœur_ with a Mr. de Crespigny, an artist, who came to paint her portrait, and who left it on the canvas half finished, being given, it was whispered, his congé in reluctant return for his insensibility to the proselytising advances of his sitter.

From little Patty I extracted all this _chronique scandaleuse_, and if she enlightened me in her own inimitable bashful way, blundering prettily on the truth out of innocence, I was not so backward even then as to be imposed upon by half-revelations, or to refrain from construing them on my own account into the language of experience.

And so I entered on my new life, having, to endear its strangeness, and soon, alas! its monotony to me, the most loving, simple-minded little comrade one might imagine. From the first my position, like my friend’s, was undefined. We were not adopted daughters, or servants, or companions to madam, but a sort of pious pensioners on her bounty. She claimed some personal menial duties of us, which might be likened to those exacted of ladies of a royal bed-chamber. As was befitting with so great a princess, we might approach and handle her, but reverently as one might uncover a reliquary of sanctified bones. And, indeed, she was little else. For myself, I did not much care. My eyes and ears served me for all her case, howsoever little of her intimacy was vouchsafed me.

I often put her to bed after supper and prayers, when she would love to engage me in little drony dialectics on faith. We had amicable contests of wit, God save me! on the qualities which endeared our favourite saints to us. I observed that the male beatitudes were her choice. Her room was hung with as many “Fathers” as a fribble’s is with Madonnas of the opera-house. The ways of piety are strange. I was no _dévote_, alas! like madam, yet I should have been abashed to go to bed in such company.

But, indeed, there was no disputing with her principles. Faith was her covering argument in everything. She wore it like a garment, high-necked and impenetrable; only, to my taste, it was none the more becoming for being fitted over broken stay-bones. Then, too, she moved so stately by faith, that I had often speculated why her heels should be trodden over, until I discovered that she had bandy legs. Truly faith, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. I attribute it to her that mine came so soon to be in myself. I have never had reason to be ashamed of anything it hid; only instinct tells me to be more particular about my garters than my scapular. If the Lady Susannah Rowe had found herself being spied upon by the Elders, she would have snatched and donned the latter, and had complete faith in its shelter. That may be grace, but it is not graceful, I think. Since the first mother started the fashions, there has been every obligation on us to consult appearances; and I at least, though never more worldly than the most, have persistently declined to let Faith make an ostrich of me.

She used often to send me to the convent across the valley with messages to the nuns; and I was early in discovering that I was the more welcomed by them when a little offering of fowls or hothouse grapes accompanied me. Then I could gain indulgences as many as I wanted for my peccadilloes--up to twenty at least for a couple of fat gallinas--and perhaps rather presumed upon my purgatory in consequence.

This community was a praying order and eternally vowed from washing, as a personal indelicacy; or from stepping beyond its convent gates, as a first _faux pas_ into the world; or from ministering to any needs but its own; or, in short, from being of any practical use on the earth whatever, save as an authorised agency for the distribution of “indulgences.” A natural consequence of all of which was that it grew to be a very pot-bellied little community, as tight-skinned and ruddy as the pears on its own south wall, and, through its Superioress, as knowing a judge as any of old port and early asparagus. The bell that prostrated it on its fat little knees to Angelus was the same that rang it to dinner. The throat of the thing was hoarse with the steam of rich pasties and salmis of game that rose from the convent kitchen hard by. It had mushroom pits and a peach-hung pleasaunce, and, indeed, by the help of my lady, was altogether as epicurean a little company for saints’ feast days as could be gathered. The devil, it is certain, sets up his tent in an empty stomach. He would have found close quarters, as was proper, in the Convent of Perpetual Invocation. I will say for the Sisters that I never heard a cross word among them.

Now, to have the command of indulgences, for feast days, and for dispensations from fast, in such a neat little paradise as theirs, seemed to me at the first a very desirable thing. Only I hoped that by the time I was ripe for the novitiate, the chaplain would have been replaced by one more personable. The Mother had, in common decency, to undertake to instruct me and Patty by and by in the articles of our creed, and Father Pope, complete gentleman, to conduct our secular finishing. We never saw any other man, except village chawbacons and, at rare intervals, the foxy earl. It was a deadly life. I could not have endured it but for the society of my sweet little _adoratrice_. She grew up the dearest thing, with the face of a Christian shepherdess. One saw lambs, not babies, in her eyes. Holding her little kind hand in memory, I pass over four years of this self-obliteration, until I awaken to find myself in my seventeenth year.