Chapter VIII: I Meet Mr. Noel De Crespigny

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:--

“Thrice happy she who from thy kindling eye
Shall draw some spark to illuminate her breast,
A wistful wanderer between earth and sky,
With doubts of love’s true haven sore oppressed.”

“Do you recognise them?” she repeated.

“Yes, madam,” I acknowledged, looking up between reserve and defiance.

“You do?” she murmured, taken aback. “And it is your hand?”

“No, madam,” I answered quietly. “It is Miss Grant’s, but disguised.”

She echoed the word, at once incredulous, and fearful of exciting another outbreak by appearing so.

“Disguised! For what purpose? And to whom addressed?”

“To me,” I answered. “It was part of a game between us; but we will play it no more.”

She echoed in amazement, “A game!” Then asked faintly, “What game?”

“I was the Hermit of the Rocks,” I said, “and Miss Grant the Princess Camilla, who wrote to consult me as to her vocation, whether for the cloister or for marriage with a pious young gentleman.”

It was an inspiration, which I had no sooner uttered than I feared for my rashness. But I need not have. Madam, as her slow perceptives kindled, grew one shine of happy intelligence.

“A game!” she repeated, smiling holy-motherly over the decorous innocence of our inventions. “Well, I will say it was a very proper one, though a little ambiguous in the articles of love to be addressed to a hermit. But how came it in the chaplain’s book, child?”

I confessed that I had had the curiosity to read in the Father’s breviary, and must unwittingly have left the paper there for a marker. She kissed me then, and, while deprecating my inquisitiveness in matters which did not concern me, apologised very handsomely, I will say, for having so traduced me on a shred of evidence.

“It shall be a lesson to me, and a penance,” she said. “But, child, go now and retract your wicked recantation, before perhaps the devil shall claim you to your sin.”

“It was very hard, madam,” I said, still rebellious. “Why, being disguised, should Father Pope have decided as of course that the verses were mine?”

“Ah!” she said, blushing and embarrassed. “That I do not know--I think; but little Patty is no genius.”

The moment I was free, I hurried palpitating to my friend, and confessed all, and implored her, by the love between us, to play her part in the little innocent deception I had practised. She gazed at me with her sweet shocked eyes, as if I were inviting her to murder.

“You really meant them for him, for Father Pope?” she whispered, half choking. “O, Diana! It was blasphemy!”

“It was,” I said, “to waste the Princess Camilla on such a block.”

Then, as my friend still cried out, I knelt, and took her waist prisoner in my arms, and begged to her.

“I am not like you, darling. I pine and pinch in this cold air. If it was not for you, you little warm thing, I should run away with Giles, the handsome stable-boy.”

“Don’t,” she wept. “You don’t mean it. Say you only intended it for a joke!”

“Of course I only meant it for a joke,” I said, urging her; “though it’s true I believed the creature was expecting it of me. But ’tis a joke that will cost me dear if you don’t back me.”

“O!” she cried, despairing, “I do, I will. But how can I ever pretend to have wrote them, when that cat rhymes with lap is the best I know of verse.”

“You little dear,” I said, laughing in sheer love of her artlessness. “Pretend nothing, but hold your tongue.”

That she would have done for me, I think, though they racked her to confess; and all might yet have gone well, had not the Lady Sophia, meddlesome like most self-righteous consciences, sent for her to question if, after all, her simple verses might not have been the instinctive expression of _her_ leaning towards the cloister. My poor transparent angel managed to articulate a panic denial of any such tendency; though, indeed, there was no need to, to any but a blindworm. If ever little maid was built for loving, or to lay her pretty hair in a puddle for some rogue to reach heaven by, it was she. The sense of guilt would confound her, however; and, what between her duty to madam and her loyalty to me, she must have answered her examination so ambiguously as to raise some new doubts and suspicions in the minds of her inquisitors.

She flew back to me with very red eyes, and a fresh horror of the imposition she was forced to practise.

“I will never, never tell,” she sobbed, “though they tear me to pieces. But O, Diana! I don’t want to be a nun.”

I comforted her, though furious with the others for their Jesuitical practices on her innocence.

“Wait,” I cried, “and I will pay them both out! What right had they, after what I said, to try and torture a lie out of you? Don’t fear for the convent, child. I pledge my word you shall have a husband and fifty children, nun or no nun.”

“I want no husband,” she answered, blushing and clinging to me, “and no lover but you.”

I have taken pains to record her fond little reply, in view of an odious charge, once concocted to my injury, of my having traded upon my friend’s faith in me to rob her heart of its dearest possession. That, indeed, was, then and always, no less than her loved Diana, of whom none was ever permitted by her to take precedence. Any sacrifice which was designed to maintain those mutual relations she thought too cheap for discussion.

One result, however, of her “questioning” was that madam’s attitude towards me was thenceforth marked by a reserve and jealousy which, inasmuch as I was unconscious of having done anything to merit it, served only to prejudice me against a religion which could be used for a cloak to so much hypocrisy. I grew quickly disenamoured of my supposed vocation, and decided that faith, which seemed largely a matter of digestion, could be better realised through independence. In short, in the world I could reach beatitude through twenty self-indulgences to one in the convent; and, such being the case, and my constitution perfect, it seemed folly to take the short way.

Madam seized an early opportunity after this to inquire into my plans for retiring from the world and taking the veil. I confessed to her, in reply, that her late suspicions had engendered in me thoughts, a sense of grievance, inimical to my right contemplation of so momentous a sacrifice. She was very much shocked and troubled, and recommended me a stricter observance of all those self-obliterating virtues which are such a comfort to those who don’t practise them. She rebuked my pride; she prescribed fasting and discipline and maceration--tortures which would have killed a dray-man--in order to lower and submit my system to its final severance from the world. She would have had me at her mercy before she drove in the knife; only, unluckily for her, my constitution was impregnable. It flourished equally whether on bread and water or _vol au vent_; and, finally, she surrendered to it. I rather liked a little pious game we played, called the Moral Lotto, in which the discs were sins, and those left uncovered at the end entailed an obligation on the losers to maintain a particular guard against the temptations they expressed. Though we all, in the end, must have been warned through the calendar, from simony to powder-puffs, I believe the contest was so sanctified to her by intention that she read a design of Heaven in every missing counter; and the fact that I generally won, did more than many assurances to convince her that I was perhaps after all not so black as she had painted me.

But, between me and Father Pope, after that little _malentendu_, there was no quarter asked or given. He treated me with a persistent coarse rudeness, and I retaliated with all the interest of wit I dared. I dropped blobs of wax on his spectacles; left his Hagiology open under a drip from the ceiling; put crumbs of cheese in his cabinets of moth to tempt the mice in; and confessed his own most obvious sins to him as mine, for which I accepted furious penances as meekly as a lamb. He hated me, and I contrived at least to give him a substantial reason for such an abuse of his cloth.

Now, I will mention one only other little incident before I pass on to the subject of this chapter. I was playing in Wellcot attics on a certain wet afternoon with Patty, when I discovered a locked Bluebeard chamber.

“What is it?” I said; but she did not know. I tried the handle; I peered vainly into the keyhole; finally, I took a pin from my hair, and contrived a little pick of it.

“O, what are you going to do?” whispered the child, quite scared.

“Get in, if I can,” said I.

“Don’t!” she said, horrified. “If we are shut out, ’tis for a reason.”

“Of course,” I answered. “And it’s no good looking for it on this side of the door.”

She clasped her hands in a little paralysis of curiosity while I worked. It was a simple lock, and I was successful. As the door swung open, we saw before us a sky-lit room, wedged under the slope of the roof, and quite empty save for a framed picture, which leaned to the wall back outwards. Patty uttered a tiny cry--

“O, Diana! It’s the portrait!”

In a moment, all excitement, we stole in a-tiptoe. The place was very still and ghostly. Only on the dusty canvas itself lay a melancholy grid of light. Palpitating in our sense of guilt, we turned the frame round, let it drop softly back again; and there, before our eyes, bloomed a smiling, wistful face. The light, which had saddened it in reverse, was quickened now to an illuminating glory. It greeted and dimpled to us--the face of a dead woman risen.

A dead woman. Had she ever lived? I could not believe it, thinking of that unsympathetic _dévote_ downstairs.

“Was she _ever_ like that?” I whispered.

“She was beautiful,” murmured Patty fervently. “I remember him painting this.”

“And going away, and leaving it unfinished?” said I: for, indeed, the portrait was but sketched in, though masterly in its promise.

“Yes,” said the little girl, gulping. “And I never supposed what had become of it till now.”

It seemed incredible, the change that but a few envious years had wrought. Had love done this thing before me? Or could love forsaken so warp the loveliness which Love himself had created? It gave me a new little thrill of respect for the humanised Sophia; because, whatever the truth of her face, a man had been found to see this beauty in it.

“She was St. Cecilia,” whispered Patty. “There is the harp in her lap.”

It was without strings--an unborn music. Perhaps the Christian lady had declined to accept a pagan Muse for midwife, and had temporised with her would-be deliverer, hoping to convert him. If so, she had played her cards badly. I wondered if the man had been a fortune-hunter. But in that event Madame Sophia would certainly be Madame de Crespigny.

Whatever the case, however, the picture made a deep impression on me, and from my first moment of seeing it I was haunted by the desire to become myself the subject of such a master’s devotion. _Ma vue et mes minauderies firent tout-à-coup tourner la girouette._ For the first time I felt myself a woman, encumbered with the heavy responsibilities of her sex.

One day--it was some eighteen months later--returning from a commission to the convent, I walked straight into the presence of the original of the picture and its painter. Yes, that is the truth. He had run faith at last to earth, it seemed, and, armed with it, was returned to add the strings to the abortive harp, and perfect the ancient harmony. I could have thought that, to do so, he had need of faith indeed; until, looking at madam, I started in sheer wonder. She was transfigured--rejuvenated. The happiest light--bashful, coy, defiant, and surrendering its defiance--was in her eyes. She was more like a wife in the first wonder of motherhood than the starved _religieuse_ of yesterday.

And the cause! Ah, my Alcide! The creature rose upon my entrance, and I could have laughed in the face of my own befooled ideal. I had thought of Raphael and the Fornarina; and, behold! a slack, half-drowned-looking figure, with an expression, and conduct of its limbs, as if it were just risen gasping from a pond--there he stood, no sort of natural fowl at all, but a freak of genius like a five-legged calf at a fair.

“He! he!” giggled he, and held himself as if he were waiting to be told what to do next.

He was tall, it is true; and there was a good deal of him, mostly gnarled bone, if that counted to his credit. His forehead, streaked with dark hair turning grey, was strong and ample, and in itself something of a feature; but, mercy! the loose indetermination of his lower lip, and the way it overhung, foolish and disproportionate as an elephant’s, the little folded chin! As I stared, too mortified for manners, he returned my gaze, suddenly startled, it seemed, into a speechlessness so stertorous that little Patty, who had entered with and stood behind me, fell back a step in confusion.

“Ah!” he exclaimed at that, chuckling, “and is hee-ar the little girl I knew?”

He spoke, when he did at last, drawlingly, and ended, as was his way, by wrinkling his thin hooked nose and hee-hawing a little laugh through it.

“She is grown, is she not?” said madam, answering for Patty, to whom he had referred, though indeed his eyes were all the time on me. Her voice was so changed and soft, I hardly recognised it.

“She is grown,” he said. “She is become, it appears, a double cherry.”

“No,” said madam seriously, “the other is a second little foundling of my care, and destined to God’s--_our_ God’s” (she added coyly)--“service, de Crespigny.”

She had no sense of humour, the dear creature. The next moment, noticing the direction of his gaze, with a little frown she bade us begone to our books.

We fled, and, once remote, I turned, with a tragi-hysteric stamp, upon my companion.

“Patience! And is that donkey _him_?”

“It is Mr. Noel de Crespigny,” she said, amazed. “He is not-- O, Diana, do you really think him”--

“Hee-haw!” I broke in, with a little passion of laughter; and then fury overcame me.

“How dared she,” I stormed, “how dared she tell him that lie about me?”

“What lie?” said poor Patty.

“Why, to claim me to her worship of a golden ass,” I cried.

“It was a calf,” said my friend, bewildered.

I screamed with laughter.

“O, don’t!” Patty implored. “It really was, Diana.”

“You dear!” I gasped. “I daresay it was. But he was so badly made, I couldn’t tell.”

She followed me upstairs, utterly bewildered. On the landing above we encountered a strange sight. The picture--_the_ picture--was already on its way down from the attics. A groom and maid bore it, and the oddest creature stood above, superintending its resurrection.

“Gogo!” whispered Patty; “it’s Gogo!”

I could well believe it of such a monster.

He was a man, and a huge one, down to his mid-thighs; and there he ended in a couple of wooden stumps. His face, lapped in a very mask of red bristle, was as savage as sin; and he growled and rumbled like an interdicted volcano.

“Ay,” he thundered, “I’m Gogo, the Dutch tumbler. Who calls me by my name?”

Holding with one hand by the banisters, he struck with the strong stick he carried at the stairs, missed the tread, and was within an inch of falling. The stick rattled down, and he swung and clung with both hands to the rail. In an instant, some whimsical impulse sent me tripping lightly up to help him.

“Take my arm,” I said, “down to the landing.”

The giggling servants paused in their task to stare up; but the monster himself laboured round, with quite a stunned look.

“To help--_me_,” he whispered hoarsely; “the little scented rush to prop the oak!”

I was in love with his changed voice at once. It was something to meet only two-thirds of a man.

“No, no,” he said, touching my arm as if it were a relic. “I’m Gogo, the colour-grinder, the bottle-washer--not worthy to latch your ladyship’s little shoe. I’ll go down--I’ll go down. Ho-ho! it’s easy. I’ve done it all my life.”

While he spoke, the odd creature had descended unaided, and, recovering his stick, struck his wooden limbs fiercely with it.

“Do you see?” he cried. “A stiff-kneed dog as ever limped after Fortune!”

He flounced upon the servants, and roared them into care of their charge; then turned again to me, where I stood with my friend, who had run trembling to my shelter.

“’Tis our market, ladies,” he said in apology. “I must be particular in its custody. We deal in new lamps for old; in”--

He descended a few steps, then turned again.

“Ah!” he groaned, tragic and comical in one. “Pity the poor genii who has to serve; pity him--pity him.”

He heaved a sigh that would have turned a windmill, and followed the picture, and disappeared.

“Patty!” I whispered, when he was gone--“Patty! Lord, Patty! who _is_ the creature?”

“I’m terrified of him,” she gulped. “He’s Mr. de Crespigny’s dog, he calls himself, and follows his master everywhere, loving and growling at him. He used to say there was no such painter in the world, if he could be kept to it; but he always frightened me dreadfully. I do hope they won’t stop long.”

“H’m!” I said. “And is that queer name all he’s got?”

“I never heard of another,” she answered. “But anyhow, it suits him.”

“Yes,” I said--and sighed--“_if_ he only had legs!”