That gentle soul was passing through a period of storm of which she presently confided the outline to Frances.
“Sometimes, darling, as I sit here alone through the long evenings, I wonder if my life might have been different if I’d been a more religious woman. You see, Francie, I married very, very young. I wasn’t much older than you are now. My husband was not a man who believed in any very definite creed, and I was young enough to be altogether influenced by him.”
It was ever Nina’s custom to lay the errors and omissions of her past at the door of Geoffrey Severing and her youthful marriage.
“Should you like to be a Roman Catholic?” asked Frances suddenly.
“It’s a very beautiful religion, and of course beauty is a religion in itself, to an artist,” said Nina thoughtfully.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’ve often thought,” said Frances very shyly, “that I should like it myself. It seems such a thorough-going sort of religion. When we were little, my mother had a Catholic maid — an Irish girl — and she used to tell us a lot about it.
And she was so particular about not eating meat on certain days and going to Mass every Sunday. She had to walk quite a long way, but I don’t believe she ever missed going.
Of course she was very superstitious, and used to want us to wear medals and charms and things, but some of the prayers she taught us were nice. My mother was a Catholic by birth, too, though she never went to church or anything.”
“If I were anything, I should certainly be a Catholic,” said Nina with extreme conviction in her tone. “It’s the only creed which appeals to me in the slightest degree. It is so beautiful — all that music and those touching ideas about the Virgin and everything.”
“But — don’t you believe? — isn’t the Church?” murmured Frances, embarrassed.
“Dear child, I am afraid the orthodox forms mean very little to me. I would never wilfully cause pain to any human being, and I try to help the sadness of the world with my little songs, but that is all. But I would never shatter the innocent faith of another soul, although I have outgrown the need of form and ritual myself.”
“Does one outgrow it? “wistfully asked Frances, whose whole nature unconsciously craved the discipline which is inseparable from any creed, faithfully followed out in practice.
“Not all of us,” tenderly said Nina, conscious of the exquisite contrast between the matured, self-reliant soul, made strong through suffering, and the innocent, inquiring child at her knee. “Not all of us, dear. Some plants need a support round which to cling, whilst others stand alone — always alone.” Her voice deepened slightly as she mused broodingly for a moment on the pathos and beauty of this horticultural parable. It came as a slight shock when Frances, generally the most sympathetic of listeners, observed in unmistakably self-absorbed accents: “I think that I shall always want a support. It seems to me that I am meant to live by rule — not by my own judgment at all. That’s why I like the Roman Catholic idea of the Church being infallible. It would be such a guide.”
Nina was aware that to no one else would Frances have spoken so unreservedly, and the reflection was soothing, but it did not prevent a slight stiffening of tone in her reply.
“Really, dear? But the surest guide in the world is the golden rule which I have tried to live up to all my life — Never think of yourself at all. Somehow, if one gives all one’s thoughts and time to other people, one finds that God takes care of the rest.”
Nina was herself rather surprised at the beauty of the sentiment as she put it into words, and it served to restore her not very deeply ruffled serenity.
“I will lend you some books, Frances, if you really want to know something about various creeds. The religion of Buddha is, to my mind, the most beautiful of them all,” reflectively said Nina, who had once read portions of Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of the “Light of Asia,” and was persuaded that she had studied it deeply. “It was the foundation of the Roman Catholic religion, of course — they borrowed a great deal from it.”
THE PELICANS “I should like to read it very much.”
Frances wanted to read anything which spoke, however indirectly, of Roman Catholic doctrines. If Nina guessed as much, however, she did not impart her surmise to the vigorously orthodox Bertha Tregaskis.
That this discreet reticence had been justified was made superabundantly evident when Mrs. Tregaskis first became aware of the Romanistic tendencies of her ward.
“People of seventeen must do what they’re told,” she said serenely, but with an undercurrent of severity. “When you’re one-and-twenty, Francie, we’ll talk about it again, and meanwhile I strongly advise you not to think about the subject. You are much too young to decide such a matter without knowing a great deal more about it, and from your own showing all this simply arises from restlessness and desire for excitement. Religion is too serious a matter to be played with, my dear little girl.”
A certain look of flintlike impenetrability came over Frances’ young face as she looked at her guardian, and she said nothing more. But Mrs. Tregaskis was much too acute to suppose that her silence denoted submission.
“Take her to London,” growled Frederick, when his wife, in her perplexity, put the case before him. “You ought to get her away from that silly woman’s influence.”
Bertha did not ask “What silly woman?” since she rightly recognized that her husband thus denoted her dearest friend, but she decided to follow his advice.
“We’ll have a month in London, and see all the sights,” she cried. “Just you and I and Rosamund, Francie, and be regular country cousins, and go to the National Gallery and British Museum, and a theatre or two from the dress-circle.
Never mind about planting the bulbs, dear — no, I don’t mind leaving them to Grant, and the garden must just get on without me for a week or two.”
She stifled a sigh heroically.
“This trip is absolutely for the sake of the girls,” she told Nina Severing. “Neither of them takes any natural healthy interest in gardening or in the animals and things, as Hazel used to do, so I must try what London will do for them. Really, girls are a problem.”
“Nothing to a boy,” sighed Nina. “There’s Morris wandering half over Europe, in the most unsatisfactory manner, pretending that he is studying languages, and really doing nothing at all except loaf. I’ve told him he ought to come back and look after the place in earnest, but he makes one excuse after another.”
“It’s too bad,” said Bertha sympathetically. “Perhaps if he came back, now that he and Rosamund are a little older and have rather more sense...”
“Oh, my dear! he’s got over that nonsense long ago. I always told you it wouldn’t last. ‘Weak and unstable as water,’ that’s what my poor Morris is.”
Bertha did not remind Mrs. Severing that everything had been done to insure the instability of Morris in this particular case. She only said affectionately: “Well, good-bye, Nina darling. Don’t forget to take pity on my old man, since I can’t drag him to London.”
“He must come and cheer me up some afternoon, if he will,” cordially responded Nina. Both ladies were perfectly aware that Frederick Tregaskis would do nothing of the sort, and that there were few things less conducive to the cheering up of either than an encounter between him and Mrs. Severing. But they exchanged their fallacious hopes with an air of affectionately reassuring one another.
“I’ve one comfort,” declared Bertie, “I’m hoping to see a very old friend of mine in town: Sybil Argent. I believe she and her son are there for a few weeks.”
“Didn’t she become a Catholic? “asked Nina, with a sudden air of intense interest, which provoked Bertha to a display of extreme nonchalance instantly.
“Let me see — did she? Oh yes. I believe she has become a Roman. Silly woman! Got under the influence of some priest or other, I fancy. She was never over-wise, though a dear, sweet thing.”
“There is a wisdom which is not of this wo
rld,” said Nina, upraising her eyes, and with an air of quotation.
Bertha laughed heartily.
“My dear Nina! It’s really too funny to hear you quoting Scripture. Or is it only some mystical poet of the new set? Anyhow, poor Sybil Argent has been a Romanist for some years now, I fancy, and of course one wouldn’t say anything about it, though I quite expect to have it all poured out to me — my friends have the quaintest knack of confiding in me. I rather fancy I know more secrets than most people.”
“That comes of always having your eyes and ears open,” declared Nina with playful sweetness, “instead of keeping your head in the clouds, as I’m afraid mine too often is.”
“I shall have to tell you not to get the stares, as I do the children when they sit gaping at vacancy,” pleasantly replied her friend, and took her departure under this agreeable analogy.
“Poor dear Nina’s affectation of mysticism is really too absurd,” she told herself, and added quite illogically: “No wonder Francie is infected by it. It will be a comfort to talk to a rational woman again — which I suppose Sybil still is, in spite of having allowed herself to be bitten by the Romanist craze.”
But Mrs. Tregaskis was not destined to probe the measure of her friend’s rationality. Lady Argent had already left London when she arrived, and she was obliged to be content with inviting Ludovic Argent to dinner.
“Can you remember him, Rosamund?” she inquired with kindly interest.
“Of course,” curtly retorted her ward, with the offended intonation which implied that Cousin Bertie had forgotten the number of Rosamund’s years.
“We weren’t so very little when we went over to Lady Argent’s,” apologetically said Frances. “I was nine, and I can remember her and the son quite well.”
“Of course,” said her guardian. “I wonder if he will have forgotten you.”
Ludovic had not forgotten Rosamund and Frances. He looked forward curiously to seeing what the years had made of the little girl whom he had found crouching outside the door of the library.
His first impression was of pleasure at her undeniable beauty, and he was glad to find himself placed between her and Mrs. Tregaskis at dinner. Frances and a couple of negligible young men completed the party.
The whole-hearted virility of Mrs. Tregaskis dominated the conversation, which at first was general, but Ludovic noted with a certain surprise that she no longer provoked in him anything but a detached amusement. That it was far otherwise with Rosamund he felt convinced. There was, latent hostility in her every glance and gesture, and she diffused an atmosphere of discontent that affected Ludovic strangely.
“She gives one a sense of unrest,” he reflected disappointedly. “The little sister, now, though she, too, is self-centred, has stability and a certain amount of poise. But Rosamund is unbalanced.” He tried to translate the impression into physical terms. “It’s as though the chemical ingredients in a retort had been carelessly flung together, regardless of power or proportion, and the solution in consequence is a mere seething chaos — fine material wasted.
But what a fool I am — she can’t be more than twenty.
The solution is still to come.”
They talked about books, and he saw her grey eyes light up with eagerness. When she became impersonal she seemed to him wholly charming.
“It is her relation to humanity that is at fault,” reflected the psychologist.
“You have never been back to the Wye Valley since you were a child, have you?” he asked her.
“No,” she said briefly, and added with a candid impulse of unreserve, “I don’t want to go back there until I go back for good. The cottage is ours, you know, and one day Francie and I will go back there to live.”
“Is that your ideal?” he asked gently.
“Yes,” she answered, in the tone of one who seeks to convince herself.
Ludovic found himself wondering whether it was also the ideal of Frances. There was something which struck him as remote, almost austere, in her young personality, and it was almost with the sense of a presentiment confirmed that he heard from Bertha Tregaskis, later in the evening, of the disquieting tendencies of her ward.
“She’s a dear little kiddie,” were the words, striking Ludovic as singularly inappropriate, which prefaced the recital of Bertha’s perplexities, “but this religious phase is very tiresome. One knows that all young things go through it, like measles, but this seems to be a particularly violent attack.”
“Would there be any very vital objection to her joining the Roman Catholic Church?”
Bertha hesitated.
“No-o — only on general principles. I believe her mother was a Roman Catholic, as far as baptism went, but Dick was quite firm about having the children brought up in his own faith, and I don’t fancy poor Rose cared either way.
The children knew precious little when they came to me, but of course they learnt their catechism and all the rest of it with my Hazel. I believe in giving children a thoroughly orthodox grounding, at all events. Frances was always more inclined to be ‘pi,’ as my schoolboy friends call it, than either of the other two.”
“Temperamentally religious?”
“Yes, I suppose so. That’s generally the sort that suffers from the worst reaction. Poor mite, she told me quite gravely that she needed an intellectual discipline.”
“I have seldom heard a better reason for joining the Church of Rome,” said Ludovic gravely.
“She’s picked up the phrase from some book, I suppose.
Poor little thing! It makes one smile, and at the same time sigh, to hear anything so very, very young. One went through it all oneself so many years ago, and eventually came back to just the old way of thinking — as one’s parents before one. But I’m talking as though you were a contemporary,” said Bertha laughing, “and forgetting that you belong to the younger generation yourself.”
Ludovic became aware that this forgetfulness implied a compliment. He tried to appear gratified, but was no longer young enough to feel so in reality.
“I am at all events able to sympathize with Miss Frances in her outlook,” he said slowly. “I do not like what I know of the Catholic religion, but it would give her the discipline she craves.”
“I dare say, but as I told her, it’s much easier to be obedient to anyone and everything, sooner than to those to whom obedience is due,” said Bertha smartly. “If she is so anxious to submit her own judgment, she can submit it to mine. But that, of course, is exactly what my young lady doesn’t choose to do.” There was an acerbity in her tone that struck Ludovic as over-personal.
“If she really wishes it, I suppose you would not oppose it a little later on?” he suggested.
“I suppose not,” said Bertha wearily. “I’ve never been hide-bound by any creed myself. One learns to be extraordinarily tolerant, as time goes on. Fresh air, laughter, sunshine, plenty of work and plenty of friends — that’s my religion.”
Ludovic had met this breezy, simple creed before, and it had always failed oddly to carry any conviction to him. It failed again now.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “You know my mother became a Catholic some years ago?”
“Yes — she wrote to me. It seems to have made her very happy.”
“I think it has,” said Ludovic simply. Thereafter their talk turned upon Lady Argent and the Wye Valley.
It was, however, directly attributable to the foregoing conversation that Mrs. Tregaskis shortly after her return to Porthlew received an invitation for Frances.
“Do let Frances come to me for a nice long visit,” wrote Lady Argent; “and Rosamund, too, if she likes, but Ludovic thinks that perhaps she would not care to be so near her old home. But I should love to have either, or both, and if Frances is really thinking of adopting her mother’s religion, it seems only fair that she should see something of a Catholic atmosphere. I will not let her do anything rash, dear Bertie, and I am sure it will be a real rest for you to have no young things on your
hands for a little while.”
“It would indeed!” quoth Bertha, rather grimly, as she imparted portions of her correspondence to Frederick, who was rather ostentatiously not listening.
“After all, the best way to get the whole thing out of her head is to treat it as a matter of course. A persecution would only make her more determined to be a little martyr — Frederick, are you listening to me?”
“I am reading — or endeavouring to read — my evening paper,” replied Frederick with unvarnished candour.
Mrs. Tregaskis had recourse to a stratagem by which she was frequently obliged to compel her husband’s attention.
She addressed her next remark, in a mysteriously lowered voice, exclusively to the attentive Miss Blandflower.
“The fact is, Minnie, that the child fancies there is more difference between the English Church and the Roman one than there is. She is very ignorant, and so imagines a great deal. If she saw rather more of Romanism, I fancy it would be a case of either kill or cure.”
“You mean,” returned Miss Blandflower acutely, “that she would either want to become a Roman Catholic at once, or else see through the whole thing and give up the idea altogether.”
“Exactly — probably the latter. There’s nothing in the Roman Catholic religion, once you get over the preliminary glamour.”
“To be or not to be,” said Minnie with thoughtful irrelevance.
“With the exceptions of the Pope, and the worship of the Virgin Mary, they have nothing that we haven’t got — Frances can be as High Church as she pleases.”
“Not in my house,” said Frederick unexpectedly.
“Why not, dear? It’s a great deal better than turning Roman Catholic outright.”
“You’ve just said that it came to exactly the same thing.”
Bertha looked rather nonplussed for an instant, but recovered herself by exchanging a glance of good-humoured intelligence with Minnie, expressing very distinctly, “How like a man!”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 67
