“Yes — much, much better. Nothing to end it, and then God’s holy presence, you know. It will all be merged in that.”
“And the people we’ve loved on earth?” urged Rosamund, as though she needed reassurance from her companion’s robust certainties.
“Yes, yes, all of them. We may have to wait a little while for some, you know, because they’ve purgatory to go through — and so have we for the matter of that — but Sister Frances is safe enough, my dear. Nuns have their purgatory on earth, is what I always say. And a little pure soul like that — why, she’s waiting up there now, for you, I expect. I shall get there before you, my dear, please God, and you may be quite sure I shall give you better prayers there than I can here.”
“Do you want to die, Mrs. Mulholland?”
“Only when God pleases, my clear. A year or two more or less won’t make very much difference, except that it gives one more time to try and get ready. But of course I look forward to getting to Heaven — naturally I do.”
“And do you think you will find the people you love there?”
“Yes, dear, yes,” Mrs. Mulholland patiently reiterated.
“I often think how very strange it will be to meet Michael again — that’s my husband, who died more than forty years ago, after we’d been married five years. A very bad husband he was to me — I married a non-practising Catholic, my dear, and a terrible mistake it was, too — but thank God he made a very good confession at the last, and died in a state of grace. But of course he must be very much changed, since he was just a bad man when I knew him — neither more nor less — except for that little while at the end. But with all the prayers and the Masses that have been offered, and God’s good mercy, I can’t help hoping that poor Michael is a blessed spirit in Heaven by this time.”
She nodded her head, and Rosamund thought that her lips moved as in some intercession that had grown habitual through long use.
“I’ve had a lot of trouble, my dear — always have had — and but for the Faith I should be an unhappy old woman.
But look at what God has done for me,” cried Mrs. Mulholland triumphantly; “brought me here, to the convent, with all these good nuns, so that I shall probably end my days amongst them, and get all their prayers to shorten my time in purgatory. Nearly twenty years I’ve been here, my dear, and my position quite established, I assure you.
I live by rule, you know, though I’m not a nun — follow the office, have my own little corner in the chapel — and then the Superior likes me to keep an eye on the lady boarders.
‘La mere des dames pensionnaires’ the lay-sisters call me.
I look after them, you know. ‘Come to me if you want anything,’ is what I always tell them. ‘The nuns are very busy — spare them all we can. Come to me instead,’ I always say. ‘If I can’t help you, well and good, I’ll refer you to the proper quarter,’ says I, ‘but come to me first’ That spares the nuns a little, and I generally find that trifling difficulties can be put right without troubling them. That’s the advantage of my position here.”
Rosamund listened passively. She liked Mrs. Mulholland to talk. Her deep, rather hoarse voice seemed to make a link between reality and that abyss into which one had fallen, where nothing was real or solid but thick tangible darkness and endless despairing pain. While Mrs. Mulholland went on talking, it was as though a faint ray of light filtered down, reminding one that above the abyss there still lay solid ground with the sky overhead.
Then, very slowly, Rosamund realized that she had left the worst depths behind her. Never again would she know the blighting, searing agony of those first moments, and never again would she be as though she had not known them.
The initiation which life holds for most of us varies as strangely in its character as does the intensity of its effect upon us.
Rosamund said to Mrs. Mulholland one day: “I feel as though this was the first time I’d ever felt anything — as though other things in my life had been only a sort of pretence. And yet they weren’t. My mother’s death, when I was a little girl, and leaving home, and other things — which happened at Porthlew — I minded them all.
I fell in love with somebody, and thought that must be the realest thing in the word. And it made me very unhappy — it really did.”
She looked at Mrs. Mulholland, not expecting her to offer any solution, but feeling a sort of weary solace in putting her confused thoughts into words.
“But, you know, it doesn’t seem at all real now. It never touched bed-rock. In a sort of way — I brought unhappiness to it — not it to me.”
“It’s very often so, my dear,” said Mrs. Mulholland placidly. “Sometimes we need a very sharp lesson to take us out of ourselves. That’s where God’s wisdom is so far above ours. He sees what we need, and orders all things for the best. The loss of your dear sister will bring you nearer to God.”
The words might hold a simple direct interpretation for Mrs. Mulholland that could never be Rosamund’s, but their truth was destined to abide with her in an ever expanding certainty.
“You are very, very kind to me,” she said wistfully; “everyone is.”
“You’re one of us, as Sister Frances Mary’s sister. The convent tie is a very real one, you know, though people in the world like to think it’s not. But you have a number of friends, my dear, outside, as well as here. I have a lot of letters for you, only Mother Juliana suggested that you might be better without them just at first. Would you like them now?”
Rosamund took the little sheaf gently.
The writers seemed strangely remote to her, but she read with a faint stirring of gratitude her guardian’s long letter.
Bertha offered to come to her, would have done so instantly, but for the illness of Cousin Frederick, who, they terribly feared, was threatened with pneumonia.
“But come to me as soon as you are able to, dearest child.
I feel torn in two, as you can imagine, and only wish I could be in both places at once. If poor Minnie would be of any comfort, telegraph to me and I’ll send her. I can easily manage the sitting up at nights for a time; anyhow, if this is going to be the long illness the doctor fears, we shall have to get a trained nurse. Remember there’s home waiting for you, my Rosamund, and an old woman who’s been through a good deal herself one way and another, and only longs to help and comfort you. One finds out, as one goes along, that nothing matters except to lend a hand.”
“I ought to go back,” said Rosamund. “I am quite well now. But I don’t know what my life is going to be.
Porthlew doesn’t seem to be right for me, somehow. It never did — and I thought that Francie and I would go back to the Wye Valley together. The cottage is ours.”
“Now don’t look too far ahead,” urged Mrs. Mulholland.
“One step at a time, is what I always say.
“‘Lord, for to-morrow and its needs I do not pray, But help me, teach me, guide me, Lord, just for to-day.’ Have you never heard that before? Dear me, dear me, I don’t believe you Protestant girls are ever taught anything at all. Excuse me for saying so, my dear, but really it’s true. Now before you settle anything I should like you to have a good talk with Mere Pauline.”
The Superior saw Rosamund in the parlour, but the understanding which she was ready to extend as to one of her own daughters in religion, failed oddly to touch any responsive chord. It was as though the two spoke different languages.
Rosamund did not want to talk with the convent chaplain, as Mere Pauline suggested, and felt merely a faint distaste at the suggestion that “cette epreuve” might be meant to guide her into the way of the true Faith.
Mere Pauline did not pursue the subject, but she appeared uneasy at Rosamund’s listless suggestion of returning to Porthlew.
“Je n’aime pas cette atmosphere-la,” she remarked with an air of omniscience that sat oddly on her little spectacled countenance.
The direct act of God therefore appeared to Mere Pauline solely responsible for the next
letter from Mrs. Tregaskis, which again altered Rosamund’s plans.
Frederick Tregaskis was very ill with pneumonia.
“I don’t leave him day or night,” wrote Bertha, “and the house would be utterly dreary for you just now. Stay on at the convent, my dear, if you’re finding peace and shelter there, and when I’ve battled through the worst of this we must look forward to meeting. It’s a sad world, Rosamund, my dear, but there’s nothing for it but to keep a stiff upper lip. I’ll write when I can.
“Your ever loving old “B. H. T.”
“Poor Cousin Bertie,” said Rosamund.
“Il faut prier,” said Mere Pauline. “But you, my child.
Will you stay on with us, as one of our lady boarders?”
“If there were some work that I might do — it is so difficult to do nothing.”
“Yes. I will reflect. A good Catholic family life is the atmosphere that I should wish for you at present, poor little one. But I will reflect.”
That Mere Pauline’s reflections were apt to take a practical turn was demonstrated three days later by a letter from Lady Argent begging Rosamund to come to her.
She wrote that she was alone. So Rosamund went back to the Wye Valley.
“God bless you, my dear child,” said Mrs. Mulholland heartily. “Come back and see us again, and don’t forget that there’s God’s good purpose behind everything, whether we can see it or not.”
“Will there be some sort of definite solution to it all, in time?” Rosamund asked.
She had come to have a curious reliance on Mrs. Mulholland’s opinionative statements.
“To be sure, my dear. You haven’t been through all this for nothing, you know,” said Mrs. Mulholland, shaking her head wisely. “Now I’m going into the garden to say my office, and you know that I shall always give you and dear little Sister Frances a special intention. I’ve put you in together.”
She kissed Rosamund warmly, then kilted her skirts in her accustomed fashion and took her old black manuals out into the spring sunshine and began her slow, steady pounding walk round and round the small enclosure.
The years would see little change for Mrs. Mulholland, until that last one which she contemplated with such matter-of-fact anticipation.
Something in that certainty sent Rosamund away with a strange lessening of the tension at her heart.
She went back to the Wye Valley, and after a little while she went across to the cottage.
Afterwards, Rosamund thought that it was on that day that she received the first hint of the solution that she had been seeking. But at the time she was conscious only of a blurred, aching pain, that yet held the strange solemnity of final peace.
The spring rain was driving against the window-panes and the outlines of the hills were dimmed.
Rosamund wept wildly and uncontrollably, but after that afternoon she bade farewell to the stormy tears of her girlhood, and they came to her no more.
There is a certain sort of weeping that, when it has once been wrung from a woman’s eyes, precludes the easy relief of trivial tears for almost all the rest of her life.
Rosamund went over the small house and found it strangely unchanged. Through it all, the sense of coming home was strong upon her.
“I could come back and live there very soon, couldn’t I?” she asked that same evening of Lady Argent. “You know I always meant to.”
“Yes, indeed, and one knows that if that poor dear little angel had been spared to us, you could have gone there together, except, of course, that it was perfectly obvious from the very beginning that she had a true religious vocation, and couldn’t have been anywhere but where she was. But girls can do almost anything nowadays, and I’ve no doubt that you could find some very suitable person to live with you, since you’re of age, and have your own money; and then you know, my dear, you’re sure to marry. But I quite see that what you want now is just the quiet of it all, and then being fond of the place and everything. Only if you won’t mind my asking, and, indeed, dear, you know it’s not from curiosity, are you quite sure that you don’t want to go back to Porthlew?”
“Yes. I know how good Cousin Bertie’s been, but indeed I don’t see any object in our living together. I worried her dreadfully when I was there, and it was quite decided that when I came of age some other arrangement would be made. You know, she has such hundreds of interests — all her work and her charities and everything — and Miss Blandflower gives her all the help she ever wants.
I don’t think I was much use there, ever.”
There was a silence.
“I know it sounds as though I were ungrateful,” said Rosamund desperately, “but I’m trying so hard to get at the truth of things. I don’t feel a bit that my place is at Porthlew — I don’t know where it is. I want to come home — but I don’t feel even that to be a solution.”
“Poor child! If only you and dear Bertie “said Lady Argent helplessly. “But I know what that sort of thing is — so hopeless, I always think, when two people are both willing and ready and tolerant as can be, and yet they don’t seem able to understand one another. And, of course, as you say, Bertie always has her hands full, and I know that very capable people don’t much like being helped — I shall never forget poor Fergus — my husband, you know, dear — over his telescope and things, even when one only wanted to clean the lenses or some tiny little thing like that.
But that was only one thing, and he was quite ready to ask for help about anything else. At least, almost anything else.”
Lady Argent’s expression became rather pensively reminiscent.
Rosamund remained vaguely wondering.
She felt during those days in the Wye Valley as though she were seeking for a conviction, latent in her mind, but that yet delayed formation and continued to evade consciousness. Once grasped, she would be in touch with reality and in some strange way closer to Frances.
She questioned herself helplessly.
“Am I sincere? Is my place really back at Porthlew, with Cousin Bertie? Is it perhaps an easy evasion to say that I am of no use to her? She gave us a home when mother died, and she has lost Hazel. Frances left her — there is only me now. Self-sacrifice — is that the key? But it all seems useless — pointless.”
She remained, seeking the solution.
Even when the hand of circumstance flung her against it, it still failed to awaken her inner certainties. Frederick Tregaskis died of pneumonia within a fortnight.
Rosamund made her preparations for a hurried departure, and found time to return once more to the cottage on the hill.
“Is it good-bye again?” she asked dumbly of her surroundings. “Certainly there is no doubt now that I have to go to Porthlew again. The solution has come, I suppose.”
She felt oddly disconcerted and at variance with herself.
At all events, there was more sense of blankness than of acute bitterness in her farewell to the cottage. The renunciation, if renunciation there was, remained strangely devoid of pain.
She reflected dimly that all that for which the cottage in the Wye Valley stood was hers still, and would remain hers, and in the days at Porthlew which followed, when Bertha frankly outfaced bitterness and loss with a courage that did not shrink from reference to their divided sorrows, Rosamund told herself passionately that to her, and her alone, belonged the deepest memory of Frances.
Since her solution was to come from within, and not from without, it was almost with the sense of puzzled acceptance that is brought to an anticipated situation, that she heard Bertha’s decision to leave Porthlew.
“The house is too big for me, alone with poor old Minnie, and for the matter of that I simply can’t afford it now. My dear old man’s pension went with him, and has made a big hole in the exchequer. Besides, I don’t know that I could altogether stand it. No, no, some rich American shall buy Porthlew. Hazel doesn’t want it now, and there’s no one to make a home for. One must just strike fresh roots somewhere, that’s all, and hope for
work. It’s the only thing, Rosamund, my dear, for an old woman left by herself. Find a lame dog that wants helping over stiles.”
But both Rosamund and Bertha were sufficiently awake to the obvious course for it to come to life between them without even any very definite suggestion or discussion.
“Could I leave Cornwall?” said Bertha wistfully. “I be a Carnish woman thru and thru, ma dear.”
It was Rosamund’s need of Bertha that clinched it. Rosamund, strangely, felt it to exist, and the sincerity of her urgency broke down Bertha’s indifferent defences. The deepest craving that Mrs. Tregaskis knew was that of being needed, and for that she left Cornwall and went with Rosamund to the Wye Valley.
It was there, with her halved memories and strangely shared sanctities, that Rosamund’s quest suddenly and consciously came to an end.
In the last and most subtle renunciation, she found the solution to which that final relinquishment held the only key, and at the same time the one enduring link that was to bring her nearest to Frances.
XXVIII
“SO you came here, my dear — after all?”
“After all, Nina. That just expresses the whole thing. Poor little Rosamund had to go through the mill, and learn her own lesson, and then after it was all over — well, she just wanted me — and there it was!”
“You were there when she wanted you.”
Bertha laughed a little.
“Well — one is, somehow. The generation that gives and the generation that takes. I suppose one took once upon a time, oneself, and this keeps the balance true.”
“And your Minnie followed you, so you’re not alone?”
“Oh no! Dear Minnie! She’s played ivy to my oak tree for so long that it’s impossible to imagine her without a prop. I’m glad to have her, and then Rosamund need never feel in any least little way bound — I’m renting this tiny place from her, you know. It’s quite a business arrangement.”
“So much the best way to do things, though, as you know, dearest, I’m so dreadfully silly about practical things like rent and ground taxes and technical terms like that.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 88
