by George Moore
They were going back to London together, and on the way back she would tell him.
“I cannot wait another minute,” she said, interrupting the conversation, “I shall miss my last train.” Mr. Innes wished her to stay, but she felt she must confide to Ulick her decision to live with her father and leave the convent to the mercy of Providence.
They hurried away; and he felt she had something to confide to him, and she told him the moment they were outside what had happened.
He took her hands, and he held them, but he held them so gently and looked at her so fondly that she felt his gentleness to be the most exquisite thing in the world.
“Ulick, you did not hear me; I said I was sorry to abandon the nuns, I’m going to live with father.”
“You will go to your father for a while; you will do all you can to live with him, but something is drawing you from him, Evelyn; your life is not with him, and we cannot live except where our life is.”
He addressed her earnestly about her soul, saying that the grey pieties of the cloister could not enclose all there is of God on earth for her. And becoming suddenly impassioned, he spoke with scorn of those who renounce a great deal in order to gain a little; and he told her that she had been appointed to express spiritual truths in art, and that she had done this with extraordinary power and purity, and that she made a great mistake in forsaking the higher medium for the lower.
He asked her why she believed that God was more in the host on the altar than in the cup of this great lily, and leaning over a pretty paling they held the flower in their hands. She might have answered, and she was minded to answer, that if we believe God is everywhere we hardly believe that he is anywhere. But she refrained from argument, knowing it to be useless, and she liked to hear him, even when she did not agree with him, and with his wide grey eyes looking at her earnestly, he spoke of the great joy there is in flinging off the fear of creeds and living in our spiritual instincts and in our bodily instincts; and he asked her if she did not think she could serve God by tendance on flowers, and by tendernesses to the beasts in the fields and the beasts by the hearth.
She wished he would forget the convent, she wished to forget it herself; it were better to do so since she could never enter it. She was thinking now of the beauty of the night, and of him, and of his ideas, which, though they were not hers, were near enough to her to be appreciated by her; for what Ulick said might easily have been said by Saint Francis d’Assisi.
As they walked along the moonlit road a little of his music came back to her, and she tried to remember it, but it was hardly rememberable. But it pleased him to hear her try to remember it, it pleased them to sit on a bench and try to read the score by the light of the moon. The blossoming branches above them showered white dust upon the manuscript in their hands.
Art was to Ulick what it had become to Evelyn, a means rather than an end, and seeing her soul in peril he could not talk to her of his music, obsessed as his imagination was by the thought that she was going to lose her soul in abstinences and rituals.
“I think you would sooner see me dead, Ulick, than in a convent.”
“Many times; there is something unspeakably painful in the death of a soul.”
“I know what you mean, that piety is not sufficient. Many nuns lose themselves in mechanical pieties.”
“Since life has been given to us it is given to us for acceptance and not for refusal. You will lose your soul, Evelyn, by stripping yourself of your womanhood which God gave you to serve him with, and by renouncing your art which was given you that you might reveal him to others. You will lose your soul by seeking God in prayer-books rather than in the stars, and by seeking him in scrolls rather than in the sunset and in the morning winds. The convent is an unspeakable degradation of self, and therefore a degradation of God. Nothing fills me with such terror as the convent.”
She tried to speak to him of his music, but he only listened for a moment.
“Music,” he said, “is only a medium, the soul is the important thing.”
To keep her soul he said she must fly from the city where men lose their souls in the rituals of materialism. He must go with her to the pure country, to the woods and to the places where the invisible ones whom the Druids knew ceaselessly ascend and descend from earth to heaven, and heaven to earth, in flame-coloured spirals. He told her he knew of a house by a lake shore, and there they might live in communion with nature, and in the fading lights, and in the quiet hollows of the woods she would learn more of God than she could in the convent. In that house they would live, and their child, if the Gods gave them one, would unfold among the influences of music and love and long traditions.
“Wandering in the woods and underneath the boughs we shall know that the great immortal presences are by us, and the peace they instil into our hearts will be the proof that they applaud our flight from priests and creeds.”
Every star that the eye can see was visible that night, and the interspaces were filled with a pale bloom, the light of stars so distant that their light is but a milky whiteness on the sky.
Nothing had been said for some while, and Ulick wondered if what he had said had influenced her in the least, and he watched for some sign; but she sat without speaking, her eyes fixed on the sky, lost in contemplation of the extraordinary diagram extending into space without end. Her thoughts returned suddenly from the infinite space, and she said, —
“I shall always consider, Ulick, that the convent ideal is the highest, and that they are wisest who choose it.”
“But you give no reason,” he answered.
“Everything is faith in the end,” she said; “all things come to be matters of faith.”
They had missed their last train, and she was glad of it. She said she would not go back to Dowlands, for on this dry, windless night she would enjoy the long walk under the stars, and he must go on telling her his dreams, his ideas, and his visions.
CHAP. XI.
ONE MORNING AT the end of the summer her father came to her with a letter in his hand.
“It is from Rome. You will never guess what it is about. It is from the Pope asking me to go to Rome to reform the singing of the papal choir.”
They sat down to consider the matter, and when everything had been said they talked it all over again. The invitation had come through Monsignor; no one else believed in the reformation of ecclesiastical art, no one else cared.
Walking to and fro, sometimes stopping to look out of the window, Mr. Innes spoke of the opposition his ideas would meet with in Rome. But he would be given a free hand, otherwise what would be the use of bringing him all the way from London?
“When do you go to Rome?”
“Go? Well, I suppose at once.”
He had read no more than the first page of the Cardinal’s letter, and appeared unable to collect his thoughts sufficiently to read the somewhat difficult handwriting. Evelyn took the letter out of his hand, and when she read that it was not necessary for him to go to Rome before the autumn a shade of disappointment passed over his face; he would have preferred that the Cardinal had said that he must be in Rome in forty-eight hours.
Then, as if ashamed of his egoism, he asked her when she was going back to the stage. The naïveté of the question raised a smile to her lips, and he said, —
“Oh, I know you won’t go back to the stage; but I met Hermann Goetze the other day, and he said he would engage you, that is why I asked.” And he stood looking at her, his thoughts divided between her and his appointment.
“Yes, father dear, I feel I am a great failure, and I am sure I wish I were different; but you see one can’t change.”
She stood thinking of the day she had told him she was going away with Owen. They were nearer to each other then than now; and his joy at his appointment reminded her of her delight the day Madame Savelli had told her she had a beautiful voice.
“But, Evelyn, what about the American tour? You could easily make the money the nuns need in Amer
ica.”
“I should like to go to Rome with you, dear.”
“Well, that would be very nice, and I might give some concerts of the old music in Rome.”
“We must never be separated again, and I shall be able to help you with your music.”
He seemed to be in Rome already; she could read in his face that he was thinking of the choir that awaited the rule of his baton. And very soon he began to imagine strange intrigues, conspiracies of cardinals to keep him from coming to Rome.
“But, Evelyn, there is no reason why we should do the journey together; there is this house to be sold, and you will have to get rid of your flat. Somebody must be here to look after things; I cannot stay, I must be in Rome next week. Besides, I am going to stay in Rome with the friars. You would not like to stay in an hotel alone, and it would be expensive. Far better to wait until I find rooms for you. You are in no hurry to get to Rome, I suppose? The autumn is the better time — early spring the best time of all. But why do you stand looking at me? You are afraid you will be lonely? Then come with me; we can put this business into the hands of an agent.”
She tried to put back her joy but her heart was overflowing. She was going to the convent for a while. Her escape had come about of itself, and it pleased her to look upon her father’s appointment as miraculous. She could not find a protest, her lips seemed sealed, to see him was to know that he was determined to go to Rome, and at once; and she tried to silence her conscience by packing his clothes, by arranging his journey for him, by giving him a list of the places where he might dine and breakfast, and where he might break the journey if he pleased. He would have to go straight through on account of the harpsichord, and she was afraid the carriage of it before he reached Rome would nearly equal the price of the instrument.
He superintended the packing of his viols and lutes, but if it had not been for her care he might have forgotten his portmanteau. She packed it herself and she saw that it was labelled, while he looked after the musical part of his luggage.
Having told him about Avignon, she looked up and down the platform, and thought she had forgotten nothing; and while she told him that each case had been carefully labelled, the train began to steam out of the station. She might have spoken to the guard. But he only went as far as Dover. The guard to speak to was the guard of the train from Paris to Avignon. She knew the length of the journey, and her father had promised to take a sleeping-car.
Rome is so beautiful in the autumn, and Owen had only shown her pagan Rome; there was also a Christian Rome, and she began to consider her own journey there. She was bringing with her all her father’s books, and they would weigh a great deal, and some silver and pictures. Almost the last words he had spoken were about her mother’s picture, and thinking of them, she remembered his letter to Owen Asher six years ago:
“I will arrive about nine with the big harpsichord and Evelyn.”
She liked him none the less for his absorption in his art; she envied him rather, and she went to Dowlands thinking of the great case the harpsichord was packed in and the difficulties that would arise at every frontier town. It had been packed in the music-room, and a charwoman was sweeping the litter away when Evelyn entered. She spoke a few words to the woman and walked through the empty rooms thinking of the passing of Dowlands. Dowlands had played quite a little part in the history of art; it had been very individual, and some day she thought someone would write its history. It would be a very interesting history — her father, her mother and herself. She threw the windows open and let in the air. These were her mother’s class-rooms, and she remembered how she used to sit on the stairs listening to the singing, and how pleased her mother had been one day when she said, though she was only four at the time, “But, mother, that lady can’t sing at all.” A shelf in the store-room reminded her of the time when she used to wonder if anyone had ever eaten as many apples as she wanted to eat, and a patch in an old brocaded chair of her mother’s maid — a discreet woman who never made any definite statement, but who was full of insinuations.
She found two Chelsea figures which she had not seen for many years in a forgotten corner, and she tried to remember if the old servant had ever mentioned them to her. The shepherdess had lost an arm, and the bower the shepherd stood in was also a little broken; perhaps that was why they had been put away in the store-room. They were very pretty figures, but she would not take them to Rome. Her father had evidently had them put away.
She suddenly discovered a book which they had been looking for for many years, a book by Morley on the singing of the plain chant; and the number of pictures dismayed her. Every picture represented a musician playing some sort of old instrument, and so long as these were correctly drawn Mr. Innes’s artistic taste was satisfied. He had given her explicit instructions regarding all these pictures, indeed for some time he had been uncertain if he would not take them with him. But Evelyn had at length dissuaded him by exaggerating the cost, and by promising not to forget anything.
The portrait of our father or our mother is a sort of crystal ball into which we look in the hope of discovering our destiny, and Evelyn looked a long while on her mother’s cold and resolute face. It was exactly as she remembered her — there was the thin wide mouth, there were the cold eyes, and she could hear the smooth, even voice, and she remembered how she had often wondered why so many men had been in love with her mother. Her mother had always seemed to her stern and cold, the opposite to what she thought she was herself, though sometimes she fancied she was a little cold. It was from her mother she had got her voice — maybe her temperament.
She turned away from the portrait, perplexed, and stood listening to the woman who was sweeping; and feeling she must talk to someone, she told her what she was to say to the auctioneer who would call next morning.
Most of her furniture had been sold at Christie’s and the few things that were left she had resolved to sell.
She knew how little influence circumstance has on the mind — nevertheless, she wished to rid herself of everything that reminded her of her dead life. She had thought of taking her piano to the convent; it was a beautiful instrument and the nuns would be glad of it, but she could not bring herself to take it with her. Merat came with a heap of papers, and said, —
“Will you look through these, mademoiselle, and see if they can be destroyed?”
She glanced at them and threw them into the grate, and there was danger of the kitchen chimney catching fire, so great was the flare of the papers.
It was sad to think that she would never wear any pretty underclothes again, nor any evening dresses. One of her stage dresses remained, and Merat asked for it, saying, “Give me this one, mademoiselle; I saw you wear it in ‘Lohengrin.’ “Merat said she would keep the dress Evelyn had worn at Owen Asher’s ball two years ago. She was more than kind — she was an affectionate human being, and Evelyn was much touched.
She had worn this hat the last time she had walked with Owen in the Park, and she remembered having worn the one with the blue feather the evening she and Owen had stood looking across the Long Water. Merat could not think how the feather had got broken. There was a hat she had not worn for many years; it took her back to St. Petersburg, to one long summer evening on a hilltop overlooking the Neva. She had met a young man there by appointment; they had sat looking at the distant shipping, and he had admired this hat, and she could not think why she had never worn it again.
One day a man came to buy her clothes. He offered ten shillings apiece for her dresses. Merat protested, and he produced a sack and threw her dresses in without even thinking of rolling them up.
Three days after her furniture, her books, and her china were sold by auction. Ulick bought an inkstand and a score of “Parsifal,” and a china bowl. She could see he was very much moved, and when the Jews began to bid for her writing-table, he said, “Why should we stay here? The sun is shining, let us go into the Park.” When they returned the workmen were removing the furniture, and Evelyn r
emembered the time had come when they must say good-bye.
“Merat will call me a hansom. I must get to the convent before five.”
“Did I not consent to go and live with my father, and how do you explain my father’s appointment? Does it not look as if the Gods had had a hand in it?”
With a little humour in his voice, which made his sadness appear all the more real, he said, —
“I cannot believe the Gods have much to do with convents. My Gods, at least, are only concerned with the earth, the air, and the souls of those who surrender themselves up to these.”
“Perhaps you are right,” she said. “We are our own Gods. Now I must really go. Will you carry my portmanteau downstairs for me?”
Merat came downstairs with a parasol; but parasols were not conventual, and Merat said she would keep it till mademoiselle came out of the convent, for Merat had agreed to go into another situation only upon the condition that she might return to Evelyn when she came out of the convent.
She waved her hand to Ulick, and he seemed so sorry for her that it seemed very harsh for her to be glad, yet she was glad. Providence was deciding for her. Sooner or later she would be a nun. Now that she was on her way to the convent she was quite happy.
She wished that the next few days were over. Then she would have settled down in her work, and she began to think of the music she would sing, and of the pieces which would be most popular.
