“I could almost envy the fleas in the Cardinal’s vestments,” Sister Ursula declared, overcome by the venal desire to see.
Gazing at the friend upon whom she had counted in some disillusion, Laura quietly left her.
The impulse to witness something of the spectacle outside was, nevertheless, infectious, and recollecting that from the grotto-sepulchre in the garden it was not impossible to attain the convent wall, she determined, moved by some wayward instinct, to do so. Frequently, as a child, had she scaled it, to survey the doings of the city streets beyond—the streets, named by the nuns often “Sinward-ho.” Crossing the cloisters, and through old gates crowned by vast fruit-baskets in stone, she followed, feverishly, the ivy-masked bricks of the sheltering wall, and was relieved to reach the grotto without encountering anyone. Surrounded by heavy boskage, it marked a spot where, once, long ago, one of the Sisters, it was said, had received the mystic stigmata… With a feline effort (her feet supported by the Grotto boulders), it needed but a bound to attain an incomparable post of vantage.
Beneath a blaze of bunting, the street seemed paved with heads. “Madonna,” she breathed, as an official on a white horse, its mane stained black, began authoritatively backing his steed into the patient faces of the mob, startling an infant in arms below, to a frantic fit of squalls.
“Just so shall we stand on the Day of Judgment,” she reflected, blinking at the glare.
Street boys vending programmes, ‘Lucky’ horseshoes, Saturnalian emblems—(these for gentlemen only), offering postcards of ‘Geo and Glory,’ etc., wedged their way however where it might have been deemed indeed impossible for anyone to pass.
And he, she wondered, her eyes following the wheeling pigeons, alarmed by the recurrent salutes of the signal guns, he must be there already: Under the dome! Restive a little beneath the busy scrutiny, his tongue like the point of a blade…
A burst of cheering seemed to announce the Queen. But no, it was only a lady, with a parasol sewn with diamonds, that was exciting the rah-rahs of the crowd. Followed by mingled cries of “Shame!” “Waste!” and sighs of envy, Madame Wetme was enjoying a belated triumph. And now a brief lull, as a brake containing various delegates and “representatives of English Culture,” rolled by at a stately trot—Lady Alexander, E. V. Lucas, Robert Hichens, Glutton Brock, etc.,— the ensemble the very apotheosis of worn-out cliché.
“There’s someone there wot’s got enough heron plumes on her head!” a young girl in the crowd remarked.
And nobody contradicted her.
Then troops and outriders, and at last the Queen.
She was looking charming in a Corinthian chlamyde, in a carriage lined in deep delphinium blue, behind six restive blue roan horses.
Finally, the bride and her father, bowing; this way and that…
Cheers.!
“Huzzas —!”
A hushed suspense.
Below the wall the voice of a beggar arose, persistent, haunting: “For the Love of God… In the Name of Pity… of Pity.
“Of Pity,” she echoed, addressing a frail, wind-sown harebell, blue as the sky: And leaning upon the shattered glass ends, that crowned the wall, she fell to considering the future—Obedience, Solitude—death.
The troubling valse theme from Dante in Paris interrupted her meditations.
How often had they valsed it together, he and she… sometimes as a two-step…! What souvenirs… Yousef, Yousef… Above the Cathedral, the crumbling clouds had eclipsed the sun. In the intense meridian glare the thronged street seemed even as though half-hypnotised; occasionally only the angle of a parasol would change, or some bored soldier’s legs would give a little. When brusquely, from the belfry, burst a triumphant clash of bells.
Laura caught her breath.
Already?
A shaking of countless handkerchiefs in wild ovation: From roof-tops, and balconies, the air was thick with falling flowers—the bridal pair!
But only for the bridegroom had she eyes.
Oblivious of what she did, she began to beat her hands, until they streamed with blood, against the broken glass ends upon the wall: “Yousef, Yousef, Yousef…”
July 1921, May 1922.
Versailles, Montreux, Florence.
The End
Notes
[1] The name by which the future saint was sometimes called among her friends.
[2] Always a humiliating recollection with her in after years. Vide: ‘Confessions.’
[3] Winds, pronounced as we’re told, “in poetry.”
[4] The capital of Pisuerga.
[5] The recollection of this was never quite forgotten.
[6] Vide Botticelli.
[7] In Pisuerga compliments are apt to rival in this respect those of the ardent South.
[8] The missing articles were:—
5 chasubles.
A relic-casket in lapis and diamonds, containing the Tongue of St Thelma.
4 3/4 yards of black lace, said to have “belonged” to the Madonna.
[9] Although the account of Princess Elsie’s arrival in Kairoulla is signed “Green Jersey,” it seems not unlikely that “Eva Schnerb” herself was the reporter on this eventful occasion.
[10] The Théâtre Diana; a Music Hall dedicated to Spanish Zarzuelas and Operettas. It enjoyed a somewhat doubtful reputation.
[11] The Hon. ‘Eddy’ Monteith had succumbed: the shock received by meeting a jackal while composing a sonnet had been too much for him. His tomb is in the Vale of Akko, beside the River Dis. Alas, for the triste obscurity of his end!
[12] Author of In the Dusk of the Dawn.
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The Flower Beneath the Foot Page 12
