The Light of Scarthey Part 14

"Unless, therefore, you should hear to the contrary, you will know that on Tuesday your three _unprotected_ female relatives will be hoping to see your travelling carriage arrive to fetch them at the Crown in Lancaster.

"Your Affectionate Aunt,

"ROSE O'DONOGHUE."

As Miss Landale sighed forth the concluding words, she dropped the little folio on her lap, and looked at her brother with a world of apprehension in her faded eyes.

"Oh, Rupert, what shall we do?"

"Do," said Mr. Landale, quickly turning on her, out of his absorption, "you will kindly see that suitable rooms are prepared for your aunt and cousins, and you will endeavour, if you please, to show these ladies a cheerful countenance, as your aunt requests."

"The oak and the chintz rooms, I suppose," Sophia timidly suggested.

"Tanty used to say she liked the aspect, and I daresay the young ladies will find it pleasant to look out on the garden."

"Ay," returned Rupert, absently. He had risen from his seat, and fallen to pacing the room. Presently a short laugh broke from him.

"Tolerably cool, I must say," he remarked, "tolerably cool. It seems to be a tradition with that Savenaye family, when in difficulties, to go to Pulwick."

Miss Landale looked up with relief. Perhaps Rupert would think better of it, and make up his mind to elude receiving the unwelcome visitors after all. But his next speech dashed her budding hopes.

"Ay, as in the days of their mother before them, when she came here to lay her eggs, like a cuckoo in another bird's nest--I wish they had been addled, I do indeed--we may expect to have the whole place turned topsy-turvy, I suppose. It is a pretty a.s.sortment, _faith_ (as Tanty says herself); an old papist, and two young ones, fresh from a convent school--and of these, one a hoyden, and the other lovesick! Faugh!

Sophia you will have to keep your eyes open when the old lady is gone.

I'll have no unseemly pranks in this house."

"Oh, Rupert," with a moan of maidenly horror, and conscious incompetence.

"Stop that," cried the brother, with a contained intensity of exasperation, at which the poor lady jumped and trembled as if she had been struck. "All your whining won't improve matters. Now listen to me," sitting down beside her, and speaking slowly and impressively, "you are to make our relatives feel welcome, do you understand?

Everything is to be of the best. Get out the embroidered sheets, and see that there are flowers in the rooms. Tell the cook to keep back that haunch of venison, the girls won't like it, but the old lady knows a good thing when she gets it--let there be lots of sweet things for the young ones too. I shall be giving some silver out this afternoon. I leave it to you to see that it is properly cleaned. What are you mumbling about to yourself? Write it down if you can't remember, and now go, go--I am busy."

PART II

"MURTHERING MOLL THE SECOND"

_Then did the blood awaken in the veins Of the young maiden wandering in the fields._

LUTEPLAYER'S SONG.

CHAPTER X

THE THRESHOLD OF WOMANHOOD

Onward floweth the water, onward through meadows broad, "How happy," the meadows say, "art thou to be rippling onward."

"And my heart is beating, beating beneath my girdle here;"

"O Heart," the girdle saith, "how happy art thou that thou beatest."

_Luteplayer's Song._

DUBLIN, _October 15th, 1814_.--This day do I, Molly de Savenaye, begin my diary.

Madeleine writes to me from Bath that she has purchased a very fine book, in which she intends to set forth each evening all that has happened her since the morning; she advises me to do so too. She says that since _real life_ has begun for us; life, of which every succeeding day is not, as in the convent, the repet.i.tion of the previous day, but brings some new discovery, pleasure, or pain, we ought to write down and preserve their remembrance.

It will be so interesting for us to read when a new life once more begins for us, and we are _married_. Besides it is the _fas.h.i.+on_, and all the young ladies she knows do it. And she has, she says, already plenty to write down. Now I _should_ like to know what about.

When ought one to start such a record? Surely not on a day like this.

"Why _demme_" (as Mrs. Hambledon's nephew says), "_what the deyvil_ have I got to say?"

_Item:_ I went out shopping this morning with Mrs. Hambledon, and, bearing Madeleine's advice in mind, purchased at Kelly's, in Sackville Street, an alb.u.m book, bound in green morocco, with clasp and lock, which Mr. Kelly protests is quite secure.

_Item:_ We met Captain Segrave of the Royal Dragoons (who was so attentive to me at Lady Rigtoun's rout, two days ago). He looked very well on his charger, but how conceited! When he saw me, he rolled his eyes and grew quite red; and then he stuck his spurs into his horse, that we might admire how he could sit it; which he did, indeed, to perfection.

Mrs. Hambledon looked vastly knowing, and I laughed. If ever I try to fancy myself married to such a man I cannot help laughing.

This, however, is not diary.--_Item:_ We returned home because it began to rain, and to pa.s.s the time, here am I at my book.

But is _this_ the sort of thing that will be of interest to read hereafter? I have begun too late; I should have written in those days when I saw the dull walls of our convent prison for the last time. It seems so far back now (though, by the calendar it is hardly six months), that I cannot quite recall how it felt to live in prison. And yet it was not unhappy, and there was no horror in the thought we both had sometimes then, that we should pa.s.s and end our lives in the cage.

It did not strike us as hard. It seemed, indeed, in the nature of things. But the bare thought of returning to that existence now, to resume the placid daily task, to fold up again like a plant that has once expanded to sun and breeze, to have never a change of scene, of impression, to look forward to nothing but _submission_, sleep, and _death_; oh, it makes me turn cold all over!

And yet there are women who, of their own will, give up the _freedom of the world_ to enter a convent _after_ they have tasted life! Oh, I would rather be the poorest, the ugliest peasant hag, toiling for daily bread, than one of these cold cloistered souls, so that the free air of heaven, be it with the winds or the rain, might beat upon me, so that I might live and love _as I like_, do right _as I like_; ay, and do wrong _if_ I liked, with the free will which is my _own_.

We were told that the outer world, with all its sorrows and trials, and dangers--how I remember the Reverend Mother's words and face, and how they impressed me then, and how I should laugh at them, _now!_--that the world was but a valley of tears. We were warned that all that awaited us, if we left the fold, was _misery_; that the joys of this world were _bitter_ to the taste, its pleasures _hollow_, and its griefs _lasting_.

We believed it. And yet, when the choice was actually ours to make, we chose all we had been taught to dread and despise. Why? I wonder.

For the same reason as Eve ate the apple, I suppose. I would, if I had been Eve. I almost wish I could go back now, for a day, to the cool white rooms, to see the nuns flitting about like black and white ghosts, with only a jingle of beads to warn one of their coming, see the blue sky through the great bare windows, and the shadows of the trees lengthening on the cold flagged floors, hear the bells going ding-dong, ding-dong, and the murmur of the sea in the distance, and the drone of the school, and the drone of the chapel, to go back, and feel once more the dull sort of content, the calmness, the rest!

But no, no! I should be trembling all the while lest the blessed doors leading back to that _horrible_ world should never open to me again.

The sorrows and trials of the world! I suppose the Reverend Mother really meant it; and if I had gone on living there till my face was wrinkled like hers, poor woman, I might have thought so too, in the end, and talked the same nonsense.

Was it really I that endured such a life for seventeen years? O G.o.d! I wonder that the sight of the swallows coming and going, the sound of the free waves, did not drive me mad. Twist as I will my memory, I cannot recall _that_ Molly of six months ago, whose hours and days pa.s.sed and dropped all alike, all lifeless, just like the slow tac, tac, tac of our great horloge in the Refectory, and were to go on as slow and as alike, for ever and ever, till she was old, dried, wrinkled, and then died. The real Molly de Savenaye's life began on the April morning when that dear old turbaned fairy G.o.dmother of ours carried us, poor little Cinderellas, away in her coach. Well do I remember my birthday.

I have read since in one of those musty books of Bunratty, that _moths_ and _b.u.t.terflies_ come to life by shaking themselves out, one fine day, from a dull-looking, shapeless, ugly thing they call a _grub_, in which they have been buried for a long time. They unfold their wings and fly out in the suns.h.i.+ne, and flit from flower to flower, and they look beautiful and happy--the world, the wicked world, is open to them.

There were pictures in the book; the ugly grub below, dreary and brown, and the lovely _b.u.t.terfly_ in all its colours above. I showed them to Madeleine, and said: "Look, Madeleine, as we were, and as we are."

And she said: "Yes, those brown gowns they made us wear were ugly; but I should not like to put on anything so bright as red and yellow.

Would you?"

That is the worst of Madeleine; she never realises in the least what I mean. And she _does_ love her clothes; that is the difference between her and me, she loves fine things because they are fine and dainty and all that--I like them because they make _me_ fine.