Part 23

“Now, look here, old lady,” she suddenly said with all her characteristic authoritative kindness in her voice, “I don’t want to drag this out of you bit by bit, if you feel it’s rather more than you can stand just yet. But remember that Frances is my child as well as your sister, and we all love her and want to hear about her. I don’t approve of what’s she’s done, and I don’t choose to go and countenance a performance of which I dislike the idea as much as I do that wedding-dress business. But I was glad and willing that you should go, as you know, and I want news of her--so do we all. Now, Rosamund, if you’re too sore to talk about any of it, just say so, and we’ll try to make allowances and wait until you can overcome yourself a little for the sake of other people. But once for all--I’m not going to pump you.”

Mrs. Tregaskis set her lips in a very determined way indeed, and knitted vigorously, and Miss Blandflower, seizing upon her last words, repeated vaguely: “It is the pump, the village pump.”

Rosamund sought for words desperately.

She evolved at last a halting, stammered, lifeless account of the _prise d’habit_, of Mrs. Mulholland’s officiousness, of the afternoon in the garden with Frances, and the interview with the novice-mistress.

“They’re satisfied with her, then?”

“Oh yes. The nuns told Lady Argent that Frances was _trés docile--tout a fait l’habitude de l’obéissance_.”

“Aha!” laughed Bertha. “She owes something to her wicked old heathen guardian, after all, then. I venture to think that _l’habitude de l’obéissance_ was picked up at Porthlew.”

“Nonsense,” was the contribution of Mrs. Tregaskis’ husband to the conversation. “Frances was submissive by nature, and it would have cost her a great deal more to disobey than to give in.”

Frederick was too much apt to speak of his wife’s departed protégée in the past tense, but Rosamund shot him a look of gratitude for the understanding which his speech seemed to denote.

“She may have been submissive, Frederick,” his wife said quietly, “but you don’t have to look very far to see that Frances was self-righteous enough to blind her to her own self-will. Look at the way she left this house.”

“She thought she was doing right,” said Rosamund quickly.

“I know that perfectly well. I understand Frances, Rosamund, quite as well as you do--better, perhaps, since I’m an experienced old lady who’s seen something of human nature. But that’s neither here nor there. We’ve discussed the ethics of the case often enough. The child’s taken her own way, and I want to hear something about how she’s getting on.”

“I think she’s happy,” said Rosamund rather doggedly. Bertha looked doubtful, and said with rather a curt laugh: “Well, I suppose getting one’s own way makes up for a good deal.”

“Undoubtedly,” observed her husband. “You can see a striking example of the advantageous results of self-will in our daughter Hazel, Bertha.”

Mrs. Tregaskis, who never made any reference to that side of Hazel’s marriage which was oftenest in her thoughts, flushed her heavy infrequent red and remained silent.

Miss Blandflower looked frightened.

“I am afraid the day will come,” she remarked courageously, “when Hazel, as well as poor dear little Frances, will wish she hadn’t taken her own way and ... and flown in the face----” Her voice trailed away feebly.

Lady Marleswood had become yearly more radiantly prosperous and happy since her marriage, but Minnie still clung faithfully to the thought of the day that would come, even while rejoicing admiringly at the occasional glimpses vouchsafed to Porthlew of Hazel and her happiness.

Bertha Tregaskis broke the silence abruptly.

“Did you give her my message about her money affairs, Rosamund, and what does she want to do?”

“She said she would have to make a will after she comes of age, when she takes her vows. It seems to be quite a usual thing for nuns to do.”

“I dare say,” snorted Frederick. “Supervised by the Mother Superior, I presume?”

“I suppose so,” said his wife shortly. “I don’t imagine they’ll turn up their noses at three hundred a year.”

“Perhaps she’ll have left before then,” said Miss Blandflower hopefully, and Rosamund, far from exalted as her opinion generally was of Minnie’s prognostications, looked at her gratefully.

“Listen to my words of wisdom, dear, and you’ll see I’m right,” declared Minnie, encouraged by any unwonted signs of attention, so few of which ever came her way. “_I_ undercumstumble our little Francesca--we shall see her trotting home one of these days, you mark my words.”

Little though Porthlew was in the habit of marking Miss Blandflower’s words, they brought a shred of comfort to Rosamund.

She was striving with passionate intensity to persuade herself that Frances would leave the convent before taking vows there, and that her desire for the religious life was only a phase.

Even when the months went on and her sister’s letters gave no sign of a possible return, Rosamund told herself that in the next letter Frances would ask to be taken away. She could not face any other possibility, and felt, as she had told Ludovic, as though her very imagination stopped at, and could never take in, the prospect of a future without Frances, with Frances permanently established in a strange, new life where one would never know anything of her inner existence, and might not even be told if she were ill or unhappy.

The thought to her was unendurable.

She had no natural tendency towards religion, and very little belief in any beneficent Deity, but she took to a sort of frenzied praying, that the God whom Frances worshipped might reject her sacrifice.

The material aspects of convent life, as Rosamund had seen them during her day at the convent, began to obsess her. She obtained books that told of the lives of nuns, the foundations of religious orders, and the rule prevailing there. The accounts of some of the physical austerities practised by the more ascetic orders turned her sick, and her nights began to be haunted by visions of Frances, starved and emaciated, bleeding under the self-imposed lash of a knotted scourge.

“I am exaggerating--I am going mad,” Rosamund told herself. “Frances is well and happy--her letters say so.”

“_But her letters are read before they reach me._”

She writhed at the thought.

Her very ignorance of convent life added to the sense of horror which was gradually taking possession of her imagination.

She looked back upon the days when she and Frances and Hazel had been children together as at some incredible other life, full of a security so supreme that it had been undreamed of by any of them.

In vain Rosamund told herself, with a piteous attempt at readjusting her focus upon life, that change was only development, that alteration was bound to mark the inevitable way of progress.

“Not this way,” her anguish protested wildly. “Not this way. Hazel has cut herself off to a certain extent by her own voluntary act, but at least she is happy and free--and my Francie--how do I know her to be either?”

Only two things stood out saliently in the darkness which encompassed Rosamund’s soul: her resolution not to add to the cost of Frances’ sacrifice by any pleadings of her own, and her anguished trembling hope that Frances might yet relinquish that way which seemed so fraught with suffering for them both.

XXV

At Pensevern, Mrs. Severing had received one of her son’s infrequent, and generally ill-timed, suggestions of a return to the parental roof.

“Will join you in London,” was Nina’s immediate telegraphic reply.

She did not definitely assure herself that she wished to preclude, as far as might be, the possibility of a _rapprochement_ between her son and Rosamund Grantham, but situations in which Nina Severing did not play the principal rôle were ever distasteful to her, and she gracefully eluded the possibility of involving herself in such a situation by a murmured fear that Morris would find Pensevern and the depths of the country too uneventful.

Having skilfully guarded against events which might serve to vary the uneventful, Nina felt able to rejoice in the self-sacrifice of leaving “the beloved country and God’s own peace and quiet there” in favour of the Ritz Hotel.

Morris, within twenty-four hours of her arrival there, disconcerted her by inquiring, with a piercing glance, whether Rosamund was at Porthlew.

Nina raised her eyebrows.

“Of course,” she said easily. “Why should she be anywhere else? She always is at Porthlew.”

“I heard she was in London with the Argents the other day.”

“The other day! What nonsense you talk, Morris. Rosamund spent two or three nights with them just about Easter-time, so as to go down to poor little Frances’ ceremony, whatever it was.”

“What a shame it is to let a little thing like that go and shut herself up for life,” said Morris warmly.

Nina immediately looked pained.

“There are one or two ways of looking at it,” she said slowly. “I don’t like to hear you making sweeping assertions like that, Morris, especially when you know nothing about the matter. It doesn’t matter when you only say it to me, of course, though it’s neither very polite nor very dutiful, but I should dislike it very much if anyone else were to hear you laying down the law as you sometimes do.”

Morris was aware that there were indeed few things that his mother disliked more than to hear him express an independent opinion on any subject whatever, and he consequently said, with a decision of manner that almost bordered upon violence:

“My dear mother, there really can’t be two opinions about the question of a child of eighteen or nineteen being allowed to take vows which will bind her to a life of that sort. It’s simply iniquitous.”

“You talk like a child, Morris!” exclaimed his parent, pale with annoyance. “But it only makes me laugh, a little sadly, to hear you. You’ll feel so very differently in a few years’ time.”

“I doubt it,” declared Morris easily. “A friend of mine--no one whom you’d know, mother dear--has gone into that sort of thing a good deal, and is thinking of being a Trappist monk. We’ve naturally had a good deal of discussion on the subject.”

Nina gazed at her son with a freezing eye. It gave her the most acute sensation of annoyance every time that she realized afresh in him the self-opinionated arrogance which he derived from her.

“My poor boy,” she said at last, “you don’t really suppose, do you, that your discussion of any of the real things of life can count for anything? Why, your opinions have no more value, to those of us who _know_, than the little idle chirpings of a baby bird that thinks it knows how to fly without waiting to be taught.”

The vigor of this trenchant simile carried Nina sublimely past its ornithological inexactitude, and she recovered her poise of mind.

“Little Frances will have a very beautiful, peaceful, sheltered life,” she observed thoughtfully. “She has shirked all the responsibility, all the sorrow and suffering, that others have to face. She will never grow up--life will always be a soft, childish, happy dream for her. It’s a very easy way out.”

Morris gazed at her with the expression which both of them felt to pertain to one who knew better.

“That remains open to question,” he enunciated with thoughtful deliberation. “To those outside, the idle, the rich, the thoughtless, it may seem a sheltered life in a garden of roses--but what about the vigils and fastings and scourgings, mother?”

“Morris,” inquired his mother coldly, “what have you been reading?”

Her son left the room in a fury.

That night at dinner he refused several courses with an air of asceticism, and drank only water, feeling that in some subtle manner this abstemiousness justified his attitude of the morning. Nina, perfectly following the workings of this strange law, remained serenely unmoved.

The astonishing ease with which Nina and Morris invariably penetrated one another’s poses was perhaps due less to years of practice than to the fundamental similarity of their methods and outlook.

It was no surprise to Morris Severing, although it irritated him very considerably, when two days later, Nina exclaimed over her correspondence in impassioned accents:

“Bertie Tregaskis is miserable about Frances--miserable! And no wonder. The child has written that she isn’t well--has been in the infirmary or something--some kind of epidemic, I imagine, as the Superior is ill too, which seems to be all that Frances writes about. She gives _no_ details about herself, and persists in declaring that she’s perfectly happy and doesn’t want to come away. It’s scandalous.”

“What is?” coldly inquired Morris, who had not forgotten Nina’s recent reception of his views on the cloistered life.

“This convent system. I’ve a very good mind....”

Nina assumed an aspect of deep consideration and of a preoccupation which Morris did not judge sufficiently deep to prevent his gazing with ostentatious inattention out of the window.

“A _very_ good mind,” Nina repeated, and paused. Morris took advantage of the pause, which his parent obviously desired broken by a question, to light a cigarette with every appearance of deliberation and in perfect silence.

But Mrs. Severing’s determinations were not easily baffled.

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, and thereby with great skill bridging over the pause, “I’m not at all sure I oughtn’t to go down there myself.”

Morris raised his eyebrows, an exercise ever effectual in conveying to his mother various undutiful sentiments which could not easily have been put into words.

“To Porthlew, mother?” he inquired, aware that she meant to the convent.

“Why do you say ‘to Porthlew,’ Morris, when you know perfectly well that I don’t mean that at all? Your affectation is unbearable, and no one but your mother would put up with it. I’m forbearing and long-suffering with you, because you’re my son, but who else in the world, do you suppose, would have patience with your endless petty insincerities and your insolent manners?”

This profitless inquiry, which Nina had hurled at her son some three times a week from the date of his tenth birthday, he allowed to drop unheeded.

Nina, having voiced her annoyance that Morris had not put the obvious inquiry which she had meant him to put as to her newly-taken decision, allowed a moment to elapse, and then resumed in ordinary conversational tones:

“They know me at the convent, and they’ll let _me_ see her, all right. I could tell in one moment how things were.”

“I should have thought Mrs. Tregaskis would be the best person to go, or Rosamund.”

“Rosamund!” Nina laughed, shrilly, as she herself recognized with inward annoyance. “Rosamund is a little girl, my dear Morris. A child is of no use. It’s a matter for a woman of the world, with tact and experience. As for poor dear Bertie, with her sledge-hammer ways, I’m afraid she’d be worse than useless. But the Superior knows me--dear Mère Pauline!”

Nina, with a slight effort, recalled the name of the Superior, and uttered it with a marked effect of intimacy.

Morris laughed a little.

“You could hardly count on her remembering you, could you, considering that it’s nearly two years since you went down for those few days, and were so terribly bored? I shall never forget coming down to fetch you home, and how thankful you were to get away from it all!”

“Morris,” said Nina with dignity, replying to the spirit which had prompted this ingeniously perverted reminiscence, “if you can speak like that to your widowed mother, there is no more to be said to you.”

Nina seldom claimed official rank, as it were, as Morris’ widowed mother, until the last outpost of her endurance had been reached, and as Morris was in reality sincerely grateful to her for never having presented him with a stepfather, he changed his tactics.

“Of course, you could quite well go down from here for the day, but do you really think there’s anything wrong? If she was really ill, they’d send for Mrs. Tregaskis, I suppose. Anyway, she’s always been more or less delicate, hasn’t she?”

“That sort of quiet, regular life ought to have made her quite strong,” said Nina negligently. “I must say, though, this is the first time one’s heard of her having a day’s illness there. The ungrateful little thing has never written to me, either, except one rather stilted, affected letter, just after she’d been given her religious habit. Evidently she was so pleased with the novelty of it all, she couldn’t help rather playing a part. Poor little thing! It didn’t ring quite true, somehow, when she spoke of praying for one, and signed herself, ‘Yours affectionately in Christ, Sister Frances Mary.’”

Morris laughed, with a note of indulgence that appeared to Nina’s sensitive perceptions to savour somewhat too nearly of superiority.

“That sort of posing never rings quite true, if very young people would only realize it,” she said, skillfully transferring her condemnation from the particular to the general, whence it might safely be assumed to include her son.

“Frances was anything but a _poseuse_, mother.”

“My dear boy, you haven’t the least idea--how could you at your age--of the effect that an atmosphere of that sort can have on a silly, impressionable girl. Poor little Frances probably wrote in that exaggerated convent style simply because she thought it would impress me with her holiness,” said the discerning Mrs. Severing.

Morris shook his head, and even indulged in the cheap provocation of slightly curling his lip.

“However that may be,” he said tolerantly, and disregarded Nina’s interpolated: “I’ve just told you how it is----” “However that may be, mother, if you really want to go down there, we could take the car to-morrow. It would be a really long run.”

He was quite aware that his mother had never for a moment seriously entertained the project of raiding the convent and obtaining an interview with Frances.

“I don’t know,” said Nina austerely. “I shall have to consider very carefully, Morris. It’s not the sort of undertaking that can be lightly rushed into.”

“Why not? The car is running beautifully just now.”

Nina gave him a glance of contemptuous rebuke. She could be flippant herself, but the flippancy of Morris caused her acute vexation.

“You are too inexperienced to know how extremely cautiously one may have to move in this sort of matter,” she said coldly. “People talk only too readily, and for the sake of poor little Frances, I don’t want gossip about her being kept at the convent against her will.”

“Considering she didn’t know a soul to speak of, and wasn’t even ‘come out’ before she went, I don’t think anyone is very likely to talk about her, I must say. Besides, no one is particularly likely to know whether you go down there or not, surely?” inquired Morris in tones of simplicity.

Few things, indeed, were better calculated to annoy the composer of the “Kismet” series than an assumption that her movements were left unchronicled and unregarded by the public eye. She now laughed with all the violent amusement so frequently simulated by intense fury.

“My dear, ridiculous boy! You’ve no idea how you make me laugh--if anybody could _hear_ you! Do you really think that your little, stupid, childish innuendoes, which one can see through so easily, can touch _me_--an experienced woman of the world?”

Nina made this inquiry of her son so frequently that only an infinitesimal pause was ever consecrated by either of them to the reply which Morris invariably confined to a sudden sulky lowering of his whole expression. He had brought the production of this look to a fine art, and it gave an admirable representation of frank happy-hearted youth and confidence sharply transformed into sullen, hopeless misery by the recurrence of an unjust, and yet oft-repeated, attack.

Inwardly, he was always rather relieved when his parent proceeded to definite rhetoric. It justified his own sense of grievance far more effectually than the covert and undignified verbal sparring which marked their more surface intercourse.

When Nina pitched her voice some three semitones lower than its natural note and said, “The day will come, my poor Morris----” her son felt that she was safely embarked upon a course well known to them both, and merely retained his sombre expression by a mechanical effort of will.

The successive stages of Nina’s contempt, her amused toleration, and at the same time her almost supernatural supply of patience and love for the blind and erring Morris, were reached and left behind, the youth and ignorance and folly of Morris and the store of regrets and bitter memories awaiting him in that future when Nina’s understanding and forgiveness would no longer be available, were all touched upon with the sure hand of long practice, and the final peroration beginning, “Ah, if youth but knew!” was almost in sight when Nina suddenly, and, her son considered, most unjustly, interpolated into her discourse a reference which she seldom made use of, and which always disquieted Morris profoundly.

“And, mind you, Morris, you won’t be able to go on like this with impunity, heartless and undutiful, and ungrateful to your mother, trading on her never giving you away to other people. The day will come when people _will_ know, and _will_ talk about it. That sort of thing doesn’t remain hidden for ever. You know very well that I would rather die than betray you, but--later on--that sort of thing comes out, Morris.”

Morris’ thoughts, not for the first time, fled apprehensively to his mother’s diaries.

These volumes, slowly accumulating ever since he could remember, had always held for him a subtle menace.

He knew that Mrs. Severing flew to them for solace, and had seen her more than once, with tears still gleaming on her golden lashes, bent over her desk, after interviews with her son similar to the present one.

And although Morris did not take his parent’s fame as a composer at her own valuation, he had never been devoid of an uneasy conviction that she meant to present posterity with her own conception of the author of the “Kismet” series, and a lively apprehension had consequently circled for him round the thought of her diaries almost ever since he could remember.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said sullenly, and wishing that he did not.

Nina looked at him pityingly.

“You must know very well, Morris, that your mother is a woman with an enormous circle of friends. One doesn’t want to be blatant,” said Nina, merely meaning that she did not want to be thought so, “but do you suppose that one day there isn’t bound to be some sort of record made--letters or journals published----” She hesitated artistically, as though implying an unlimited posthumous publicity which might doubtless be insisted upon by the enormous circle of friends, but of which modesty forbade her to speak. Morris, always more or less hypnotized by the perfect assurance which characterized his mother’s most outrageous utterances, into believing them, made a violent mental effort, and told himself that he was no longer a child.

“I don’t know what you mean, mother,” he untruly assured her; “but I can tell you one thing, and that is, as far as I am concerned, letters and everything else are invariably destroyed.”

“I should never count upon your loyalty to my memory, Morris,” said his mother sombrely.

A heavy silence prevailed.

Morris wondered vaguely, as he had often wondered before: “What is it all about?”