Читать книгу The Heart of Penelope - Marie Belloc Lowndes - Страница 20

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Cecily Wake had not been brought up by her aunt. Even before the death of her father, which had followed that of her mother at an interval of some years, she had been placed in one of those convent schools which, in certain exceptional circumstances, take quite little children as boarders. Accordingly, till the age of eighteen, the only home she had ever known was the large, old-fashioned Georgian manor-house near Brighton, which had been adapted to suit the requirements of the French nuns who had first gone there in 1830.

As time went on that branch of the Order which had settled in England had become cosmopolitan in character. Among those who joined it were many English women, one of them a sister of Cecily's mother. But the Gallic nationality dies hard, even in those who claim to be citizens of the heavenly kingdom, and Cecily's convent remained French in tradition, in methods of education, and in the importance attached by the nuns to such accomplishments as bed-making, sewing, cooking, and feminine deportment. They also taught the duty of rather indiscriminate charity, holding, with the saint who had been their founder, that it is better to give alms to nine impostors rather than risk refusing the tenth just beggar; but this interpretation of a Divine precept was unconsciously abandoned by Cecily after she had become intimately acquainted with the conditions of life which surrounded the Melancthon Settlement. Still even there she remained, to the regret of her colleagues, curiously open-handed, and—what was worse, for a principle was involved—she always, during her connection with the Settlement, persisted in saying that she herself, were she in the place of the deserving seeker for help, would rather receive half a crown in specie than five shillings' worth of goods chosen by some one else!

As for education, in the modern sense of the word, Cecily was, and remained, very deficient; many subjects now taught to every school-girl were never even mentioned within the convent walls, and this was specially true of all the 'ologies, including theology. On the other hand, Cecily and her school-fellows were taught to read, write and talk with accuracy two languages. The daughter of a man who has left his mark on English literature, and whose children had one by one returned to the old fold, taught them English composition, as she herself had been taught it by a good old-fashioned governess. This nun, a curious original person, also introduced the elder girls under her charge to much of the sound early Victorian fiction with which she herself had been familiar in her youth.

The Superioress, who reserved to herself the supervision of all the French classes, was a fine vigorous old woman, the daughter of a Legitimist who had been among the leaders of the Duchesse de Berri's abortive rising. As was natural, she held and taught very strong views concerning the state, past and present, of her beloved native country. To her everything which had taken place in France before the Revolution had been more or less well done, while all that had followed it was evil and reprobate. Without going so far as to show Louis XIV. 'étudiant les plans du General La Vallière et du Colonel Montespan,' she completely hid from her pupils the ugly side of the old régime, and exhibited the Sun King as among the most glorious descendants of St. Louis. To her the romance of French history was all woven in and about Versailles, the town where she had herself spent her girlhood, and on the steps of whose palace her own uncle had fallen in defending the apartments of Marie Antoinette on the historic 5th of October. The many heroic episodes of the revolution and of the Vendean wars were as familiar to this old nun, who had spent more than half her long life in England, as if she had herself taken part in them, and she delighted in stirring her own and her pupils' blood by their recital.

So Cecily's heroes and heroines all wore doublet and hose, or hoops, patches, and powder. Most of them spoke French, though in the spacious chambers of her imagination there was room left for Charles I., his Cavaliers, and their valiant wives and daughters.

Equally real to the girl were the saints and martyrs with whose histories she was naturally as familiar, and it was characteristic of her sunny and kindly nature that she early adopted as her patroness and object of special veneration that child-martyr whose very name is unknown, and to whom was accordingly given by the Fathers that of Theophila—the friend of God.

Cecily, knowing very well what it was to be without those ties with which most little girls are blessed, thought it probable that even in heaven St. Theophila must sometimes feel a little lonely, especially when she compared herself with such popular saints—from the human point of view—as St. Theresa, St. Catherine, St. Anthony, and St. Francis.

Perhaps some of the nuns, who in the course of long years had grown to regard Cecily Wake as being as integral a part of their community as they were themselves, hoped that she would finally follow their own excellent example. This was specially the wish of the old house-sister who had been appointed the nurse of the motherless little girl whose arrival at the convent had been the source of such interest and amusement to its inmates. But the Mother Superior cherished no such hopes, or, rather, no such illusion. Not long before Cecily left the convent for 'the world'—as all that lies beyond their gates is generally styled by religious—the nuns spent a portion of their recreation in discussing the girl who was in so special a sense their own child, and whose approaching departure caused some among them keen pain. The Mother Superior heard all that was said, and then, speaking in her native tongue, and with the decision that marked her slightest utterances, observed: 'Cette petite fera le bonheur de quelque honnête homme. Elle est faite pour cela.' After a short pause, and with a twinkle in her small brown eyes, she had added: 'Et il ne sera pas à plaindre, celui-là!'

Cecily's first introduction to the world was not of a nature to make her fall in love with its pomps and vanities. The busy, cheerful conventual household, largely composed of girls of her own age, where each day was lived according to rule, every hour bringing its appointed duty or pleasure, was an unfortunate preparation for life in a small Mayfair lodging, spent in sole company with a nervous elderly woman, who, while capable of making a great sacrifice of comfort in order to do her duty by her great-niece, was yet very unwilling to have the even tenor of her life upset more than was absolutely necessary.

The elder Miss Wake, from her own point of view, had not neglected Cecily during the years the girl had been at school. She had made a point of spending each year the Christmas fortnight at Brighton, and of entertaining the child for one week of that fortnight. During those successive eight days the elder lady had always been on her best behaviour, and Cecily easy to amuse. Then, also, the child had many school-fellows in Brighton, and her aunt always took her once each year to the play. Cecily remembered these brief yearly holidays with pleasure, and when about to leave the convent she looked forward to life in London as to an existence composed of a perpetual round of pleasant meetings with old school-fellows, of evenings at the theatre, varied with visits and benefactions to Arcadian poor, for Cecily, after a sincere childish fashion, was anxious to do her duty to those whom she esteemed to be less fortunate than herself.

The reality had proved, as realities are apt to do, very different from what she had imagined. The elder Miss Wake, like so many of those women born in a day when no career—and it might almost be said no pleasant mode of life—was open to gentlewomen of straitened means, had learnt to content herself with a way of existence which lacked every source of healthy excitement, interest, and pleasure.

Her one amusement, her only anodyne, was novel-reading. For her and her like were written the three-volume love-stories, full of sentiment and mild adventure, for which the modern spinster no longer has a use. When absorbed in one of these romances, she was able to put aside, to push, as it were, into the background of her mind, her most incessant, though never mentioned, subject of thought. This was the problem of how to make her small income suffice, not only to her simple wants, but to the upkeep of the consideration she thought due to one of her name and connections.

Miss Theresa Wake never forgot that she belonged to a family which, in addition to being almost the oldest in England, would now have been doubtless great and powerful had it not remained faithful to a creed of which the profession in the past had meant the loss of both property and rank.

Settling down in London at the age of fifty, after a bitter quarrel with her only remaining brother, a small squire in the North of England, she had taken the ground-floor of a lodging-house of which the landlord and his wife had come from her own native village, and therefore grudged her none of that respect which she looked for from people in their position.

In their more prosperous days the Wakes had married into various great Northern families, and Miss Wake was thus connected with several of her Mayfair neighbours. For a while after her removal to London she had kept in touch with a certain number of people whose names spelled power and consideration, but as the years went on, and as her income lowered some pounds each year, she gradually broke with most of those whose acquaintanceship with her had only been based, as she well knew, on a good-natured acceptance of the claim of distant kinship. From some few she continued, rather resentfully, to accept such tokens of remembrance as boxes of flowers and presents of game; an ever-narrowing circle left cards at the beginning of the season, and fewer still would now and again come in and spend half an hour in her dreary sitting-room. These last, oddly enough, almost always belonged to the newer generation, the children of those whose parents she had once called friends; when a stroke of good fortune had come to these young people, sometimes when a feeling of happy vitality almost oppressed them, a call on Miss Wake took the shape of a small dole to fate.

There had been in the very long ago a marriage between a Wake and an Oglethorpe. Lord and Lady Wantley had made this fact the excuse to be persistently courteous and kind to the peculiar spinster lady, and in this matter Penelope had followed her parents' example.

Two or three times a year—in fact, it might almost be said, whenever she was in London—Penelope Robinson shed the radiance of her brilliant presence on the dowdy little lodging, always paying Miss Wake the compliment of coming at the right time, that is, between four and six, and of being beautifully dressed. On one such occasion, when she might surely have been forgiven for cutting short her call, for she was on the way to a royal garden-party, she had actually prolonged her visit nearly forty minutes!

Yet another time she had come in for only a moment, but bringing with her a gift which had deeply moved Miss Wake, for the noble water-colour drawing seemed to bear into the dingy London sitting-room a breath of the rolling hills and limitless dales of that tract of country which lies in Yorkshire on the border of Westmorland, and which the old lady still felt to be home. 'I thought you would like it,' Penelope had exclaimed eagerly. 'I went over to Cargill Force from Oglethorpe, and I chose the place——'

'I know,' had interrupted Miss Wake, her voice trembling a little in spite of herself. 'You must have drawn it from the mound by the Old Lodge. I recognise the fir-tree, though it must have grown a good deal since I was there last. The hills seem further off than they used to do years ago, and, of course, we do not often have such bad weather as that you have shown here. There are often long days without any rain.'

Penelope had driven away a little chilled. 'I wonder if she would have preferred a photograph,' she said to herself. But Miss Wake would not have preferred a photograph. She saw not Nature as her cousin, Mrs. Robinson, saw it, and she by no means wished she could; but she found herself looking more often, and always with increasing conviction of its truth, at the painting which showed the storm-god let loose over the wild expanse of country which formed the background to all her early life and associations. Finally Miss Wake hung the water-colour in the place of honour over her mantelpiece, where she could herself always see it from where she sat nursing both her real and her fancied ailments.

This slight account of the elder Miss Wake will perhaps make it clear how grievous was her perplexity when she decided that it was her duty to take charge of her now grown-up niece. The idea that the girl might, and indeed should, work for her livelihood never presented itself to the aunt's mind, and yet the matter had been one that grimly reduced itself to pounds, shillings, and pence. Cecily's income was the interest on a thousand pounds, and her bare board and bed, to say nothing of clothes, must cost nearly twice that sum. Miss Wake did the only thing possible: she gave up all those necessities which she regarded as luxuries, but sometimes she allowed herself to dwell on the possibility that her niece would either marry, or develop, as would be so convenient, a religious vocation.

The months that followed her arrival in London had the effect of gradually transforming Cecily Wake from an unthinking child into a thoughtful young woman. Her energy and power of action, finding no outlet, flowed back and vitalized her mind and nature. For the first time she learnt to think, to observe, and to form her own conclusions. She was only allowed to go out alone to the church close by, and to a curious old circulating library, originally founded solely with a view of providing its subscribers with Roman Catholic literature, but which, as time had gone on, had gradually widened its scope, especially as regarded works of history, memoirs, and biographies. Novels were forbidden to the girl, according to the strict rule which had obtained in Miss Wake's own girlhood, and when Cecily felt the dreary monotony of her life almost intolerable, she would slip off to church for half an hour, and return to her aunt, if not cheerful, at least submissive.

More than once certain of the Jesuit priests, who had long known and respected the elder Miss Wake, had tried to persuade her to allow her niece a little more liberty and natural amusement. But, greatly as the old lady valued the friendship of those whom she considered as both holy and learned, she did not regard herself at all bound to accept their advice as to how she should direct the life of her young charge. Above all, she courteously but firmly declined for her niece any introductions to other young people. 'Later on I shall perhaps be glad to avail myself of your kindness,' she would answer a certain kindly old priest, who had it in his power to open many doors; and he, in spite of a deserved reputation for knowledge of the world and the human heart, never divined Miss Wake's chief reason for declining his help—the fact, simple, bald, unanswerable, that there was no money to buy Cecily even the plainest of what the old lady, to herself, called 'party frocks.'

In time Cecily, growing pale from want of air, heavy-eyed from over-reading, and utterly dispirited from lack of something to do, was secretly beginning to evolve a scheme of going back to her beloved convent as pupil-teacher, when, on a most eventful March day, Mrs. Robinson, driving up Park Street on her way back from a wedding, suddenly bethought herself that it was a long time since she had called on her old cousin.