XI
PERHAPS it was reaction from the materialistic atmosphere that undoubtedly prevailed at the modern and opulent mansion of Cotton that was responsible for the extreme spirituality which marked Mrs. Severing’s conversation that Friday afternoon.
Her golden hair shone against darkly splendid furs, and her luminous gaze strayed continually to some far horizon and was continually recalled with a start that just contrived not to be imperceptible.
“It is too delightful to be in an atmosphere like this one,” she murmured to Lady Argent in the hall, and bent over her plate at luncheon for a long moment with a reverence which far surpassed the gentle murmur in which her hostess indulged.
When curried eggs were succeeded by cutlets Nina cast a gravely wondering look around her.
“Friday?” she murmured gently. “I wonder if I might ask—ah! I see you, too, fast on Fridays.”
“Oh no,” said Lady Argent gently, “I only abstain from meat—really no privation at all—I’m not very fond of meat, and it’s so much better for one to have fish and eggs and vegetables and things, quite apart from what one always feels to be the cruelty of it, though I’m afraid one doesn’t think about it very often, except just when one actuallyseesthe lambs playing about in the fields, or the chickens being killed in that dreadfully cruel way, poor things.”
“We should all be infinitely better physically and mentally if we only had one meal a day. Just,” said Nina with poignant simplicity, “a little fruit or uncooked nuts, and a draught of water. I’ve always said that I should like to live as the old hermits did.”
Frances was aware that Nina had always said so, and wondered vaguely why she was for the first time rendered slightly uncomfortable by the aspiration.
“May I give you some fish, Mrs. Severing?” asked Ludovic matter-of-factly.
“Please do,” she smiled. “I don’t actually belong to your beautiful Faith, but I love to live up to all the dear old symbols.”
“You couldn’t call turbot a symbol, exactly,” said Lady Argent rather doubtfully, “and I do hope you’ll give Mrs. Severing a respectable slice, my dear boy, for she must be very hungry after such a long drive.”
“No,” said Nina, looking as though a breath would blow her away altogether. “No.” Her smile repudiated the mere suggestion of hunger with a delicate completeness.
“I hear you have the most lovely little chapel,” she said softly, turning to her hostess. “It would be a great pleasure to me to see it. What a boon one’s little solitary corner for meditation is! Francie may have told you that I am rather a wanderer on the face of the earth, and so can appreciate it doubly.”
Frances, who had always looked upon Mrs. Severing as the prosperous chatelaine of Pensevern and its adjoining acres, looked so naïvely astonished that Ludovic felt strongly inclined to laugh. Instead, however, he charitably engaged her in a long conversation which enabled Nina to carry out the skilled presentment of herself which she evidently had in mind, unhampered by the startled gaze of her earlier acquaintance.
“Ludovic had the chapel built for me, as a surprise while I was away once,” Lady Argent told her proudly. “So very dear and kind of him, and I shall never forget my astonishment, especially as I thought at first that it was a new bathroom. Not when I went inside, you know, but we’d talked about having one for a long time, and when I saw the remains of the workmen outside, I felt sure it must be that. Ladders and tools and things, you know, and agreat bucket of whitewash, such as one naturally associates with a bathroom, especially if one has it already in one’s mind, you know. But that was just because Ludovic thought it would make it lighter.”
“White walls,” murmured Nina symbolically. “Idoso agree. Do you hold your own little services there?”
“The Bishop most kindly lets his own chaplain come over twice a week and say Mass. You see, the nearest Catholic Church is some miles away, and going in early isn’t always possible, although I can always manage Sundays, but of course it’s the greatest possible blessing to have the Chaplain. Such a nice man—and not an Irishman,” said Lady Argent rather thankfully.
“I’m afraid my prejudices are rather against parsons of any denomination,” Nina said with the air of one making a candid admission. “I always fancy—perhaps it’s just a fancy peculiar to myself—that one is so much more easily in tune with the Infinite, without any human intervention. But then I’m afraid I’m a dreadfully individual person.”
“Of course,” said Lady Argent quietly, “a Catholic looks at that quite differently.”
“Ah, but don’t speak as though I were not one of you in heart, in mind,” cried Nina quickly. “I adore the Catholic Church, and when I go to Church in London, I always go to Farm Street or one of your places of worship. I always say that there is anatmospherein a Catholic Church which one finds nowhere else.”
Ludovic caught the words and glanced hastily at his mother, aware that this well-worn sentiment is as a red rag to a bull to the devout Catholic. For the remainder of the meal he firmly directed and maintained the conversation in undenominational channels.
But after luncheon was over and Nina had smoked two cigarettes, with an air of detachment that made the act seem almost saintly, Ludovic left Lady Argent and Frances to entertain their guest unaided.
“Talk to me,” said Nina gently, turning her enormouseyes on her hostess, “talk to me a little of your wonderful Faith. I have heard so much of you—and of it—from my little Francie, and I feel she must have told you that I, too, am a seeker after truth; things of this world mean so little—oh, so little!—in comparison with the eternal quest.”
Receiving no immediate response but the slight bewilderment slowly becoming apparent on Lady Argent’s face, Nina glided on her conversational way with much discretion:
“Such things are not to be talked about, are they? They go too deep. One understands. My own reserve has always been rather a proverb; but somehow in this sort of atmosphere—well, it’s deep calling to deep, isn’t it, rather?”
She laughed a very little, with a perceptible undercurrent of agitation.
“You’ll let me talk to you quite frankly, won’t you?” she asked, with an appealing look at Lady Argent. “It’s so seldom one has the impulse—and my life has been a very lonely one. Oh, I have my boy, of course—but, then, what does the younger generationgive? Nothing. Theycangive us nothing—in the nature of things. It’s all taking on their side, and sacrifice on ours. One would hardly have it otherwise—but—— Little Frances knows that I don’t mean her—she is my little comfort.” Nina tendered a reassuring, if rather absentminded, hand to her little comfort, who received it rather perfunctorily, and released it a good deal sooner than its owner expected.
“My son has always been a companion to me since he was a child,” said Lady Argent firmly; “and as for sacrifices, I’ve always felt them to be on his side, if there were any, since he might have been so much more in touch with things, living in London—he writes, you know—only my tiresome asthma is so troublesome there, and he won’t hear of leaving me. Not that it is a sacrifice, since he wouldmuch rather be with me here, than without me anywhere else,” she concluded simply.
“How very, very wonderful and beautiful such a relationship is,” breathed Nina reverently. “Morris and I are all the world to one another, but he is very, very young—young for his age, as well—and perhaps the very young shrink a little from an atmosphere of sadness. You see I have been all alone for a number of years now. I married very, very young—a child—and then I was left, with——”
Before Nina had reached the looming allusion to a child with only a star to guide her, Frances rose quickly and glided from the room, rather to the relief of Mrs. Severing, who was becoming increasingly aware of her protégée’s startled eyes at various new aspects of a recital which she had supposed she knew by heart.
“That is a very pure, sweet little soul,” said Nina as the door shut, after the invariable rule which causes minds of a certain calibre instantly to adopt as subject of conversation whoever has most recently left the room.
The custom not being one which recommended itself to Lady Argent, she merely replied with a vague, kind murmur indicative of goodwill, but of nothing else.
“One does so dislike the idea of discussingles absents,” said the responsive Nina, with an atrocious accent of which she was sufficiently conscious to make her slur the words over rather rapidly, “but I have somehow felt that perhaps between us we could find out what it is that the child reallyneeds. I don’t know that beloved Bertha Tregaskis altogether understands her, though I wouldn’t say so for the world.”
“Bertie has been very good to them both,” said Lady Argent loyally. “So wonderful of her, I always think, and all that dairy work and the Mothers’ Union and everything as well—simply marvellous.”
“Indeed, yes,” cried Nina, “quite the most practical woman I know, and my dearest friend in the world. Attractionof opposites, I suppose. I always think that she and I are the two types—Martha and Mary—active and contemplative, you know.”
Lady Argent, to whom Nina’s favouritemotwas naturally new, looked more than a little doubtful.
“Dear Bertie is very wonderful altogether,” she murmured. “Her insight and sympathy, you know, and then her humility—it’s really quite touching to hear her blame or ridicule herself, when one is so full of admiration—all her gifts, you know, intellectual as well as practical.”
“Ah, those clever dialect imitations!” cried Nina, with an enthusiasm that strove subtly to confine Bertha’s mental attainments to dialect imitations. “She’s so original, isn’t she? And at one time she used to scribble a little, you know—just trifles for the magazines, butquiteclever. I remember going through one or two of the proof-sheets for her—Bertie is always so ridiculously determined to think that I can write myself, you know, and wanted me to polish up some of her descriptions of travel—not, of course, that I’m really much good, though I’ve always thought I shouldliketo write, if I could find the time.”
“Music, of course, has taken up most of your time.”
“Ah yes—my art. It’s been everything, of course.”
“It would be the greatest possible pleasure if you would play to us a little this afternoon. Ludovic loves music, and really knows a great deal about it,” said Lady Argent, believing herself to be stating a fact.
“One can always play to a true lover of music,” murmured Nina. “I often feel that with little Francie—child though she is.”
“Mrs. Grantham was so very musical, poor thing!” ejaculated Lady Argent, who would have felt it almost an irreverence to omit the epithet in the case of one deceased. “It is a pity the girls have not inherited her gift. They neither of them play, do they, or is Rosamund musical?”
“Not in the very least,” replied Nina, who rather disliked Rosamund. “She does not know the meaning of theword. Between ourselves, dear Lady Argent, Rosamund is not a very taking sort of girl, although she’s prettier than Frances—in fact,” she added, with the easy generosity of an extremely and maturely attractive woman, “she is quite unusually pretty. But that’s all.”
“I thought she was clever.”
Nina shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s not the sort of cleverness that attracts,” she said shrewdly. “Hazel Tregaskis, before she married, had twice the success that Rosamund had. Now, of course, with money and clothes and things, and that romantic story about her marriage, Hazel is too popular for words, though she’s really not pretty in the least—only very bright and attractive.”
Lady Argent, who did not think that Hazel Tregaskis’s marriage with Sir Guy Marleswood was a sufficiently reputable subject to be mentioned, except to the Almighty, with whom she occasionally pleaded piously for the first Lady Marleswood’s demise, maintained a rather weighty silence.
Nina rippled lightly through it.
“Rosamund is rather the sort of girl who likes to go about looking like a tragedy-queen, and for no particular reason, you know. There was a very foolish and youthful love affair,” said Nina with an air of extreme detachment, “which only lasted about a week, and meant nothing at all, but she has quite got over that—so that her air of having a grievance is really affectation. You know anything which fails to ring quite true does jar so—one feels it instinctively—in a moment. Don’t you agree?”
Lady Argent looked as though she were torn between truth and an unaccountable desire to contradict her visitor, and it was a slight but distinct relief to them both when Ludovic came into the room.
“Are you going to be kind enough to let us hear you play, Mrs. Severing?” he asked her. “The piano is an Erard, and though it is not new, I should very much like you to try it, if you will.”
“Do,” said Lady Argent cordially.
Ludovic wondered whether the cordiality sprang from a certain weariness which he thought that he could detect in his parent’s expression. It seemed to him that one might weary rather speedily in Mrs. Severing’s company. But when she was seated before the Erard, a load of rings removed from her white supple fingers, and the sound of one of her own “Preludes” filling the room, Ludovic felt inclined to change his mind.
Nina Severing at the piano interested him. He felt that “meretricious” was still the word that he would apply to her talent, but her rendering of her own inspirations struck him as an odd bit of self-revelation.
The “Prelude” was a rapid, highly-technicaltour-de-forceof muscular agility, with the merest and most disconnected thread of melody possible in the treble, and in syncopated time. Ludovic divined that Nina regarded it as her masterpiece. She played with great self-confidence and an amount of force that was rather surprising.
Afterwards, at Lady Argent’s request, she played a Chopin Polonaise and the too well-known Minute-Waltz. Her rendering of neither satisfied Ludovic’s taste, but he listened with an interest that was almost profound.
“She is only sincere when she is dealing with her own compositions,” was his final verdict. “As an interpreter she fails altogether. She does not attempt to give us Chopin’s Chopin, but Nina Severing’s Chopin—the Chopin of the author of the ‘Kismet’ songs. And so the polonaise becomes trivial, almost a little vulgar—it is utterly above and beyond her personality.” He gave himself up to interested musings, and listened to Nina’s subsequent performances with his outward ear only.
But Frances and Lady Argent gave the popular musician her full meed of applause and congratulation.
“How you can ever have time to practise all those things, and learn them by heart, I can’t imagine,” said Lady Argent admiringly. “When I think what difficulty I had as a girlin memorizing a very pretty thing called ‘The Maiden’s Prayer,’ which I believe is quite out of date nowadays—but then I was never considered particularly musical. Ludovic gets it all from his father.”
“Celtic blood,” said Nina, pronouncing theCas though it had beenS. “No—memorizing has never been of much difficulty to me. Things just seem tocome, you know. As a child I used to spend hours and hours in an old organ-loft, just playing to myself, you know—always alone, but never lonely so long as I could make music.” Her eyes deepened and grew introspective over this pathetic sketch, which happened to be a fancy one, and it was with a perceptible effort that she presently shook off her slight appearance of absorption and once more begged to be shown the chapel.
“Frances will take you, and show you all that there is to be seen. I know you will forgive me for not undertaking the stairs oftener than I can help,” said her hostess with a little hesitation.
“But of course!”
Nina followed her guide with a graceful gesture expressive of complete understanding.
“Ludovic!” cried Lady Argent in a distraught manner, as soon as he had carefully closed the door. “I am afraid it was really very wrong of me to tell such a shocking untruth, though I did not say in so many words that it would bring on my asthma if I went upstairs to the chapel, but I am sure that is what she understood me to mean, and the worst of it is that Imeanther to take it that way, and that is really just the same thing as telling a downright lie. Because of course stairs never affect me in the least, as you very well know, only damp, which the chapel is far from being, especially with that dear little radiator put in under Our Lady’s statue. Oh, my dear boy, do you think it was very wrong of me?”
“Not in the least. Why should you have taken her to the chapel yourself, tiresome woman that she is?”
“Oh, hush,” said his mother, looking delighted. “Praydon’t call her names, Ludovic, my dear, it really is most uncharitable. But I am dreadfully afraid that I have taken a terrible dislike to her.”
“What! When she is so much interested in Catholicism?” asked Ludovic, with a shade of derision in his tone.
“I did not like her manner about the Church at all,” said Lady Argent with melancholy emphasis. “I really didnot, Ludovic. I have no doubt that it is very uncharitable of me, but it positively struck me once or twice that she was almost posing about it all. So unlike dear little Frances, who is so much in earnest.”
“I believe it was Mrs. Severing who first put the idea of Catholicism into her head, all the same,” said Ludovic rather maliciously.
“My dear boy, how can you say such a thing! It was the grace of God, neither more nor less, and when you consider that Mrs. Grantham was a Catholic herself, by birth!—though I’m sure I had no idea of such a thing till just the other day: but then one was so dreadfully apt to look upon all foreigners as belonging to some odd fancy religion, or even nothing at all, in those days. And, of course, poor thing, she must have given up her religion altogether, or those children would never have been baptized Protestants, poor little things, when you think of the promises the non-Catholic party to a marriage always has to make—but I suppose Mr. Grantham was never even told about them, let alone asked to make them.”
“Probably not,” agreed her son placidly.
“Dreadful to think of! And so poor Mrs. Grantham died without the Last Sacraments or anything at all. If one had only known in those days! However,” said Lady Argent, wisely putting the past away from her, “God has His own ways of doing things, and I have no doubt that Frances is His chosen instrument for many things—perhaps she may even bring dear Bertie herself into the Church, one of these days.”
“And Mrs. Severing, mother?”
“Ludovic! I can’t bear to think of that woman’s first Confession. I can see her, keeping the poor priest for hours in the confessional, while she forced all her fancies down his throat,” said Lady Argent, with the energy that only a really good woman can put into denunciation.
“Mother!”
“Well, my dear boy, I dare say it is very wrong of me to say so, and if I am giving you scandal I am sorry for it. You know very well that I would never say such a thing before the servants or anybody, though what Charles must have thought of her at luncheon, calling the turbot symbolical and everything, I really don’t know. She will have to have tea before driving all that way back, but pray ring the bell and let me order it half an hour earlier.”
This inhospitable manœuvre had hardly been put into execution before Frances and Nina reappeared. The latter laid her slender, gloveless hand for a moment on Lady Argent’s sleeve, the blackness of which formed an admirable foil to extreme whiteness and the flash of diamonds, and said in tones which almost suggested an emotionaltremolo:
“I can’t thank you enough. It’s been a revelation—Coram sanctissimum!”
Ludovic, with some perspicacity, divined that Mrs. Severing supposed her fragment of Latinity to be some recondite version of “sanctum sanctorum,” and tried to look proportionately gratified, the more so as his mother’s expression denoted considerable distrust mingled with a most perfunctory politeness.
“I’m so glad,” she murmured doubtfully. “Do pray let me give you some tea—they are just bringing it.”
“The little shrine!” said Nina with a sort of soft rapture. “It reminded me so much of those little wayside shrines one saw everywhere in Italy. I have always loved them.”
“Do you know Italy well?” asked Ludovic.
“I was there years ago—with my husband. I remember,” said Nina determinedly turning to Lady Argent, “thatwe had a private audience with the Pope—so interesting, and he was the dearest old man. I shall never forget kneeling there—I was a mere child, I married very, very young—to receive his blessing, and how impressive it all was. He gave me some beads, too, that I am sure have all sorts of beautiful Indulgences attached to them, even for a poor little heretic. Frances knows them—they always hang over my bed at home. I really could hardly sleep without them.”
Even Frances felt no regret when Mrs. Severing took her departure.
Neither she nor Lady Argent alluded to the visit that evening, and Ludovic, on his return from conducting Nina to the Towers, spent the evening in reading aloud an article on French literature.
But when his mother rose to go to bed, and he handed her the small heap of miscellanies without which she seldom moved, she looked almost coldly at the polished brown rosary that crowned the little pile.
“Thank you, my dear boy,” she said rather faintly, taking them from him, and added, as soon as Frances was out of earshot, “I assure you that that absurd woman has really almost put me off saying my rosary for the evening.”