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The White Sister

by F. Marion Crawford · English · Gutenberg #18847 · 519,540 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The White Sister

Author: F. Marion Crawford


        
Release date: July 16, 2006 [eBook #18847]

Language: English

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THE WHITE SISTER

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration: VIOLA ALLEN AS THE WHITE SISTER]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The White Sister
_By_ F. Marion Crawford

Author of "The Diva's Ruby," "Saracinesca," "In the Palace of the
King," etc.

A. L. BURT COMPANY
PUBLISHERS--NEW YORK

Macmillan Standard Library
All Rights Reserved

------------------------------------------------------------------------

COPYRIGHT, 1908,
BY F. MARION CRAWFORD.

COPYRIGHT, 1909,
BY F. MARION CRAWFORD.

COPYRIGHT, 1909,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1909. Reprinted May, June,
twice, July, August, twice, September, October, November, December,
1909; February, 1910; March, November, 1910; February, 1911;
September, 1913.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




THE WHITE SISTER

CHAPTER I


'I cannot help it,' said Filmore Durand quietly. 'I paint what I see.
If you are not pleased with the likeness, I shall be only too happy to
keep it.'

The Marchesa protested. It was only a very small matter, she said, a
something in the eyes, or in the angle of the left eyebrow, or in the
turn of the throat; she could not tell where it was, but it gave her
niece a little air of religious ecstasy that was not natural to her.
If the master would only condescend to modify the expression the least
bit, all would be satisfactory.

Instead of condescending, Filmore Durand smiled rather indifferently
and gave his pallet and brushes to his man, who was already waiting at
his elbow to receive them. For the famous American portrait-painter
detested all sorts of litter, such as a painting-table, brush-jars,
and the like, as much as his great predecessor Lenbach ever did, and
when he was at work his old servant brought him a brush, a tube of
colour, a knife, or a pencil, as each was needed, from a curtained
recess where everything was kept ready and in order.

'I like it as it is,' said Giovanni Severi, resting his hands on the
hilt of his sabre, as he sat looking thoughtfully from the portrait to
the original.

The young girl smiled, pleased by his approbation of the likeness,
which she herself thought good, though it by no means flattered. On
the contrary, it made her look older than she was, and much more sad;
for though the spring laughed in her eyes when she looked at the
officer to whom people said she was engaged, their counterparts in the
portrait were deep and grave. Certain irregularities of feature, too,
were more apparent in the painting than in nature. For instance, there
was a very marked difference between the dark eyebrows; for whereas
the right one made a perfect curve, the other turned up quite sharply
towards the forehead at the inner end, as if it did not wish to meet
its fellow; and the Marchesa del Prato was quite sure that Angela's
delicate nose had not really that aquiline and almost ascetic look
which the great master had given it. In fact, the middle-aged woman
almost wished that it had, for of all things that could happen she
would have been best pleased that her niece should turn out to have a
vocation and should disappear into some religious order as soon as
possible. This was not likely, and the Marchesa was by no means ready
to accept, as an alternative, a marriage with Giovanni Severi, whom
she had long looked upon as her own private property.

Filmore Durand glanced from one to another of the three in quick
succession, stroked his rather bristly moustache, and lit a cigarette,
not because he wanted to smoke, but because he could not help it,
which is a very different thing. Then he looked at his picture and
forgot that he was not alone with it; and it still pleased him, after
a fashion, though he was not satisfied with what he had done.

Great artists and great writers are rarely troubled by theories; one
of the chief characteristics of mature genius is that it springs
directly from conception to expression without much thought as to the
means; a man who has used the same tools for a dozen years is not
likely to take his chisel by the wrong end, nor to hesitate in
choosing the right one for the stroke to be made, much less to 'take a
sledge-hammer to kill a fly,' as the saying is. His unquiet mind has
discovered some new and striking relation between the true and the
beautiful; the very next step is to express that relation in clay, or
in colour, or in words. While he is doing so he rarely stops to think,
or to criticise his own half-finished work; he is too sure of himself,
just then, to pause, and, above all, he is too happy, for all the real
happiness he finds in his art is there, between the painfully
disquieting ferment of the mental chaos that went before and the more
or less acute disappointment which is sure to come when the finished
work turns out to be less than perfect, like all things human. It is
in the race from one point to the other that he rejoices in his
strength, believes in his talent, and dreams of undying glory; it is
then that he feels himself a king of men and a prophet of mankind; but
it is when he is in this stage that he is called vain, arrogant, and
self-satisfied by those who do not understand the distress that has
gone before, nor the disillusionment which will follow soon enough,
when the hand is at rest and cool judgment marks the distance between
a perfect ideal and an attainable reality. Moreover, the less the lack
of perfection seems to others, the more formidable it generally looks
to the great artist himself.

It was often said of Durand that his portraits were prophetic; and
often again that his brushes were knives and scalpels that dissected
his sitters' characters upon the canvas like an anatomical
preparation.

'I cannot help it,' he always said. 'I paint what I see.'

It was not his fault if pretty Donna Angela Chiaromonte had thrown a
white veil over her dark hair, just to try the effect of it, the very
first time she had been brought to his studio, or that she had been
standing beside an early fifteenth century altar and altar-piece which
he had just bought and put up at one end of the great hall in which he
painted. He was not to blame if the veiling had fallen on each side of
her face, like a nun's head-dress, nor if her eyes had grown shadowy
at that moment by an accident of light or expression, nor yet if her
tender lips had seemed to be saddened by a passing thought. She had
not put on the veil again, and he had not meant that a suggestion of
suffering ecstatically borne should dim her glad girlhood in his
picture; but he had seen the vision once, and it had come out again
under his brush, in spite of him, as if it were the necessary truth
over which the outward expression was moulded like a lovely mask, but
which must be plain in her face to every one who had once had a
glimpse of it.

The painter contemplated his work in silence from within an Olympian
cloud of cigarette smoke that almost hid him from the others, who now
exchanged a few words in Italian, which he only half understood. They
spoke English with him, as they would have spoken French with a
Frenchman, and probably even German with a German, for modern Roman
society has a remarkable gift of tongues and is very accomplished in
other ways.

'What I think most wonderful,' said the Marchesa del Prato, who
detested her husband's pretty niece, 'is that he has not made a Carlo
Dolce picture of you, my dear. With your face, it would have been so
easy, you know!'

Giovanni Severi's hands moved a little and the scabbard of his sabre
struck one of his spurs with a sharp clink; for he was naturally
impatient and impulsive, as any one could see from his face. It was
lean and boldly cut; his cheeks were dark from exposure rather than by
nature, there were reddish lights in his short brown hair, and his
small but vigorous moustache was that of a rather fair man who has
lived much in sun and wind in a hot climate. His nose was Roman and
energetic, his mouth rather straight and hard; yet few would have
thought his face remarkable but for the eyes, which betrayed his
nature at a glance; they were ardent rather than merely bold, and the
warm, reddish-brown iris was shot with little golden points that
coruscated in the rays of the sun, but emitted a fiery light of their
own when his temper was roused. If his look had been less frank and
direct, or if his other features had suggested any bad quality, his
eyes would probably have been intolerably disagreeable to meet; as it
was, they warned all comers that their possessor was one of those
uncommon and dangerous men who go to the utmost extremes when they
believe themselves in the right and are constitutionally incapable of
measuring danger or considering consequences when they are roused.
Giovanni Severi was about eight-and-twenty, and wore the handsome
uniform of an artillery officer on the Staff. He had not liked the
Marchesa's remark, and the impatient little clink of his scabbard
against his spur only preceded his answer by a second.

'Happily for Angela,' he said, 'we are not in the studio of a
caricaturist.'

The Marchesa, who could be near-sighted on occasion, put up her
tortoiseshell-mounted eyeglass and looked at him aggressively; but as
he returned her gaze with steadiness, she soon turned away.

'You are extremely rude,' she said coldly.

For she herself made clever caricatures in water-colours, and she knew
what Giovanni meant. Angela's mother had been a very devout woman and
had died young, but had incurred the hatred of the Marchesa by
marrying the very man whom the latter had picked out for herself,
namely, the elder of two brothers, and the Marchesa had reluctantly
consented to marry the other, who had a much less high-sounding title
and a far smaller fortune. She had revenged herself in various small
ways, and had often turned her brother-in-law's wife to ridicule by
representing her as an ascetic mediæval saint, in contorted attitudes
of ecstasy, with sunken cheeks and eyes like saucers full of ink. Like
many other people, Giovanni had seen some of these drawings, for the
resentful Marchesa had not destroyed them when the Princess
Chiaromonte died; but no one had yet been unkind enough to tell Angela
of their existence. The girl did not like her aunt by marriage, it was
true, but with a singularly simple and happy disposition, and a total
absence of vanity, she apparently possessed her mother's almost
saintly patience, and she bore the Marchesa's treatment with a
cheerful submission which exasperated the elder woman much more than
any show of temper could have done.

Just now, seeing that trouble of some sort was imminent, she made a
diversion by coming down from the low movable platform, on which her
chair had been placed for the sitting, and she spoke to the artist
while she studied her own portrait. Durand was a very thin man, and so
tall that Angela had to look very high to see his face as she stood
beside him.

'I could never be as good as the picture looks,' she said in English,
with a little laugh, 'nor so dreadfully in earnest! But it is very
nice of you to think that I might!'

'You will never be anything but good,' answered Filmore Durand, 'and
it's not necessarily dreadful to be in earnest about it.'

'You are a moralist. I see.' observed the Marchesa, putting on a sweet
smile as she rose and came forward, followed by Giovanni.

'I don't know,' replied the painter. 'What is a moralist?'

'A person who is in earnest about other people's morals,' suggested
Angela gaily.

'Really!' cried the Marchesa, with a most emphatic English
pronunciation of the word. 'One would think that you had been brought
up in a Freemasons' lodge!'

In view of the fact that Angela's father was one of the very last
survivors of the 'intransigent' clericals, this was quite the most
cutting speech the Marchesa could think of. But Filmore Durand failed
to see the point.

'What has Freemasonry to do with morality?' he inquired with bland
surprise.

'Nothing at all,' answered the Marchesa smartly, 'for it is the
religion of the devil.'

'Dear me!' The artist smiled. 'What strong prejudices you have in
Rome!'

'Are you a Freemason?' the noble lady asked, with evident nervousness;
and she glanced from his face to Angela, and then at the door.

'Well--no--I'm not,' the painter admitted with a slight drawl, and
evidently amused. 'But then I'm not a moralist either, though I
suppose I might be both and yet go on painting about the same.'

'I think not,' said the Marchesa so stiffly that Giovanni almost
laughed aloud. 'We must be going,' she added, suddenly relaxing to
graciousness again. 'It has been such a privilege to see you day after
day, my dear Mr. Durand, and to watch you working in your own
surroundings. My brother-in-law will come to-morrow. I have no doubt
that he will be much pleased with the portrait.'

Filmore Durand smiled indifferently but with politeness as he bowed
over the Marchesa's hand. He did not care a straw whether Angela's
father liked the picture or not, being in love with it himself, and
much more anxious to keep it than to be paid for it.

'When shall I see you again?' Giovanni had asked of Angela, almost in
a whisper, while the Marchesa was speaking.

Instead of answering she shook her head, for she could not decide at
once, but as her glance met his a delicate radiance tinged her cheeks
for a moment, as if the rosy light of a clear dawn were reflected in
her face. The young soldier's eyes flashed as he watched her; he drew
his breath audibly, and then bit his upper lip as if to check the
sound and the sensation that had caused it. Angela heard and saw, for
she understood what moved him, so far as almost childlike simplicity
can have intuition of what most touches a strong man. She was less
like the portrait now than a moment earlier; her lips, just parting in
a little half-longing, half-troubled smile, were like dark rose leaves
damp with dew, her eyelids drooped at the corners for an instant, and
the translucent little nostrils quivered at the mysterious thrill that
stirred her maiden being.

The two young people had not known each other quite a year, for she
had never seen Severi till she had left the convent to go out into
society and to take her place at her widowed father's table as his
only child; but at their first meeting Giovanni had felt that of all
women he had known, none but she had ever called his nature to hers
with the longing cry of the natural mate. At first she was quite
unconscious of her power, and for a long time he looked in vain for
the slightest outward sign that she was moved when she saw him making
his way to her in a crowded drawing-room, or coming upon her suddenly
out of doors when she was walking in the villa with her old governess,
the excellent Madame Bernard, or riding in the Campagna with her
father. Giovanni's duties were light, and he had plenty of time to
spare, and his pertinacity in finding her would have been compromising
if he had been less ingeniously tactful. It was by no means easy to
meet her in society either, for, in spite of recent social
developments, Prince Chiaromonte still clung to the antiquated
political mythology of Blacks and Whites, and strictly avoided the
families he persisted in calling 'Liberals,' on the ground that his
father had called them so in 1870, when he was a small boy. It was not
until he had bored himself to extinction in the conscientious effort
to take the girl out, that he appealed to his sister-in-law to help
him, though he knew that neither she nor his brother was truly
clerical at heart. Even then, if it had been clear to him that
Giovanni Severi had made up his mind to marry Angela if he married at
all, the Prince would have forced himself to bear agonies of boredom
night after night, rather than entrust his daughter to the Marchesa;
but such an idea had never entered his head, and he would have scouted
the suggestion that Angela would ever dare to encourage a young man of
whom he had not formally approved; and while she was meeting Giovanni
almost daily, and dancing with him almost every evening, her father
was slowly negotiating an appropriate marriage for her with the eldest
son of certain friends who were almost as clerical and intransigent as
himself. The young man was a limp degenerate, with a pale face, a weak
mouth, and an inherited form of debility which made him fall asleep
wherever he was, if nothing especial happened to keep his eyes open;
he not only always slept from ten at night till nine the next morning
with the regularity of an idiot, but he went to sleep wherever he sat
down, in church, at dinner, and even when he was driving. Neither his
own parents nor Prince Chiaromonte looked upon this as a serious
drawback in the matter of marriage. A man who slept all day and all
night was a man out of mischief, not likely to grumble nor to make
love to his neighbour's wife; he would therefore be a model husband.
When he fell asleep in the drawing-room in summer, his consort would
sit beside him and brush away the flies; in winter she would be
careful to cover him up lest he should catch cold; at mass she could
prick him with a hat-pin to keep him awake; as for the rest, she would
bear one of the oldest names in Europe, her husband would be a
strictly religious and moral person, and she would be very rich. What
more could any woman ask? Evidently nothing, and Prince Chiaromonte
therefore continued to negotiate the marriage in the old-fashioned
manner, without the least intention of speaking about it to Angela
till everything was altogether settled between the family lawyers, and
the wedding could take place in six weeks. It was not the business of
young people to fathom the intentions of their all-wise parents, and
meanwhile Angela was free to go to parties with her aunt, and her
intended husband was at liberty to sleep as much as he liked. The
negotiations would probably occupy another two or three months, for
the family lawyers had disagreed as to the number of times that Angela
should be allowed to take the carriage out every day, and this had to
be stipulated in the marriage contract, besides the number of dishes
there were to be at luncheon and dinner and the question whether, if
Angela took coffee after her meals, it should be charged to her
husband, who took none, or against the income arising from her dowry.
The family lawyers were both very old men and understood these
difficult matters thoroughly, but neither would have felt that he was
doing his duty to his client if he had not quarrelled with the other
over each point. From week to week each reported progress to his
employer, and on the whole the two fathers felt that matters were
going on well, without any undue delay.

But the Fates frowned grimly on the marriage and on all things
connected with it, for on the very morning during which Filmore Durand
finished Angela's portrait, and before she had left his studio in the
Palazzo Borghese, something happened which not only put a stop to the
leisurely labours of the two lawyers, but which profoundly changed
Angela's existence, and was the cause of her having a story quite
different from that of a good many young girls who are in love with
one man but are urged by their parents to marry another. The interest
of this tale, if it has any, lies in no such simple conflict of forces
as that, and it is enough to know that while her father had been busy
over her marriage, Angela Chiaromonte had fallen in love with Giovanni
Severi, and had, indeed, as much as promised to marry him; and that a
good many people, including the Marchesa del Prato, already suspected
this, though they had not communicated their suspicions to the girl's
father, partly because he was not liked, and partly because he hardly
ever showed himself in the world. The situation is thus clearly
explained, so far as it was known to the persons concerned at the
moment when the Great Unforeseen flashed from its hiding-place and
hurled itself into their midst.

As Filmore Durand went with the Marchesa towards the entrance hall,
followed by the young people, he called his man to open the outer
door, but almost at the same moment he heard his voice at the
telephone; the servant was a Swiss who spoke German, English, and
Italian, and had followed the artist for many years. He was evidently
answering an inquiry about the Marchesa just as he heard her step.

'The lady is here,' he said. 'She is coming to the telephone herself.'

He looked round as the four approached, for the instrument was placed
on the right side of the large door that opened upon the landing.

'Some one for your ladyship,' he said in English, holding out the
receiver to the Marchesa.

She took it and put it to her ear, repeating the usual Italian
formula.

'Ready--with whom am I speaking? Yes. I am the Marchesa del Prato, she
herself. What is it?'

There was a pause while she listened, and then Angela saw her face
change suddenly.

'Dead?' she shrieked into the telephone. 'Half-an-hour ago?'

She still held the receiver to her ear, but she was stretching out her
left hand as if she needed support. Durand took her by the arm and
elbow, prepared to hold her up if she showed signs of fainting. Angela
was already on her other side.

'Who is dead?' the girl asked quietly enough, but with evident
anxiety.

'Your father,' answered the Marchesa, with such sudden and brutal
directness that Giovanni started forward, and Durand stared in
surprise, for he knew enough Italian to understand as much as that.

Angela made two steps backwards, slowly and mechanically, like a blind
man who has unexpectedly run against a wall; like the blind, too, she
held out her hands before her, as if to assure herself that she was
getting out of reach of the obstacle. Her face had turned white and
her eyes were half closed.

The Marchesa no longer seemed to be in need of support and watched
her.

'My poor child!' she cried, in a tone of conventional sympathy. 'I
should have broken the news to you gradually----'

'You should indeed!' answered Giovanni with stern emphasis.

He was already leading Angela to one of the nearest of the high-backed
chairs that stood ranged against the dark-green wall of the hall. She
sat down, steadying herself by his arm.

'Run over by a motor car almost at his own door,' said the Marchesa,
in a lower tone and in English, as she turned slightly towards Durand.
'Killed on the spot! It is too awful! My poor brother-in-law!'

'Get some brandy and some cold water,' said the artist to his man,
watching the girl's pale face and twitching hands.

'Yes,' said Giovanni, who was bending over her anxiously. 'Bring
something quickly! She is going to faint.'

But Angela was not fainting, nor even half-unconscious. She had felt
as if something hard had struck her between the eyes, without quite
stunning her. She attempted to get up, but realised her weakness and
waited a moment before trying again. Then she rose to her feet with an
effort and stood straight and rigid before her aunt, her eyes quite
open now.

'Come!' she said, almost imperiously, and in a voice unlike her own.

In a moment they were gone, and the artist was standing before the
portrait he had finished, looking into its eyes as if it were alive.
He had been deeply shocked by what had just happened, and was
sincerely sorry for Angela, though he had not the least idea whether
she had loved her father or not, but his face was calm and thoughtful
again, now that she was gone, and expressed a quiet satisfaction which
had not been there before. For it seemed to him that the picture was a
precious reality, and that the young girl who had sat for it was only
nature's copy, and not perfect at that; and perhaps the reality would
not be taken from him, now, since Prince Chiaromonte had come to an
untimely end; and the prospect of keeping the canvas was exceedingly
pleasing to Filmore Durand. He had never painted anything that had
disappointed him less, or that he was less willing to part with, and
during the last day or two he had even thought of making a replica of
it for the Prince in order to keep the original, for no copy, though
it were made by himself most conscientiously, could ever be quite so
good. But now that the Prince was dead, it was possible that the
heirs, if there were any besides Angela, would be glad to be excused
from paying a large sum for a picture they did not want. He was sure
from the young girl's manner that she would no more care to possess a
portrait of herself than a coloured postcard of the Colosseum or a
plaster-cast of one of Canova's dancing-girls. This was not flattering
to the artist, it was true, but in the present case he would rather
keep his own painting than have it appreciated ever so highly by any
one else.

Late in the afternoon he stopped before the closed gateway of the
Palazzo Chiaromonte and pushed the little postern that stood ajar. The
big porter was within, standing dejectedly before the door of his
lodge, and already dressed in the deep mourning which is kept in
readiness in all the great Roman houses. The painter asked in broken
Italian if the bad news was true, and the man nodded gravely, pointing
to the gates. They would not be shut unless the master were dead.
Durand asked after Donna Angela, but the porter was not communicative.
She had come in with her aunt and both were upstairs; he suspected the
painter of being a foreign newspaper correspondent and would say
nothing more.

The American thanked him and went away; after all, he had come to make
sure that the Prince was really dead, and he was conscious that his
wish to keep the portrait was the only motive of his inquiry.

He strolled away through the crowded streets, blowing such clouds of
cigarette smoke about him that people looked at him in surprise. It
was almost sunset, in February, and it was just before Lent. Rome is
at her gayest then, though the old Carnival is as dead and gone as Pio
Nono, Garibaldi, the French military occupation, the hatred of the
Jesuits, and all that made the revival of Italy in the nineteenth
century the most thrilling romance that ever roused Italian passion
and stirred the world's sympathy. Durand was not old enough to
remember those times, and he had never been in Rome at all till he was
nearly thirty years of age and on the first wave of his high success;
but he had read about the past, and to his unspoiled sight and vivid
imagination Rome was still romantic and the greatest city in the
world, ancient or modern; and somehow when he thought of his picture
and of Angela's face, and remembered the scene at the telephone, he
felt that he was himself just within the sphere of some mysterious and
tragic action which he could not yet understand, but which might
possibly affect his own life.

'This is a serio-comic world,' he said to himself as he slowly made
his way down the Corso, watching the faces of the people he passed,
because he never passed a face in the street without glancing at it,
stopping now and then to look into a shop window where there was
nothing to see that he had not seen a thousand times elsewhere,
smoking cigarettes without number, thinking of Angela's portrait, and
mechanically repeating his little epigram over and over again, to a
sort of tune in his head, with variations and transpositions that
meant nothing at all.

'This is a serio-comic world. This is a comico-serious world. This
world is a serious comico-serial. This is a worldly-serious comedy.'
And so forth, and so on; and a number of more or less good-looking
women of the serio-comic world, whose portraits he had painted, and
several more or less distinguished men who had sat to him, passed the
man of genius and greeted him as if they were rather pleased to show
that they knew him; but they would have been shocked if they could
have heard the silly words the great painter was mechanically
repeating to himself as he idled along the pavement, musing on the
picture he hoped to keep, and already regarded as his masterpiece and
chief treasure.




CHAPTER II


The excellent Madame Bernard had been Angela's governess before the
child had been sent to the convent, on the Trinità dei Monti, and
whenever she was at home for the holidays, and also during the brief
interval between her leaving school and going into society; and after
that, during the winter which preceded Prince Chiaromonte's death, she
had accompanied the motherless girl to concerts and had walked with
her almost daily in the mornings. She was one of those thoroughly
trustworthy, sound-minded, well-educated Frenchwomen of the middle
class of whom many are to be found in the provinces, though the type
is rare in Paris; nearly fifty years of age, she had lived twenty
years in Rome, always occupying the same little apartment in a
respectable street of Trastevere, where she had a spare room which she
was glad to let to any French or English lady of small means who came
to Rome for a few months in the winter and spring.

Angela sent her maid for Madame Bernard on the day of the catastrophe,
since her aunt neither offered to take her in at once nor seemed
inclined to suggest any arrangement for the future. The Marchesa did,
indeed, take charge of everything in the Palazzo Chiaromonte within an
hour of her brother-in-law's death; she locked the drawers of his
private desk herself, sent for the notary and had the customary seals
placed on the doors of the inner apartments 'in the name of the
heirs'; she spoke with the undertaker and made every arrangement for
the customary lying in state of the body during the following night
and day; saw to the erection of the temporary altar at which masses
for the dead would be celebrated almost without interruption from
midnight to noon by sixteen priests in succession; gave full
instructions to the effect that the men-servants should take their
turn of duty in regular watches, day and night, until the funeral; and
finally left the palace, after showing herself to be an exceedingly
practical woman.

When she went away, she was holding her handkerchief to her eyes with
both hands and she forgot her parasol; but she remembered it as she was
just going out by the postern, her carriage being outside because the
gates were shut, and she sent her footman back for it and for the little
morocco bag in which she carried her handkerchief and card-case. It was
a small matter, but the porter, the footman, and the butler upstairs all
remembered it afterwards, and the footman himself, while coming down,
took the trouble to look into the little wallet, and saw that the
card-case was there, but nothing else; for the Marchesa sometimes
carried certain little cigarettes in it, which the man had found
particularly good. But to-day there was not even one.

Madame Bernard arrived in tears, for she was a warm-hearted woman, and
was overcome with sympathy for the lonely girl. She found Angela
sitting by a small fire in her own little morning-room on the upper
floor. A tray with something to eat had been set beside her, she knew
not by whom, but she had not tasted anything. Her eyes were dry, but
her hands were burning and when she was conscious of feeling anything
she knew that her head ached. She had forgotten that she had sent for
the governess, and looked at her with a vaguely wondering expression
as if she took the kindly Frenchwoman in black for a new shadow in her
dream.

But presently mechanical consciousness returned, though without much
definite sensation, and she let Madame Bernard have her way in
everything, not making the slightest resistance or offering the
smallest suggestion; she even submitted to being fed like a little
child, with small mouthfuls of things that had no taste whatever for
her.

By and by there was a dressmaker in the room, with an assistant, and
servants brought a number of big bandboxes with lids covered with
black oilcloth; and Angela's maid was there, too, and they tried one
thing after another on her, ready-made garments for the first hours of
mourning. Then they were gone, and she was dressed in black, and the
room was filled with the unmistakable odour of black crape, which is
not like anything else in the world.

Again time passed, and she was kneeling at a faldstool in the great
hall downstairs; but a dark screen had been placed so that she could
not be seen by any one who came in to kneel at the rail that divided
the upper part of the hall from the lower; and she saw nothing
herself--nothing but a Knight of Malta, in his black cloak with the
great white Maltese cross on his shoulder, lying asleep on his back;
and on each side of him three enormous wax torches were burning in
silver candlesticks taller than a tall man.

Quite at the end of the hall, five paces from the Knight's motionless
head, three priests in black and silver vestments were kneeling before
a black altar, reciting the Penitential Psalms in a quiet, monotonous
voice, verse and verse, the one in the middle leading; and Angela
automatically joined the two assistants in responding, but so low that
they did not hear her.

The Knight bore a resemblance to her father, that was all. Perhaps it
was only a waxen image she saw, or a wraith in that long dream of
hers, of which she could not quite remember the beginning. She knew
that she was nothing to the image, and that it was nothing to her.
While her lips repeated the grand dirge of the King-poet in Saint
Jerome's noble old Latin words, her thoughts followed broken threads,
each cut short by a question that lacks an answer, by the riddle man
has asked of the sky and the sea and the earth since the beginning:
What does it mean?

What could it mean? The senseless facts were there, plain enough.
That morning she had seen her father, she had kissed his hand in the
old-fashioned way, and he had kissed her forehead, and they had
exchanged a few words, as usual. She remembered that for the thousandth
time she had wished that his voice would soften a little and that he
would put his arms round her and draw her closer to him. But he had been
just as always, for he was bound and stiffened in the unwieldy armour of
his conventional righteousness. Angela had read of the Puritans in
history, and an Englishman might smile at the thought that she could not
fancy the sternest of them as more thoroughly puritanical than her
father, who had been brought up by priests from his childhood. But such
as he was, he had been her father that morning. The motionless figure of
the Knight of Malta on the black velvet pall was not he, nor a likeness
of him, nor anything human at all. It was the outward visible presence
of death, it was a dumb thing that knew the answer to the riddle but
could not tell it; in a way, it was the riddle itself.

While her half-stunned intelligence stumbled among chasms of thought
that have swallowed up transcendent genius, her lips unconsciously
said the Penitential Psalms after the priests at the altar. At the
convent she had been a little vain of knowing them by heart better
than the nuns themselves, for she had a good memory, and she had often
been rebuked for taking pride in her gift. It was not her fault if the
noble poetry meant nothing to her at the most solemn hour of her life,
though its deep human note had appealed profoundly to her the last
time she had repeated the words. Nothing meant anything now, in the
face of the unanswered riddle; nothing but the answer could have any
meaning.

The great apostle of modern thought asked three questions: What can I
know? As a reasoning being what is it my duty to do in life? What may
I dare to hope hereafter? Angela had never even heard of Kant; she
only asked what it all meant; and the Knight of Malta was silent under
the steady yellow light of the six wax torches. Perhaps the white
cross on his cloak was the answer, but the emblem was too far from
words for mere humanity to understand it. She wished they would take
him away, for he was not her father, and she would be far better able
to pray alone in her own room than in the stately presence of that one
master whom all living things fear, man and bird and beast, and
whatsoever has life in the sea.

To pray, yes; but for what? Rebellious against outward things, the
girl's prime intuition told her that her father was quite separated
from his mortal symbol now, having suddenly left that which could
change to become a part of the unknown truth, which must be
unchangeable if it is true; invisible, without form or dimension,
'being' not 'living,' 'conscious' not 'aware,' 'knowing' not 'seeing,'
'eternal' not 'immortal.' That might be the answer, but it meant too
much for a girl to grasp, and explained too little to be comforting.
The threads of thought broke short off again, and Angela's lips went
on making words, while she gazed unwinking on the Knight's
expressionless face.

Suddenly her mind awoke again in a sort of horror of darkness, and her
lips ceased from moving for a while, for she was terrified.

Was there anything beyond? Was it really God who had taken her father
from her in an instant, or was it a blind force that had killed him,
striking in the dark? If that was the answer, what was there left?

The sensitive girl shivered. Perhaps no bodily danger could have sent
that chill through her. It began in her head and crept quickly to her
hands and then to her feet, for it was not a fear of death that came
upon her, nor of anything outward. To lose life was nothing, if there
was heaven beyond; pain, torture, martyrdom would be nothing if God
the good was standing on the other side. All life was but one long
opportunity for sinning, and to lose it while in grace was to be safe
for ever; so much she had been taught and until now she had believed
it. But what loss could be compared with losing God? There were
unbelievers in the world, of course, but she could not understand how
they could still live on, and laugh, and seek pleasure and feel it
keenly. What had they to fill the void of their tremendous loss?
Surely, not to believe was not to hope, to be for ever without hope
was the punishment of the damned, and to live hopeless in the world
was to suffer the pains of hell on earth.

She felt them now. 'The pains of hell gat hold upon me,' she moaned,
heedless of the priest's recitation. Darkness rose like a flood-tide
all round her and she shut her eyes to keep it out, for her will
fought for hope, as her body would have struggled against drowning. It
was no longer a mere question that assailed her, but imminent
destruction itself.

It passed away this first time and she grew calm again. Not to believe
was sin, and against all sin, prayer and steadfast will must be
availing. The will, she had; she could remember many prayers, too, and
say them earnestly, and was thankful for her memory which held orisons
in readiness for every circumstance of daily duty or spiritual life.
From her childhood she had found a gentle delight in the Church's
liturgies and hymns, and now, as she prayed with the forms of language
she had always loved, habit brought back belief to lighten her
darkness. She still felt the bitter cold of the outer night that was
very near her; but she kept it off now, and warmed her poor little
soul in the fervour of her praying till she felt that she was coming
again to life and hope.

She opened her eyes at last and saw that nothing was changed. The
Knight of Malta slept on, as he was to sleep for ever; the priests
knelt motionless before the black altar; their quiet, monotonous
voices went on with the Penitential Psalms as priests had said them
for at least fifteen centuries. Angela listened till she caught the
words and then began to respond again, and once more her thoughts
followed broken threads.

Surely, by all she had been taught, her father was in heaven already.
It was not possible that any human being should obey every written and
unwritten ordinance of his religion more strictly than he had done
ever since she could remember him. He had been severe, almost to
cruelty, but he had been quite as unyieldingly austere in dealing with
himself. He had fasted rigidly, not only when fasts were ordered, but
of his free will when others only abstained, he had never begun a day
without hearing mass nor a week without confession and communion, he
had retired into spiritual retreat in Lent, he had prayed early and
late; in his dealings with men, he had not done to others what he
would not have had them do to him, he had not said of his neighbour
what he would not have said of himself, he had wronged no man; he had
given much to charity and more to the 'imprisoned' head of the Church.
He had so lived that no confessor could justly find fault with him,
and he had never failed to pray for those in whom he discerned any
shortcoming.

Who would condemn such a just person? Not God, surely. Therefore when
his life had ended so suddenly that morning, his soul had been taken
directly to heaven.

Such righteousness as his had venial sins to expiate, what hope was
there left for men of ordinary earthly passions and failings?

It was a consolation to think of that, Angela told herself, now that
the tide of darkness had ebbed back to the depth of terror whence it
had risen; and when at last the long dream slowly dissolved before
returning reality the lonely girl's eyes overflowed with natural tears
at the thought that her father's motionless lips would never move
again, even to reprove her, and that she was looking for the last time
on all that earth still held of him who had given her life.




CHAPTER III


Three days later Angela sat alone in her morning-room, reading a letter
from Giovanni Severi. All was over now--the lying in state, the funeral
at the small parish church, the interment in the cemetery of San
Lorenzo, where the late Prince had built a temporary tomb for himself
and his family, under protest, because modern municipal regulations
would not allow even such a personage as he to be buried within the
walls, in his own family vault, at Santa Maria del Popolo. But he had
been confident that even if he did not live to see the return of the
Pope's temporal power, his remains would soon be solemnly transferred to
the city, to rest with those of his fathers; and he had looked forward
to his resurrection from a sepulchre better suited to his earthly rank
and spiritual worth than a brick vault in a public cemetery, within a
hundred yards of the thrice-anathematised crematorium, and of the
unhallowed burial-ground set aside for Freemasons, anarchists,
Protestants, and Jews. But no man can be blamed fairly for wishing to
lie beside his forefathers, and if Prince Chiaromonte had failed to see
that the destiny of Italy had out-measured the worldly supremacy of the
Vatican in the modern parallelogram of forces, that had certainly been a
fault of judgment rather than of intention. He had never wavered in his
fidelity to his ideal, nor had he ever voluntarily submitted to any law
imposed by the 'usurper.'

'That excellent Chiaromonte is so extremely clerical,' Pope Leo the
Thirteenth had once observed to his secretary with his quiet smile.

But Angela missed her father constantly, not understanding that he had
systematically forced her to look to him as the judge and master of
her existence, and she wondered a little why she almost longed for his
grave nod, and his stern frown of disapproval, and even for the daily
and hourly reproof under which she had so often chafed. Madame Bernard
had been installed in the palace since the day of the fatal accident,
and she was kindness personified, full of consideration and
forethought; yet the girl was very lonely and miserable from morning
till night, and when she slept she dreamed of the dead Knight of
Malta's face, of the yellow light of the wax torches, and the voices
of the priests.

On the fourth day a letter came from Giovanni, the first she had ever
received from him. She did not even know his handwriting, and she
looked at the signature before reading the note to see who had written
to her so soon. When she understood that it was he, a flood of
sunshine broke upon her gloom. The bright morning sun had indeed been
shining through the window for an hour, but she had not known it till
then.

It was not a love-letter. He used those grammatically illogical but
superfinely courteous forms which make high Italian a mystery to
strangers who pick up a few hundred words for daily use and dream that
they understand the language. He used the first person for himself,
but spoke of her in the third singular; he began with: 'Most gentle
Donna Angela,' and he signed his full name at the end of a formal
phrase setting forth his profoundly respectful homage. She would have
been much surprised and perhaps offended if he had expressed himself
in any more familiar way. Brought up as she had been under the most
old-fashioned code in Europe when at home, and under the frigid rule
of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart when she was at school, any
familiarity of language seemed to her an outrage on good manners, and
might even be counted a sin if she condescended to it in speaking with
a man who was not yet her husband. She had been made to address her
father in the third person feminine singular ever since she had
learned to talk, precisely as Giovanni wrote to her; and if she prayed
to the Deity with the less formal second person plural, this was
doubtless because the Italian prayers had been framed in less refined
and courteous times than her own.

In spite of his stiff grammar, however, Severi managed to write things
that brought the colour to her face and the light to her eyes. He
said, for instance, that he was coming to see her that very afternoon;
that in order not to attract attention at the gate of the palace he
would wear civilian's dress, and that he hoped she would not only
receive him, but would send Madame Bernard out of the room for a
little while, so that he might speak to her alone.

The proposal was so delightful and yet so disturbing that Angela
thought it must be wicked and tried to examine her conscience at once;
but it shut up like an oyster taken out of the water and pretended to
be perfectly insensible, turn it and probe it how she would.

So she gave it up; and she did so the more readily because it would be
quite impossible to see Giovanni that afternoon, enchanting as the
prospect would have been. Her aunt the Marchesa had sent word that she
was coming at four o'clock with the lawyer to explain Angela's
position to her, and it was impossible to say how long the two might
stay. Meanwhile she must send word to Giovanni not to come, for it
would not suffice that he should be refused admittance at the gate,
since he might chance to present himself just when the Marchesa drove
up, which would produce a very bad impression. Angela was ashamed to
send her maid with a note to a young officer, and she would not trust
one of the men-servants; she turned for advice to Madame Bernard, who
was her only confidante.

'What am I to do?' she asked when she had explained everything. 'He is
generally at the War Office at this time and he may not even go home
before he comes here. I see no way but to send a note.'

'He would certainly go home to change his clothes,' answered the
practical Frenchwoman; 'but it is not necessary for you to write. I
will telephone to the War Office, and if the Count is there I will
explain everything.'

Angela looked at her doubtfully.

'But then the servant who telephones will know,' she objected.

'The servant? Why? I do not understand. I shall speak myself. No one
will be there to hear.'

'Yourself? My father never could, and I never was shown how to do it.
Are you sure you understand the thing? It is very complicated, I
believe.'

Madame Bernard was not surprised, for she knew the ways of the Palazzo
Chiaromonte; but she smiled and assured the young girl that a
telephone was not really such a dangerous instrument as she had been
led to believe.

'I once tried to make a few stitches with a sewing-machine,' Angela
said, apparently in explanation.

'A telephone is different,' Madame Bernard answered gravely. 'Shall I
ask the Count to come to-morrow at four o'clock, instead of to-day?'

Angela hesitated, and then blushed faintly.

'Do you think----' she began, but she stopped and hesitated. 'He would
be angry, I am sure----' She seemed to be suddenly distressed.

'Your father?' asked the Frenchwoman, guessing what she meant. 'My
dear Princess----'

'Oh, please don't call me that!' cried Angela. 'You never do----'

'You see, you are a great personage now, my dear child,' Madame
Bernard answered, 'and I am no longer your governess----'

'But you are my friend, dear, dear Madame Bernard! Indeed, I think you
are my only friend now!'

And thereupon Angela threw her arms round the little woman's neck and
kissed her very affectionately. Madame Bernard's fresh face beamed
with pleasure.

'Thank you, my dear,' she answered. 'And as for your father, my child,
he is without doubt in heaven; and that means that he now judges you
by your intentions and no longer by appearances only.'

This sage little speech reassured Angela, though she soon afterwards
asked herself whether it was quite loyal to allow any one to say that
the Prince had ever judged her 'by appearances only.' But while she was
making this reflection Madame Bernard was already telephoning to
Giovanni, who was at the War Office, as Angela supposed, and he answered
with alacrity that he would come to the palace on the following
afternoon and ask to see Madame Bernard on a matter of business. It was
really her business to teach French, as all the servants knew, and if
they thought that the young officer came to ask about some lessons for
himself or a friend, so much the better. Madame Bernard was naturally
practical, and Giovanni was by nature quick-witted; so the matter was
settled in a few words, to the satisfaction of both; and when Angela was
merely told that he was coming she was much more pleased than she was
willing to show, and she said no more about her father's hypothetical
disapproval.

That afternoon she received the Marchesa del Prato and the lawyer
downstairs in the second of the outer drawing-rooms. It was cold there,
but she had not quite dared to order a fire to be made, because the
Prince had never allowed fires except in the inner rooms, which were
still closed under the notarial seals. The place had a certain grandeur
of its own, for the massive decorations, the heavy furniture, and the
rich brocade curtains all dated from the best period of Louis the
Fourteenth's reign. On the walls there were four or five first-rate
pictures, the largest of which was a magnificent portrait of a former
Chiaromonte by Vandyke; there was a Holy Family by Guercino, another by
Bonifacio, a Magdalen with the box of ointment, by Andrea del Sarto, and
one or two smaller paintings of no inconsiderable value.

But at that hour the light was bad, for the afternoon had turned cold
and rainy after a beautiful morning, and at four o'clock it was still
too early to have lamps. A few moments after the hour, a servant
opened the door, held the curtains aside, and announced the visitor.

'Her Excellency, the Princess Chiaromonte!'

Angela started slightly at the name. The last Princess Chiaromonte who
had passed through that doorway had been her mother, and in her
solitude the girl had not even been told that her uncle had already
assumed the title of the head of the house. The lacquey paid no
attention whatever to the quiet man in black who followed the
Princess, holding his hat against his chest with both hands and
advancing with a bowing motion at every step, as if he were saluting
the family chairs as he passed them. Angela vaguely remembered his
solemnly obsequious face.

Her aunt seemed to have grown taller and larger, as she bent to
imprint a formal kiss on the girl's cheek, and then sat down in one of
the huge old easy-chairs, while the lawyer seated himself at a
respectful distance on an ottoman stool with his high hat on his
knees. Angela took her place at one end of the stiff sofa that stood
directly under the Vandyke portrait, and she waited for her aunt to
speak.

The Princess had evidently prepared herself, for she spoke clearly and
did not pause for some time.

'Your uncle has a slight attack of influenza,' she said; 'otherwise he
would have come with me, and I should have been more than glad if he
himself could have explained the whole situation to you instead of
leaving that painful duty to me. You are well aware, my dear Angela,
that your father always clung to the most prejudiced traditions of the
intransigent clericals, and could never be induced to conform to any
of the new regulations introduced by the Italian Government. In point
of fact, I do not think he quite realised that the old order had
passed away when he was a mere boy, and that the new was to be
permanent, if not everlasting. If he had, he would have acted very
differently, I am sure, and my present duty would have been much
easier than it is. Are you quite certain that you understand that?'

Angela was quite certain that she did, and nodded quietly, though she
could not see how her father's political convictions could affect her
own present situation.

'I have no doubt,' continued the Princess, 'that he brought you up to
consider yourself the heiress of all his fortune, though not of the
title, which naturally goes to the eldest male heir. Am I right?'

'He never told me anything about my inheritance,' Angela replied.

'So much the better. It will be easier for me to explain your rather
unusual position. In the first place, I must make it clear to you that
your father and mother declined to go before the mayor at the Capitol
when they were married, in spite of the regulations which had then
been in force a number of years. They were devout Catholics and the
blessing of the Church was enough for them. According to your father,
to go through any form of civil ceremony, before or after the wedding,
was equivalent to doubting the validity of the sacrament of marriage.'

'Naturally,' Angela assented, as her aunt paused and looked at her.

'Very naturally.' The Princess's eyes began to glitter oddly, and the
lawyer turned his hat uneasily on his knees. 'Very naturally, indeed!
Unfortunately for you, however, your father was not merely overlooking
a municipal regulation, as he supposed; he was deliberately bidding
defiance to the laws of Italy.'

'What do you mean?' asked Angela rather nervously.

'It is very painful to explain,' answered the elder woman with
gleaming eyes and a disagreeable smile. 'The simple truth is that as
your father and mother were not civilly married--civilly, you
understand--they were not legally married at all, and the law will
never admit that they were!'

Angela's hand tightened on the arm of the old sofa.

'Not married?' she cried. 'My father and mother not married? It is
impossible, it is monstrous----'

'Not "legally" married, I said,' replied the Princess. 'To be legally
married, it is absolutely necessary to go before the mayor at the
Capitol and have the civil ceremony properly performed. Am I right?'
she asked, turning suddenly to the lawyer. 'It is absolutely
necessary, is it not?'

'Absolutely, Excellency,' the legal adviser answered. 'Otherwise the
children of the marriage are not legitimate.'

'What does that mean?' asked Angela in a frightened tone.

'It means,' explained the Princess, 'that in the eyes of the law you
do not exist----'

Angela tried to laugh.

'But I do exist! Here I am, Angela Chiaromonte, to say that I am
alive!'

'Angela, but not Chiaromonte,' corrected the Princess, hardly able to
hide her satisfaction. 'I am sorry to say that your dear father would
not even submit to the regulation which requires all parents alike to
declare the birth of children, and he paid a heavy fine for his
refusal. The consequence is that when your birth was entered at the
Municipality, you were put down as a foundling child whose parents
refused to declare themselves.'

'A foundling! I, a foundling!' Angela half rose in amazed indignation,
but almost instantly sat down again, with an incredulous smile.
'Either you are quite mad,' she said, 'or you are trying to frighten
me for some reason I do not understand.'

The Princess raised her sandy eyebrows and looked at the lawyer,
evidently meaning him to speak for her.

'That is your position, Signorina,' he said calmly. 'You have,
unhappily, no legal status, no legal name, and no claim whatever on the
estate of His Excellency Prince Chiaromonte, who was not married to your
mother in the eyes of the law, and refused even to acknowledge you as
his child by registering your birth at the mayoralty. Every inquiry has
been made on your behalf, and I have here the certified copy of the
register as it stands, declaring you to be a foundling. It was still in
your father's power to make a will in your favour, Signorina, and as the
laws of entail no longer exist, His Excellency may have left you his
whole estate, real and personal, though his titles and dignities will in
any case pass to his brother. I must warn you, however, that such a will
might not prove valid in law, since His Excellency did not even legally
acknowledge you as his child. So far, no trace of a will has been found
with his late Excellency's notary, nor with his lawyer, nor deposited
with his securities at his banker's. It is barely possible that some
paper may exist in the rooms which are still closed, but I think it my
duty to tell you that I do not expect to find anything of the kind when
we break the seals to-morrow, in the presence of the heirs and
witnesses.'

He ceased speaking and looked at the Princess as if asking whether he
should say more, for Angela had bent her head and quietly covered her
eyes with one hand, and in this attitude she sat quite motionless in
her place. The lawyer thought she was going to burst into tears, for
he did not know her.

'That will do, Calvi,' said the Princess calmly. 'You have made it all
very clear, and you may retire for the present. The young lady is
naturally overcome by the bad news, and would rather be alone with me
for a little while, I daresay.'

Signor Calvi rose, made a profound obeisance to the Princess, scarcely
bent his head to Angela, and retired, apparently bowing to the family
chairs as he passed each. The young girl dropped her hand and looked
after him with a sort of dull curiosity; she was the last person in
the world to take offence or to suppose that any one meant to be rude
to her, but it was impossible not to notice the lawyer's behaviour. In
his opinion she was suddenly nobody, and deserved no more notice than
a shop-girl. She understood enough of human nature to be sure that he
counted on the Princess's approval.

The elder woman was watching her with a satisfaction she hardly tried
to conceal. Her small hands were encased in marvellously fitting black
gloves, though black gloves rarely fit so well as others, and were
crossed on her knee over the little leather bag she always carried.
She was leaning back in the great arm-chair, and the mourning she wore
made her faultless complexion look even more brilliant than it was. No
one knew how near forty the Princess might be, for she appeared in the
_Almanach de Gotha_ without a birthday, and only the date of her
marriage was given; but the year was 1884, and people said it was
impossible that she should have been less than seventeen when her
parents had brought her to Rome and had tried to marry her to the
elder of the Chiaromonte family; as twenty years had passed since they
had succeeded in capturing the second son for their daughter, it was
clear that she could not be under thirty-seven. But her complexion was
extraordinary, and though she was a tall woman she had preserved the
figure and grace of a young girl.

Angela did not look directly at her enemy for some seconds after the
lawyer had left the room, closing the door behind him, not loudly but
quite audibly; but she was the first to speak when she was sure that
he was out of hearing.

'You hate me,' she said at last. 'What have I done to you?'

The Princess was not timid, nor very easily surprised, but the
question was so direct that she drew further back into her chair with
a quick movement, and her bright eye sparkled angrily as she raised
her sandy eyebrows.

'In this world,' she said, 'the truth is always surprising and
generally unpleasant. In consideration of what I have been obliged to
tell you about yourself, I can easily excuse your foolish speech.'

'You are very kind,' Angela answered quietly enough, but in a tone
that the Princess did not like. 'I was not asking your indulgence, but
an explanation, no matter how disagreeable the rest of the truth may
be. What have I done that you should hate me?'

The Princess laughed contemptuously.

'The expression is too strong,' she retorted. 'Hatred would imply an
interest in you and your possible doings, which I am far from feeling,
I assure you! Since it turns out that you are not even one of the
family----'

She laughed again and raised her eyebrows still higher, instead of
ending the speech.

'From what you say,' Angela answered with a good deal of dignity, 'I
can only understand that if you followed your own inclination you
would turn me out into the street.'

'The law will do so without my intervention,' answered the elder
woman. 'If my brother-in-law had even taken the trouble to acknowledge
you as his child, without legitimising you, you would have been
entitled to a small allowance, perhaps two or three hundred francs a
month, to keep you from starving. But as he has left no legal proof
that you are his daughter, and since he was not properly married to
your mother, you can claim nothing, not even a name! You are, in fact,
a destitute foundling, as Calvi just said!'

'It only remains for you to offer me your charity,' Angela said.

'That was not my intention,' returned the Princess with a savage
sneer. 'I have talked it over with my husband, and we do not see why
he should be expected to support his brother's--natural child!'

Angela rose from her seat without a word and went quietly towards the
door; but before she could reach it the Princess had followed her with
a rush and a dramatic sweep of her black cloth skirt and plentiful
crape, and had caught her by the wrist to bring her back to the middle
of the great room.

'I shall not keep you long!' cried the angry woman. 'You ask me what
you have done that I should hate you, and I answer, nothing, since you
are nobody! But I hated your mother, because she robbed me of the man
I wanted, of the only man I ever loved--your father--and when I married
his brother I swore that she should pay me for that, and she has! If
she can see you as you are to-day, all heaven cannot dry her tears,
for all heaven itself cannot give you a name, since the one on her own
tombstone is not hers by any right. I hope she sees you! Oh, I hope it
was not for nothing that she fasted till she fainted, and prayed till
she was hoarse, and knelt in damp churches till she died of it! I hope
she has starved and whined her way to paradise and is looking down at
this very moment and can see her daughter turned out of my house, a
pauper foundling, to beg her bread! I hope you are in a state of
grace, as she is, and that the communion of saints brings you near
enough together for her to see you!'

'You are mad,' Angela said when the Princess paused for breath. 'You
do not know what you are saying. Let go of my wrist and try to get
back to your senses!'

Whether the Princess was really out of her mind, as seemed at least
possible, or was only in one of her frequent fits of rage, the words
had an instantaneous effect. She dropped Angela's wrist, drew herself
up, and recovered her self-control in a few seconds. But there was
still a dangerous glare in her cat-like eyes as she turned towards the
window and faced the dull yellowish light of the late afternoon.

'You will soon find out that I have not exaggerated,' she said, dropping
from her late tone of fury to a note of icy coldness. 'The seals will be
removed to-morrow at noon, and I suppose no one can prevent you from
being present if you choose. After that you will make such arrangements
for your own future as you see fit. I should recommend you to apply to
one of the two convents on which my brother-in-law lavished nearly three
millions of francs during his life. One or the other of them will
certainly take you in without a dowry, and you will have at least a
decent roof over your head.'

With this practical advice the Princess Chiaromonte swept from the
room and Angela was left alone to ask herself whether such a sudden
calamity as hers had ever before overtaken an innocent girl in her
Roman world. She went back very slowly to the sofa and sat down again
under the great Vandyke portrait; her eyes wandered from one object to
another, as if she wished to make an inventory of the things that had
seemed to be hers because they had been her father's, but she was far
too completely dazed by what had happened to think very connectedly.
Besides, though she did not dare let the thought give her courage, she
still had a secret conviction that it was all a mistake and that her
father must have left some document which would be found among his
papers the next day, and would clear away all this dreadful
misunderstanding.

As for the rest of her aunt's story, no one had ever hinted at such a
thing in her hearing, but Madame Bernard would know the truth. There
was little indeed which the excellent Frenchwoman did not know about
the old Roman families, after having lived among them and taught their
children French for nearly a quarter of a century. She was very
discreet and might not wish to say much, but she certainly knew the
truth in this case.

It was not till she was upstairs in her own room, and was trying to
repeat to her old governess just what had been said, that Angela began
to realise what it meant. Madame Bernard was by turns horrified,
righteously angry, and moved to profound pity; at first she could not
believe her ears, but when she did she invoked the divine wrath on the
inhuman monster who had the presumption to call herself a woman, a
mother, and an aunt; finally, she folded Angela in a motherly embrace
and burst into tears, promising to protect her at the risk of her own
life--a promise she would really have kept if the girl had been in
bodily danger.

In her secret heart the little Frenchwoman was also making some
reflections on the folly and obstinacy of the late Prince, but out of
sheer kindness and tact she kept them to herself for the present.
Meanwhile she said she would go and consult one of the great legal
lights, to whose daughters she had lately given lessons and who had
always been very kind to her. It was nonsense, she said, to believe
that the Prince's brother could turn Angela out of her home without
making provision for her, such a liberal provision as would be
considered a handsome dowry--four hundred thousand francs would be the
very least. The Commendatore was a judge in the Court of Appeals and
knew everything. He would not even need to consult his books! His
brain was an encyclopædia of the law! She would go to him at once.

But Angela shook her head as she sat looking at the small wood fire in
the old-fashioned red-brick fireplace. Now that she had told her story
she saw how very sure the Princess and the lawyer must have been to
speak as they had both spoken.

But Madame Bernard put on her hat and went out to see the judge, who
was generally at home late in the afternoon; and Angela sat alone in
the dusk for a while, poking her little fire with a pair of very rusty
wrought-iron tongs, at least three hundred years old, which would have
delighted a collector but which were so heavy and clumsy that they
hurt her hands.

Her aunt's piece of advice came back to her; she had better ask to be
taken in at one of the convents which her father had enriched and
where she would be received without a dowry. She knew them both, and
both were communities of cloistered nuns; the one was established in a
gloomy mediæval fortress in the heart of the city, built round a
little garden that looked as unhealthy as the old Prioress's own
muddy-complexioned face and stubbly chin; the other was shut up in a
hideous modern building that had no garden at all. She felt nothing
but a repugnance that approached horror when she thought of either,
though she tried to reprove herself for it because her father had
given so much money to the sisters, and had always spoken of them to
her as 'holy women.' No doubt they were; doubtless, too, Saint Anthony
of Thebes had been a holy man, though it would have been unpleasant to
share his cell, or even his meals. Angela felt that if she was to live
on bread, water, and salad, she might as well have liberty with her
dinner of herbs. It was heartless to think of marrying, no doubt, when
her father had not yet been dead a week, but since she was forced to
take the future into consideration, she felt sure that Giovanni would
marry her without a penny, and that she should be perfectly happy with
him. She could well afford to laugh at the Princess's advice so long
as Giovanni was alive. He was coming to see her to-morrow, she would
tell him everything, and when the year of her mourning expired they
would be married.

The question was, what she was to do in the meantime, since it was
quite clear that she must soon leave the home in which she had been
brought up. Like all people who have never been face to face with
want, or any state of life even distinctly resembling poverty, she had
a vague idea that something would be provided for her. It was not till
she tried to define what that something was to be that she felt a
little sinking at her heart; but the cheering belief soon returned,
that the whole affair was a mistake, unless it was a pure invention of
her aunt's, meant to frighten her into abandoning her rights. In a
little while Madame Bernard would come back, beaming with
satisfaction, with a message from the learned judge to say that such
injustice and robbery were not possible under modern enlightened laws;
and Angela smiled to think that she could have been so badly
frightened by a mad woman and an obsequious old lawyer.

Decidedly, in spite of her gift for remembering prayers and litanies,
the mere thought of a cloistered life repelled her. Like most very
religiously brought up girls she had more than once fancied that she
was going to have a 'vocation' for the veil; but a sensible confessor
had put that out of her head, discerning at once in her mental state
those touches of maiden melancholy which change the look of the young
life for a day or a week, as the shadow of a passing cloud saddens a
sunlit landscape. It was characteristic of Angela that the possibility
of becoming a nun as a refuge from present and future trouble did not
present itself to her seriously, now that trouble was really imminent.
She was too buoyant by nature, her disposition was too even and
sensible, and above all, she was too courageous to think of yielding
tamely to the fate her aunt wished to impose upon her.

It might have been expected that she should at least break down for a
little while that afternoon and have a good cry in her solitude, while
Madame Bernard was on her errand to the judge; but she did not, though
there was a moment when she felt that tears were not far off. By way
of keeping them back she went into her bedroom, lit a candle and knelt
down to recite the prayers she had selected to say daily for her
father. They were many, some of them were beautiful, and more than
half of them were centuries old. Her conviction that the very just man
was certainly in heaven already did not make it seem wholly useless to
pray for him. No one could be quite sure of what happened in paradise,
and in any case, if he was in no need of such intercession himself,
she was allowed to hope that grace might overflow and avail to help
some poor soul in purgatory, by means of the divine indulgence.

Madame Bernard came back at last, but there was consternation in her
kindly face, for the great legal light had confirmed every word the
Princess and her lawyer had said to Angela, and had shrugged his
shoulders at the suggestion that a will might still be found. He had
told the governess plainly that a man married to a woman only by a
religious ceremony was not legally her husband, and that his children
had neither name nor rights unless he went through the legal form of
recognising them before the proper authorities. If the parents died
without making a will, the children had no claim whatever on the
estate unless they had been properly recognised. If there was a will,
however, they might inherit, even if they had not been legitimised,
provided that no lawful heirs of the testators were living, ascendants
or descendants. The Commendatore had expressed great surprise that the
late Prince should not have been warned of his daughter's irregular
position by his legal advisers. It only showed, he said, how necessary
the law was, since people who disregarded it got into such terrible
trouble.

The French teacher instinctively felt that there was something wrong
with the final syllogism, but it was only too clear that the
Commendatore knew his business, and that unless a legally executed
will were found on the morrow Angela had not the smallest chance of
getting a penny from the great estate her father had left.

'If they are so inhuman as to turn you out of your home without
providing for you,' Madame Bernard said, with tears in her eyes, 'I do
not see what you are to do, my dear child. I am ashamed to offer you
the little spare room I sometimes let to single foreign ladies--and
yet--if you would take it--ah, you would be so welcome! It is not a bad
exposure--it has the sun on it all day, though there is only one
window. The carpet is getting a little threadbare, but the curtains
are new and match the furniture--a pretty flowered chintz, you know.
And I will make little dishes for you, since you have no appetite! A
"navarin," my dear, I make it well, and a real "fricassée"! We
Frenchwomen can all cook! The "navarin" was my poor husband's
predilection--when he had eaten one made by me, he used to say that the
fleshpots of Egypt were certainly the "navarin" and nothing else. But
when I am alone it is not worth while to take so much trouble. An egg,
five sous' worth of ham and brawn, and a roll--that suffices me when I
am alone! But if you will accept the little room--ah, then I will put
on an apron and go into the kitchen, and you shall taste the French
cookery of a Frenchwoman!'

Angela was not listening to all this, for she was too much touched by
the generous intention to hear half of what Madame Bernard said, and
she could only press the little governess's hand again while she tried
to edge in a word of thanks between the quick sentences.

'And as for the rest,' Madame Bernard ran on, 'I have chaperoned half
the young girls in Roman society to concerts and to the dentist's, and
I have a nice little sitting-room, and there is no reason in the world
why Count Severi should not come to see us, until you can be married!'

This, at least, did not escape Angela, who squeezed the small plump
hand very hard, and at last succeeded in speaking herself.

'You are too good!' she cried. 'Too kind! If it turns out to be true,
if I am really to be a beggar, I would rather beg of you than of
distant cousins and people I know! Besides, they are all so afraid of
my aunt's tongue that not one of them would dare to take me in, even
for a week! But I will not come unless you will let me work to help
you, in some way--I do not know how--is there nothing I know well enough
to teach?'

'Oh, la, la!' cried Madame Bernard. 'Will you please not say such
things, my dear! As if it were not the greatest happiness in the world
you will be giving me, a lonely old woman, to come and live with me,
and help me take care of the parrot and water the flowers in the
window every evening at sunset, and learn how to make a "navarin!"
Work? Oh yes! You shall work, my dear child! If you think it is easy
to please a parrot, try it! I only say that!'

'I will do my best,' Angela said, smiling. 'To-morrow, at this hour,
we shall know what is to happen.'

'What has happened, has happened,' said Madame Bernard, as calmly as
any Hindu, though she was not a fatalist. 'Even if there is a paper
somewhere, do you think the Marchesa will not be the first to find it
and tear it to a thousand bits? No, I will not call her "Princess
Chiaromonte"! I, who knew your mother, my dear! Trust me, if there is
a will in the sealed rooms, the Marchesa will discover it before any
one!'

Angela thought that this might be true, for she had a most vivid
recollection of her aunt's look and voice during the late interview.
The more she thought of the immediate future, the clearer it became to
her that she must accept her old governess's offer of shelter for the
present. She could not bring herself to beg a lodging and the bare
necessaries of life from any of those people whom she had called her
friends. There were at least half-a-dozen girls with whom she had been
intimate at the Sacred Heart, and during the past winter, and some of
them were connections of her father's and would be profoundly shocked
to learn what her position now was. No doubt their parents would take
her in for a few days, and would very possibly do more than that, and
formally protest to her aunt and uncle against the treatment she had
received. But could she stay with any of them longer than a week on
such a footing? Would she be anything better than a waif, not knowing
where she should sleep or get a meal a few days hence? No; her only
choice lay between accepting Madame Bernard's offer, and presenting
herself as a candidate for charity at one of the two convents her
father had protected. Afterwards, a year hence or more, when she
should be married to Giovanni Severi, she would find some means of
amply repaying the generous woman, without hurting her feelings. Until
then, she must accept the kindness and be thankful that it came from
such a true friend.

She had no intention of showing herself downstairs the next day, when
the seals were to be removed and the papers examined. If she had
cherished any illusion as to the existence of a document in her
favour, Madame Bernard's last speech had effectually destroyed it,
which was the best thing that could have happened. At least, she was
sure of Giovanni, and a year must pass in a year's time! That was
axiomatic, and when the twelve months were over she would be married
quietly. She would not bring him a handsome dowry as she had fully
expected to do, and though his father was well-off, there were other
children, so that she could not expect to be rich; but what difference
could that make to two young people who loved each other? Evidently,
none at all.

It rained all the morning and Angela spent most of the time in a sort
of apathy, so far as her companion could see, sitting still for an
hour with a book she did not read, then moving about to rooms in an
objectless way only to go back to her chair in a few minutes and to
sit motionless again before the smouldering wood fire.

Madame Bernard, on the contrary, was very busy in making preparations
to take her away if a sudden move should be necessary. Though the
servants were evidently informed of what was taking place, she
succeeded in getting a couple of trunks and a valise brought up, and
she began to pack them with clothing from Angela's wardrobe, taking
only such things as would be useful in the quiet life of mourning the
girl was to lead for a year. The maid had disappeared, presumably to
look for a place, and when it was time for luncheon it was not without
difficulty that Madame Bernard got a footman to bring something cold
on a tray. It was quite clear by this time that the whole household
knew the truth and expected Angela to leave the palace that day, and
the little woman paused more than once in her packing to shake her
fist at the slim visions of the Princess Chiaromonte that crossed the
field of her imagination.

Downstairs matters proceeded as she had foreseen. The Princess, two
lawyers, a notary, and several clerks had removed the seals and locked
themselves in the inner apartment to examine the papers and such
valuables as were there; but it is needless to say that they found
nothing in the nature of a will, nor any document even expressing a
wish on the part of the deceased. The notary observed that it was very
strange, but one of the lawyers shrugged his shoulders and smiled,
while the other asked why, in the nature of things, a man so young and
healthy as the late Prince should have been expected to make careful
preparations against his sudden demise when he might well expect to
live thirty years longer. The Princess said nothing, and her husband
did not appear; indeed, he never did, and on all occasions of
importance, like the present, the Princess was provided with a power
of attorney to represent him, speak for him, decide for him, and sign
documents for him. There were many stories about him in society, none
of which contained more than the merest particle of truth. Some people
said he was mad, others maintained that he was paralysed; there were
those who confidently asserted that his face was disfigured by an
unsightly claret mark, and it was even suggested that he was a leper.
When any of these tales were repeated to his wife by dear friends, she
answered that he was very well and had just gone to the Abruzzi to
look after one of the large holdings of the estate, or that he was in
Hungary, shooting with distant cousins who had lands there, or that,
if the truth must be known, he had a touch of the influenza and would
probably run down to Sicily for a change, as soon as he was able to
travel. Angela herself had not seen him since she had been a mere
child. She remembered that once, when she was at her aunt's, a tall,
pale man with a thoughtful face had passed through the room quickly
without paying the least attention to any one; she had asked her small
cousins who he was, and had been told in an awe-struck whisper that it
was their father. That was probably the only time she had ever laid
eyes on him; and somehow she did not connect him with what was
happening to her now. It was all her aunt's doing; the thin and
thoughtful man had not looked as if he were heartless, he would not
have allowed his brother's child to be turned out a beggar, under the
letter of the law.

Yet the Princess's most ultimate and affectionate enemies had not
succeeded in fathoming the mystery. Two of them, who were connections
of her husband's, had once had a theory that she had locked him up and
kept him a prisoner for her own ends; a similar case had then recently
occurred in Palermo, where a widowed lady and her daughter had been
kept in confinement during several years, and almost starved to death,
by the wicked steward of their estates. Accordingly, the aforesaid
connections had appealed to the chief of secret police for information
about their relative; but in a few days he had been able to tell them
confidently that the Marchese del Prato was in good health and quite
free, that he was an enthusiastic scholar, and was writing an
exhaustive work on the mythology of Pindar's _Odes_, and that there
was no cause for any anxiety about him. So that matter was settled for
ever.

At half-past three o'clock the Princess went away, leaving the lawyers
and clerks to finish their work, for she was more than satisfied that
no will nor any similar document would be found amongst the late
Prince's papers, and everything else was mere formality; the regular
inventories would be made later when the succession duties had to be
paid, but meanwhile there was nothing to hinder her from taking
possession in her husband's name. Before leaving the palace she sent
for the butler, and told him that 'Signorina Angela' was to be
requested to 'remove her effects' the next day. She further
condescended to inform him that the 'Signorina' had been ascertained
to be a nameless foundling who had no share in the inheritance and
must shift for herself, as it was not the intention of the Prince to
support such a person. The butler had learned something of the great
Roman families during a brilliant career in the servants' hall, and he
could have told some singularly romantic tales, but he had never had
experience of anything like this. He tried to look at the Princess for
a moment before he answered her, but he could not face her glittering
eyes.

'Very well, Excellency,' he said, bowing. 'Is the young lady to have
her meals here till she leaves? The French governess is also staying
in the house.'

'Send them up something from the servants' dinner,' the Princess
answered.

'Very well, Excellency.'

But the butler looked after her with considerable curiosity, watching
her graceful figure as she went down the grand staircase and holding
the swinging door open on the landing till she was out of sight. Then
he went in again, looked round the empty hall, and spoke aloud, asking
a question that has never had any answer.

'Women, women--who can understand you?'




CHAPTER IV


Half-an-hour later Giovanni Severi entered the gate below in
civilian's dress and asked if he could see Madame Bernard, the French
teacher, who had let him know that she was stopping in the palace. The
porter told him to ring at the right-hand door on the second landing,
but added that it was doubtful whether any one would let him in, as
there was 'confusion in the house.'

Madame Bernard was waiting for him, however; he had arrived punctually
and she let him in herself.

'Have you heard, Monsieur?' she asked, before he could speak. 'Do you
know what is happening?'

'Yes,' he answered. 'All Rome knows it by this time, for the story was
in the morning papers. May I see Donna Angela?'

'Come, Monsieur.'

She had fastened the outer door while he was speaking, and she now led
the way without any more words.

Angela knew Giovanni's step at a distance, and when he entered she was
standing in the middle of the room. He had never before seen her in
black, and she was paler than usual; he looked anxiously into her face
as he took her hand, and she, meeting his eyes expectantly, saw a
change in them. Neither Angela nor Severi spoke at first, and in the
silence Madame Bernard passed them and went into the next room,
shutting the door after her.

'Have you heard?' Angela asked, still standing and still holding
Giovanni's hand.

'Yes. It is in all the papers to-day. There is an outcry. If your aunt
shows herself in the streets she will be hissed. But she has the law
on her side. I have been to two lawyers to inquire.'

He spoke in short sentences, nervously, and when he stopped he bit his
moustache.

'There is something else,' Angela answered. 'I see it in your eyes.
There is something I do not know, some still worse news. Sit down
there by the fire opposite me and tell me everything, for I am not
afraid. Nothing can frighten me now.'

She seated herself where she had sat more than half the day, and he
took the chair to which she had pointed. She poked the small green
logs with the antiquated tongs and watched the sparks that flew
upwards with every touch while she waited for him to speak. But he
looked at her in silence, forgetting everything for a while except
that he was really alone with her, almost for the first time in his
life. He changed his position and bent forward with his elbows on his
knees and his hands together, so that he was nearer to her. Without
turning her face from the fire she saw him in a side-glance, but made
no answering motion.

'Tell me what it is,' she said softly. 'Only one thing could hurt me
now.'

'It is hard to tell,' he answered in rather a dull voice.

She misunderstood, and turned to him slowly with wondering and
frightened eyes. Her hand weakened, without quite losing its hold, and
the ends of the clumsy tongs clattered on the brick hearth. The doubt
that had sprung upon her like a living thing as soon as she saw him,
began to dig its claws into her heart.

'If it is so hard to tell,' she said, 'it must be that one thing.' She
turned resolutely to the fire again. 'If it is to be good-bye, please
go away quietly and leave me alone.'

The words were not all spoken before he had caught her arm, so
suddenly that the old tongs fell on the bricks with a clang. Like him,
she had been leaning forward in her low chair, and as he drew her to
him she involuntarily slipped from her seat and found herself kneeling
on one knee beside him. She gave a little cry, more of surprise than
of displeasure or timidity, but he did not heed her. It was the first
time they had ever been left alone together, and while he still held
her with his right hand his left stole round her neck, to bring her
face nearer.

But she resisted him almost fiercely; she set both her hands against
his chest and pushed herself from him with all her might, and the red
blush rose even to her forehead at the thought of the kiss she almost
saw on his lips, a kiss that hers had never felt. He meant nothing
against her will, and when he felt that she was matching her girl's
strength against his, as if she feared him, his arms relaxed and he
let her go. She sprang to her feet like a young animal released, and
leaned against the mantelpiece breathing hard, and fixing her burning
eyes on the old engraving of Saint Ursula, asleep in a queer four-post
bedstead with her crown at her feet, that hung over the fireplace. But
instead of rising to stand beside her, Giovanni leaned back in his
chair, his hands crossed over one knee; and instead of looking up to
her face, he gazed steadily down at the hem of her long black skirt,
where it lay motionless across the wolf's skin that served for a
hearth-rug.

'What is it?' she asked, after a long pause, and rather unsteadily.

He understood that she was going back to the question she had asked
him at first, but still he did not answer. She kept her eyes steadily
on Saint Ursula while she spoke again.

'If it is not good-bye, what is it that is so hard to say?'

'I have had a long talk with my father.'

Angela moved a little and looked down at his bent head, for he spoke
in an almost despairing tone. She thought she understood him at last.

'He will not hear of our marriage, now that I am a beggar,' she said,
prompting him.

But Giovanni raised his face at once, and rather proudly.

'You are unjust to him,' he said. 'He is not changed. It is a very
different matter. He has had a great misfortune, and has lost almost
all he had, without much hope of recovering anything. We were very
well off, and I should have had a right to marry you, though you had
not a penny, if this had not happened. As it is, my father is left
with nothing but his General's pension to support my mother. My
brothers will both need help for years to come, for they are much
younger than I am, and I must live on my pay if I mean to stay in the
service.'

'Is that all?' Angela's voice trembled a little.

'Yes, my pay, and nothing more----'

'I did not mean that,' she hastened to say, interrupting him, and
there was a note of returning gladness in her voice. 'I meant to ask
if that was all the bad news.'

'It is enough, surely, since it half ruins our lives! What right have
I to ask you to keep your promise and marry me, since I have not
enough for us to live on?'

Angela turned quite towards him now and repeated his own words.

'And what right have I to ask you to keep your promise and marry me?
When you gave your word, you thought I had a great name and was heir
to a splendid fortune. You were deceived. I am a "destitute
foundling"--the lawyers have proved it, and the proof of their proofs
is that I am obliged to accept the charity of my old governess, God
bless her! If ever a man had a right to take back his word, you have.
Take it, if you will. You are free!'

Giovanni stood up beside her, almost angry.

'Do you think I wanted your fortune?' he asked, a little pale under
his tan.

'Do you think I am afraid of poverty?'

Her lips were still parted in a smile after she had asked the
question, and with the gesture of an older woman she tapped his arm
half reproachfully. The colour came back to his brown face.

'I fear poverty for you,' he answered, 'and I am going to fight it for
your sake if you have the courage to wait for me. Have you?'

'I will wait for ever,' she said simply as she laid her hand in his.

'Then I shall leave the army at once,' he replied. 'So far, I have
made what is called a good career, but promotion is slow and the pay
is wretched until a man is very high up. An artillery officer is an
engineer, you know, and a military engineer can always find well-paid
work, especially if he is an electrician, as I am. In two years I
promise you that we shall be able to marry and be at least
comfortable, and there is no reason why I should not make a fortune
quite equal to what my father has lost.'

He spoke with the perfect confidence of a gifted and sanguine man,
sure of his own powers, and his words pleased her. Perhaps what had
attracted her most in him from the beginning had been his enthusiasm
and healthy faith in the world, which had contrasted brilliantly with
her father's pessimism and bigoted political necrolatry, if I may coin
a word from the Greek to express an old-fashioned Roman's blind
worship of the dead past.

Angela was pleased, as any woman would have been, but she protested
against what she knew to be a sacrifice.

'No,' she said decidedly, 'you must not give up the army and your
career for the sake of making money, even for me. Do no officers marry
on their pay? I am sure that many do, and manage very well indeed. You
told me not long ago that you were expecting promotion from day to
day; and in any case I could not marry you within a year, at the
least.'

'If I do not begin working at once, that will be just a year lost,'
objected Giovanni.

'A year! Will that make much difference?'

'Why not ten, then? As if a year would not be a century long, while I
am waiting for you--as if it were not already half a lifetime since
last month, when we told each other the truth! Wait? Yes, if I must;
for ever, as you said awhile ago, if there is no other way. But if it
can be helped, then not an hour, not a minute! Why should we let
happiness pass us by and not take it when we may and can? There is not
enough in the world, as it is; and you cannot even pretend that you
are generous if you do not take your share, since what fate means for
you is useless for any one else! No, dear, no! We will take the fruit
there is on the tree, and leave none to rot on the branch after we are
gone. Promise to marry me a year from to-day, and leave the rest to
me--will you?'

'Yes--but promise me one thing, too. Do not resign to-morrow, nor next
week, as I know you mean to do. Take a month to think it over, and to
look about you. You are so impulsive--well, so generous--that you are
capable of sending in your resignation to-morrow.'

'It is already written,' Giovanni answered. 'I was going to send it in
to-night.'

'I knew it! But you must not. Please, please, take a little time--it
will be so much wiser. I will wait for you for ever, or I will promise
to marry you a year from to-day, even if we have to live on bread and
water. Indeed I will! But, at least, be a little cautious! It will be
far better to marry on your pay--and you will surely get your captaincy
in a few months--than to be stranded without even that, in case you do
not find the work you hope for. Don't you see? I am sure it is good
advice.'

Giovanni knew that it was, if caution were ever worth practising
in human affairs; but that has often been doubted by brave and
light-hearted men. Giovanni yielded a little reluctantly. If she had
asked him to make it two months instead of one, he would have refused,
for it seemed to him intolerable to lose a moment between decision and
action, and his thoughts doubled their stride with every step, in a
geometrical progression; a moment hence, a minute would be an hour, an
hour a month, a month a lifetime. Men have won battles in that temper;
but it has sometimes cost them their life.

'I know you are sensible,' Giovanni said, taking Angela's hand between
his, 'but it is to please you that I agree to wait a month. It is not
because it looks wise, as it does. For one man who succeeds by wisdom,
ten win by daring. Who knows what may chance in a month, or what may
happen to put out of reach what I could do to-day?'

'Nothing!'

Angela gave her answer with the delicious little smile of superiority
which the youngest woman and even the merest girl can wear, when she
is sure that she is right and that the man she loves is wrong. It may
be only about sewing on a button, or about the weather, or it may
concern great issues; but it is always the same when it comes: it
exasperates weak men, and the stronger sort like it, as they more
especially delight in all that is womanly in woman, from heroic virtue
to pathetic weakness.

'Nothing can happen in a month to prevent you from resigning then, as
you could to-day,' Angela said confidently.

The faint smile disappeared, and she grew thoughtful, not for herself,
but for him, and looked at Saint Ursula again. Her hand still lay in
his, on the edge of the mantelpiece, and while she gazed at the
engraving she knew that he was looking at her and was moving nearer;
she felt that he was going to kiss her, but she did not resist this
time though the colour was rising in her throat, and just under the
exquisitely shaped petal of peach-blossom on which his eyes were
fixed, and which was really only the tip of her ear, though it was so
like the leaf of a flower that the scent of the bloom came to his
memory when his lips touched the spot at last.

His hand shut closer over hers at the same moment, and hers fluttered
under his fingers like a small soft bird; but there was no resistance.
He kissed the tip of her ear, and she turned towards him a little; his
kiss pressed her cool cheek, and she moved again; their eyes met, very
near, and dark, and full of light, and then his lips touched hers at
last.

Destiny has many disguises and many moods. Sometimes, as on that day
at the telephone, the unexpected leaps up from its hiding-place and
strikes stunning blows, right and left, like Orestes among the steers
in Tauris, or a maniac let loose among sane men; but sometimes Fate
lurks in her lair, silently poring over the tablets of the future, and
she notes all we say, scrawling 'Folly' against our wisest speeches,
and stamping 'So be it' under the carelessly spoken jest.

She was busy while the young lovers kissed for the first time, by the
mantelpiece; but no inward warning voice had told Angela that she
herself was sealing the order of her life irrevocably when she gave
Giovanni the best advice she could, and he accepted it to please her,
making his instinct obey his judgment for her sake. A man is foolish
who takes an important step without consulting the woman who loves him
most dearly, be she mother, sister, wife, or sweetheart; but he is
rarely wise if he follows her advice, like a rule, to the letter, for
no woman goes from thought to accomplishment by the same road as a
man. You cannot make a pointer of a setter, nor teach a bulldog to
retrieve.

If Giovanni had sent in his resignation that evening, or even during
the next day, as he was ready to do, it would have been accepted in
the ordinary course of things; he would then, without doubt, have
found employment for his talents and energy, either at home or abroad.
He would in all probability have succeeded in life, because he
possessed the elements of success; he would have married Angela in due
time, and the two would probably have lived happily for many years,
because they were suited to each other in all ways and were possessed
of excellent constitutions. If all this had happened, their story
would have little interest except for themselves, or as an example to
young couples; and it is a deplorable fact that there is hardly
anything so dull and tiresome in the world as a good example. The
hoardings along life's dusty roads are plentifully plastered with good
examples, in every stage of preservation, from those just fresh from
the moral bill-poster's roll, redolent of paste, to the good old ones
that are peeling off in tatters, as if in sheer despair because nobody
has ever stopped to look at them. May the gods of literature keep all
good story-tellers from concocting advertisements of the patent
virtues!

The most important and decisive moment in Angela's life, from its
beginning to its end, had passed so quietly that she never suspected
its presence, and almost the very next instant brought her the first
kiss of the only man she had ever loved, or was to love thereafter.




CHAPTER V


Madame Bernard had not overstated the advantages of the lodging she
occasionally let to foreign ladies who travelled alone and practised
economy, and Angela refused to occupy it till she had satisfied
herself that her old governess's own room was just as large and just
as sunny and just as comfortable.

In the first place, it was much bigger than she had expected, and when
she had spread out all her possessions and put away her clothes, and
had arranged her pretty toilet set and the few books that were quite
her own, she found that she was not at all cramped for space. The
ceiling was not very high, it was true, and there was only one window,
but it was a very wide one, and outside it there was a broad iron
shelf securely fixed, on which four good-sized flower-pots were set
out in the sunshine. It was true that there were no flowers yet, but
the two plants of carnations were full of buds and had been very
carefully tended, a tiny rose-bush promised to bear three or four
blossoms before long, and the pot of basil was beginning to send up
curly green shoots. Opposite the window, and beyond the quiet street,
there was a walled garden, in which there were some orange and
mandarin trees.

Between the two bedrooms there was the sitting-room, which was a
little smaller than either, but quite big enough for two women.
Indeed, Madame Bernard ate her meals there all winter, because the
little dining-room at the back of the house was not so cheerful and
was much colder. An enlarged coloured photograph of the long-deceased
Captain Bernard, in the uniform worn by the French artillery at the
time of the Franco-Prussian War, hung on one of the walls, over an
upright piano; it had a black frame, and was decorated with a wreath
of everlasting daisies tied with a black bow. Underneath the portrait
a tiny holy-water basin of old Tyrolese pewter was fastened to the
wall. This Madame Bernard filled every year at Easter, when the parish
priest came to bless the rooms, and every year she renewed the wreath
on the anniversary of her husband's death; for she was a faithful soul
and practised such little rites with a sort of cheerful satisfaction
that was not exactly devout, but certainly had a religious source.
Captain Bernard had been a dashing fellow and there was no knowing
what his soul might not need in the place his widow vaguely described
as 'beyond' when she spoke of his presumable state, though in the case
of Angela's father, for instance, it was always 'heaven' or
'paradise.' Apparently Madame Bernard had the impression that her
husband's immortal part was undergoing some very necessary cure before
partaking of unmixed bliss.

'Military men have so many temptations, my dear,' she said to Angela,
thinking more of the deceased Captain than of being tactful,--'I mean,'
she said, correcting herself, 'in France.'

Angela was not afraid of temptation for Giovanni; rightly or wrongly,
she trusted that her love would be his shield against the wicked world
and her name his prayer in need, and she smiled at Madame Bernard's
speech. The big old parrot on his perch cocked his head.

'Especially the cavalry and artillery,' the good lady went on to
explain.

'À drrroite--conversion!' roared the parrot in a terrific voice of
command.

Angela jumped in her chair, for it was the first time she had heard
the creature speak in that tone; but Madame Bernard laughed, as if it
pleased her.

'It is absolutely my poor husband's tone,' she said calmly. 'Coco,'
she said, turning to the bellicose bird, 'the Prussians are there!'

'Feu!' yelled the parrot suddenly, dancing with rage on his bar. 'Feu!
'cré nom d'un nom d'un p'tit bon Dieu!'

'Every intonation!' laughed the little Frenchwoman gaily. 'You
understand why I love my Coco!'

But Angela thought there was something grimly horrible in the coming
back of the dead soldier's voice from battles fought long ago.

Giovanni came to see her two days after she had moved, but this time
Madame Bernard did not leave them together very long. She had a lively
sense of her responsibility, now that the young girl was altogether in
her charge, and she felt that the proprieties must be strictly
observed. It must never be thought that Giovanni was free to see
Angela alone whenever he pleased, merely because her people had turned
her out.

He looked distressed, and the young girl at once suspected some new
trouble; and she was not mistaken, for her advice had begun to bear
fruit already, and the inevitable was closing in upon them both.

He told the story in a few words. It had been decided in the War
Office for some time that a small exploring and surveying expedition
should be sent up the country from the Italian colony at Massowah with
the idea of planning some permanent means of inland communication with
the British possessions. Giovanni's father had seen a chance for him
to distinguish himself and to obtain more rapid promotion, and by
using all the considerable influence he possessed in high quarters he
had got him appointed to be the engineering officer of the party. The
young man had already been two years in Africa, before being appointed
to the Staff, and had done exceptionally good service, which was an
excellent reason for using him again; and chance further favoured the
plan, because the officer who had first been selected for the place,
and who was an older man, was much needed in the War Office, to his
own exceeding disgust. The expedition might be attended with
considerable danger and would certainly be full of adventure, for
there had recently been trouble with the tribes in that very region;
but to send a strong force was out of the question, for political
reasons, though the work to be done was so urgently necessary that it
could not be put off much longer.

Old General Severi sincerely hoped Angela might yet marry his son, and
was convinced that the best thing possible would be to secure for the
latter the first opportunity for quick promotion, instead of allowing
him to leave the army in order to find more lucrative employment. The
expedition would be gone five or six months, perhaps, and there were
many reasons why it would be better to keep the young people apart for
a time. Any one would understand that, he was sure. While Angela was
living obscurely with a former governess, a brilliant young officer of
some distinction, like Giovanni, could not see her regularly without
seriously compromising her. It was the way of the world and could not
be helped, yet if Giovanni stayed in Rome it would be too much to
expect that he should stay away from the little apartment in
Trastevere. So the matter was settled, and when he came to see Angela
that afternoon he had just had an interview with his chief, who had
informed him of his appointment, and at the same time of his promotion
to be captain. The expedition was to leave Italy in a few days, and he
would have barely time to provide himself with what was strictly
necessary for the climate. He explained all this to Angela and Madame
Bernard.

'If you had only let me resign the other day,' he said ruefully, when
he had finished his account, 'nobody could have found fault then! But
now, I must face the laugh of every man I know!'

Angela looked up quickly, in evident surprise.

'Why?' she asked. 'I see nothing to laugh at in such an expedition.'

'I am not going to accept the appointment,' Giovanni answered with
decision. 'I asked for twenty-four hours to consider it, though the
General seemed very much surprised.'

'But you cannot refuse!' Angela cried. 'They will say you are afraid!'

'They may say whatever occurs to them, for I will not go, and I shall
resign at once, as I said I would. My mind is made up.'

'You cannot refuse this,' Angela repeated confidently. 'If you are
obliged to admit that there is some danger in it, though you wish
there were none, because you safely could refuse to go, it must be
very dangerous indeed. Tell me the truth, as far as you know it.'

'It would depend on circumstances----' Giovanni hesitated.

'You have told me that if the Government dared, it would send a large
force to protect the expedition. The larger that force would be, the
greater the danger if there is no protection at all. Is that true, or
not?'

'It is true, in one way, but----'

'There is no condition!' Angela interrupted him energetically. 'It is
enough that it is going to be dangerous in one way, as you say!'

'No one can say that I ever avoided danger before,' he objected.

'They will say many things if you refuse to go. They will shrug their
shoulders and say that you have lost your nerve, perhaps! That is a
favourite expression, and you know how people say it. Or if you make
money soon after you resign, they will say that you preferred a
fortune to risking your life for your country. Or else they will say
that a woman has made a coward of you, and that I am she!'

'Coward!' yelled the parrot in a tone of withering contempt, and the
creature actually spat in disgust.

Giovanni started violently, for he had not noticed the bird in the
room. Then he tried to laugh at his own surprise.

'I do not wonder that you are surprised, Monsieur,' said Madame
Bernard with a pleasant smile. 'Oh, Coco has exactly my poor husband's
voice!'

'I can brave a parrot's opinion,' Giovanni said, attempting to speak
gaily.

'Will you brave mine?' Angela asked.

'You certainly do not think I am afraid to go,' he answered, 'for you
know why I mean to refuse. My first duty is to you. As I am placed, it
would be cowardly to be afraid to face public opinion in doing that
duty, and to keep you waiting six months or a year longer than
necessary, when I have promised to provide means for us to marry
within a year. That would deserve to be called cowardice!'

'Sale Prussien! 'cré nom d'une pipe!' yelled Coco in a tone of
disgust.

'Really!' exclaimed Giovanni, with some annoyance. 'Does the thing
take me for an hereditary enemy, Madame?'

Madame Bernard rose with a little laugh and went to the parrot's
perch, holding out her hand.

'Come, Coco!' she said, coaxing him. 'It is peace now, and we can go
home to Paris again.'

'Paris' meant her bedroom in bird language; it also meant being bribed
to be quiet with good things, and Coco strutted from his perch to her
finger.

'Marche!' he commanded in a sharp tone, and as she moved he began to
whistle the Marseillaise with great spirit.

She marched off, laughing and keeping step to the tune till she
disappeared into her room, shutting the door behind her. As it closed
Giovanni caught Angela's left hand and drew it to him. She laid her
right on his, quietly and affectionately.

'Am I never to see you alone?' he asked, almost in a whisper.

'When you come to say good-bye before starting,' Angela answered. 'I
will ask her to leave us quite alone then. But now it will only be for
a minute or two.'

Thereupon, with the most natural movement in the world, she lifted her
hands, brought his face close to hers and kissed him, drew back a
little, looked gravely into his astonished eyes for some seconds, and
then kissed him again.

'I love you much more than you love me,' she said with great
seriousness. 'I am sure of it.'

It was all very different from what he had expected. He had vaguely
fancied that for a long time every kiss would have to be won from her
by a little struggle, and that every admission of her love would be
the reward of his own eloquence; instead, she took the lead herself
with a simplicity that touched him more than anything else could have
done.

'You see!' she cried, with the intonation of a laugh not far away. 'I
took you by surprise, because I am right about it! What have you to
say?'

He said nothing, but his lips hurt hers a little in the silence. She
shivered slightly, for she had not yet dreamed that a kiss could hurt
and yet be too short. The sound of Madame Bernard's voice came from
the next room, still talking to the parrot. Angela laid her hand on
Giovanni's gold-laced sleeve and nestled beside him, with her head in
the hollow of his shoulder.

'I have always wanted to do this,' she said in a drowsy little voice,
as if she wished she could go to sleep where she was. 'It is my place.
When you are away in Africa, at night, under the stars, you will dream
that I am just here, resting in my very own place.'

She felt his warm breath in her hair as he answered.

'I will not go; I will not leave you.'

'But you must,' she said, quickly straightening herself and looking
into his face. 'I should not love you as I do, if I could bear to
think of your staying here, to let men laugh at you, as you say they
would!'

'It is not like resigning on the day after war is declared!' he
retorted, trying to speak lightly.

'It is!' she cried, with a sort of eager anxiety in her voice. 'There
is only a difference in the degree--and perhaps it is worse! If there
were war, you would be one man in a hundred thousand, but now you will
be one in ten or twenty, or as many as are to go. Think what it would
be if you were the only man in Italy, the one, single, only officer
who could certainly accomplish something very dangerous to help your
country--and if you refused to do it!'

'There are hundreds of better men than I for the work,' objected
Giovanni.

'I doubt it. Are there hundreds of engineer officers on the General
Staff?'

'No, but there are plenty----'

'A score, perhaps, and you have been chosen, no matter why, and there
is danger, and there is a great thing to be done, perhaps a great
good, which in the end will save the lives, or help the lives, of many
Italians! And you want to refuse to do it--for what? For a woman, for a
girl you love! Do you think she will love you the more, or less, for
keeping out of danger, if she is a true Italian as she thinks you are?
Why is it that our Italy, which no one thought much of a few years
ago, is coming to the front in so many ways now? It was not by staying
at home for women's sake that our sailors have got nearer the North
Pole than all the others who have tried! It is not by avoiding danger
that our officers are learning to astonish everybody with their
riding----'

'That is different,' objected Giovanni. 'It is one thing to do daring
things----'

'Yes,' interrupted Angela, not letting him speak, 'it is the one and
only thing, when it is good daring and can bring good, and helps the
world to see that Italy is not dead yet, in spite of all that has been
said and written against us and our unity. No, no, I say! Go, do your
duty, do and dare, wherever and howsoever your country needs you, and
I will wait for you, and be glad to wait for that one reason, which is
the best of all. If you love me half as dearly as I love you, go back
at once and tell your chief that you are ready, and are proud to be
used wherever you can be of any use! And if there is danger to be
faced, think that you are to face it for my sake as well as for
Italy's, and not in spite of me, for I would ten thousand times rather
that you should die in doing your duty--ever so obscurely--than stay
here to be called a coward in order that we may be rich when we
marry!'

Giovanni listened, more and more surprised at her energy and quick
flow of words, but glad at heart that she was urging him to do what
was right and honourable.

'It was for you that I meant to stay,' he said. 'Hard as it is to
leave you, it would have been harder to refuse the appointment. I will
go.'

A little silence followed, and Madame Bernard, no longer hearing their
voices, and having said everything she had to say to her parrot,
judged that it was time for her to come back and play chaperon again.
She was careful to make a good deal of noise with the latch before she
opened the door.

'Well, Monsieur,' she asked, on the threshold, 'has Donna Angela
persuaded you that she is right? I heard her making a great speech!'

'She is a firebrand,' laughed Giovanni, 'and a good patriot as well!
She ought to be in Parliament.'

'You are a feminist, I perceive,' answered Madame Bernard. 'But Joan
of Arc would be in the Chambers if she could come back to this world.
The people would elect her, she would present herself in the tribune,
and she would say, "Aha, messieurs! Here I am! We shall talk, you and
I." And our little Donna Angela is a sort of Joan of Arc. People do
not know it, but I do, for I have often heard her make beautiful
speeches, as if she were inspired!'

'It takes no inspiration to see what is right,' Angela said, shaking
her head. 'The only difficulty is to do it!'

'Even that is easy when you lead,' Giovanni answered thoughtfully, and
without the least intention of flattering her.

He had seen a side of her character of which he had not even suspected
the existence, and there was something about it so large and imposing
that he was secretly a little ashamed of feeling less strong than she
seemed. In two successive meetings he had come to her with his own
mind made up, but in a few moments she had talked him over to her
point of view without the least apparent difficulty, and had sent him
away fully determined to do the very opposite of that which he had
previously decided to do. It was a strange experience for a young man
of great energy and distinctly exceptional intelligence, and he did
not understand it.

He stayed barely half-an-hour, for Madame Bernard showed no
disposition to leave the room again, and he felt the difficulty of
keeping up an indifferent conversation in her presence, as well as the
impossibility of talking freely to Angela of what was uppermost in her
thoughts and his own. It was true that the governess knew all about
it, and there are excellent women of that sort whose presence does not
always hinder lovers from discussing their future; but either Madame
Bernard was not one of these by nature, or else the two felt the
difference of her nationality too much. The French are perhaps the
only civilised nation whom no people of other nations can thoroughly
understand, and who, with very few individual exceptions, do not
understand any people but themselves. They have a way of looking at
life which surprises and sometimes amuses men of all other
nationalities; they take some matters very seriously which seem of
trivial consequence to us, but they are witty at the expense of
certain simple feelings and impulses which we gravely regard as
fundamentally important, if not sacred. They can be really and truly
heroic, to the point of risking life and limb and happiness, about
questions at which we snap our fingers, but they can be almost
insolently practical, in the sense of feeling no emotion while keenly
discerning their own interest, in situations where our tempers or our
prejudices would rouse us to recklessness. In their own estimation
they are always right, and so are we in ours, no doubt; but whereas
they consider themselves the Chosen People and us the Gentiles, or
compare themselves with us as the Greeks compared themselves with the
Barbarians, we, on our side, do not look down upon their art and
literature as they undoubtedly do on ours, and a good many of us are
rather too ready to accept them as something more than our equals in
both. When I say 'we,' I do not mean only English-speaking people, but
other Europeans also. I have overheard Frenchmen discussing all sorts
of things in trains, on steamers, in picture-galleries, in libraries,
in the streets, from Tiflis to London and from London to the Pacific,
but I have never yet heard Frenchmen admit among themselves that a
modern work of art, or book, or play was really first-rate, if it was
not French. There is something monumental in their conviction of their
own superiority, and I sincerely believe it has had much to do with
their success, as a nation, in the arts of peace as well as in war. A
man who is honestly convinced that he is better than his opponent is
not easily put down in peaceful competition, and will risk his life in
action with a gallantry and daring that command the admiration of all
brave men; and it is a singular fact that German soldiers did not call
Frenchmen cowards after the great war, whereas it was a very common
thing to hear Frenchmen inveigh against 'those dirty, cowardly
Prussians' who had got the better of them. Men who can take such a
point of view as that must be utterly unlike other people.

This little digression should explain why Angela and Madame Bernard
never quite understood each other, in spite of the elder woman's
almost motherly love for the girl and the latter's devoted gratitude.

They talked about Giovanni when he was gone, of course, but neither
said all she thought about him, because she feared that the other
would think a little differently. The cheerful Frenchwoman had gone
through life with the belief that it is better, on the whole, to make
oneself comfortable in this world, if it can be managed on honest
principles, than to worry oneself about heroics, and in the calm
recesses of her practical little soul she was sure that, in Angela's
place, she would have told Giovanni to resign as soon as possible and
find some pleasant and well-paid occupation for his married life. All
Angela's talk about a man's duty to his country would be very well in
time of war, when there was glory to be got; but it was nonsense in
ordinary times, where one man would do as well as another, to risk his
life in a small expedition, and when it was distinctly advisable not
to be that one. But she knew also that she had better not try to
explain this to Angela, who was evidently a little mad on the point,
most probably because she was an Italian. For Italians, Germans,
Spaniards, Englishmen, and Americans were all completely insane; there
was some little hope for Austrians and a good deal for Russians, in
Madame Bernard's opinion, but there was none for the rest, though they
might be very nice people. The safest thing was to humour them. She
had given lessons in Roman families that were half Austrian and even
half Russian, for the Romans have always been very cosmopolitan in
their marriages, but Angela was quite Italian on both sides, and so
was Giovanni. It was therefore pretty certain that they would behave
like lunatics, sooner or later, the good lady thought; and they
apparently were beginning already.

It is needless to dwell long on what followed, since what has been
narrated so far is only the introduction to Angela's story and the
exposition of the circumstances which determined her subsequent life.
As in most cases, it happened in hers that the greatest events were
the direct consequences of one very small beginning. If she had not
urged Giovanni to wait some time before leaving the army, he would not
have been obliged to remain in the service almost as a matter of
honour, yet it had seemed very sensible to advise him to do nothing in
a hurry. Everything else followed logically upon that first step.

It was the inevitable, and it was therefore already in nature tragic,
before active tragedy took the stage. Yet Angela did not feel its
presence, nor any presentiment of the future, when she bade Giovanni
farewell ten days after he had first been to see her in Madame
Bernard's apartment.

What she felt was just the common pain of parting that has been the
lot of loving men and women since the beginning; it is not the less
sharp because almost every one has felt it, but it is as useless to
describe it as it would be to write a chapter about a bad toothache, a
sick headache, or an attack of gout. Angela was a brave girl and set
herself the task of bearing it quietly because it was a natural and
healthy consequence of loving dearly. It was not like the wrench of
saying good-bye to a lover on his way to meet almost certain death.
She told herself, and Giovanni told her, that in all probability he
was not going to encounter any danger worse than may chance in a day's
hunting over a rough country or in a steeple-chase, and that the risk
was certainly far less than that of fighting a duel in Italy, where
duelling is not a farce as it is in some countries. He would come back
within a few months, with considerable credit and the certainty of
promotion; it was a hundred to one that he would, so that this was
merely a common parting, to be borne without complaint. He thought so
himself, and they consoled each other by making plans for their
married life, which would be so much nearer when he came home.

Madame Bernard left them alone for an hour in the sitting-room and
then came in to say good-bye to Giovanni herself, bringing Coco
perched upon her wrist, but silent and well-behaved. Angela was pale,
and perhaps her deep mourning made her look paler than she was, but
her face was as quiet and collected as Giovanni's. He took leave of
the governess almost affectionately.

'Take care of her, Madame,' he said, 'and write me some news of her
now and then through the War Office. It may reach me, or it may not!'

He kissed Angela's hand, looked into her eyes silently for a moment,
and went out.

'Marche! 'cré nom d'un nom!' screamed the parrot after him, as if he
were going too slowly.

But this time Angela could not speak of him with her friend just after
he was gone, and when Madame Bernard tried to talk of other things
with the idea of diverting her attention, she went and shut herself up
in her own room. It was distracting to know that he was still in Rome,
and that until nearly midnight, when the train left for Naples, it
would be possible to see him once more. If she had insisted, Madame
Bernard would have consented to go with her in a cab to find him. It
was hard to resist, as she sat by the window, listening to the distant
sound of wheels in the street; it was the first great temptation she
had ever felt in her life, and as she faced it she was surprised at
its strength. But she would not yield. In her own gentle womanliness
she found something she recognised but could not account for; was it
possible that she had some strength of character, after all? Could it
be that she inherited a little of that rigid will that had made her
father so like her idea of a Puritan? He had always told her that she
was weak, that she would be easily influenced by her surroundings,
that her only hope must be to obtain Divine aid for her feeble,
feminine nature. She had believed him, because he had taught her that
she must, even in the smallest things, and this was a great one.

But now something cruelly strong was tearing at her, to make her go into
the next room and beg Madame Bernard to help her find Giovanni, if only
that she might see his face and hear his voice and say good-bye just
once more. She laid her hands on the window-sill as if she would hold
herself down in her chair, and she refused to move; not because it
looked foolish, for that would not have mattered, but because she chose
not to yield. Perhaps she was too proud to give way, and pride, they
told her, was always a sin, but that did not matter either. There was an
unexpected satisfaction in finding one thin strand of steel among the
pliant threads of her untried young will.

Besides, she would have much to bear, and if she did not begin at
once, she would never grow used to the burden. That was another reason
for not following her instinct, and a very good one.

To help herself, she began to say one of those prayers of which she
knew so many by heart. To her surprise, it disturbed her instead of
strengthening her determination, and while her lips were moving she
felt an almost overwhelming impulse to do what she was determined not
to do at any cost. The sensation startled her, and in a moment she
felt that tide of darkness rising to drown her which had almost
overwhelmed her while she was kneeling beside her dead father. Her
hand pressed the stone window-sill in terror of the awful presence.

It is familiar to those few who have knowingly or unwittingly tried to
penetrate the darkness to the light beyond. It has been called the
Guardian, the Dweller on the Threshold, the Wall, the Destroyer, the
Giant Despair. Many have turned back from it as from death itself,
some have gone raving mad in fighting their way through it, some have
actually died in it, of failure of the heart from fright. Some come
upon it unawares in their reasoning, some in the hour of profound
meditation; some know by long experience where it is and keep away
from it; some are able to pass through it with unshaken mind and
unbroken nerves. Scarcely one in a million even guesses that it
exists; of those who do, ninety-nine in a hundred turn from it in
horror; of the remaining score of those who face it in a whole
generation of men, more than half perish in mind or body; the last
ten, perhaps, win through, and these are they that have understood the
writing over the temple door, the great 'Know thyself,' the precept of
the Delphic Oracle and of all mystics before Trophonios and since.

Angela's lips ceased moving, and very soon she was herself again,
quietly sitting there and wondering what had frightened her so badly,
and whether there might not be something wrong with her heart, because
she remembered how it had beat twice quickly in succession and then
had seemed to stand still while she could have counted ten, quite
slowly.

What she called her temptation left her at peace till she knew that
Giovanni's train had started. In imagination she could hear the engine's
whistle, the hissing of the steam from the purge-cocks at starting, the
quickening thunder of the high-pressure exhaust, the clanking noise as
the slowly moving train passed over the old-fashioned turn-tables, and
the long retreating rumble as the express gathered speed and ran out of
sight.

Then it was over, for good and all; Giovanni was gone beyond the
possibility of seeing him again and the strain relaxed. Angela put out
her light, and when she fell asleep a quarter of an hour later, drops
she did not even feel were slowly trickling from her lids to the
pillow; for there are women who do not easily cry when they are awake,
but when they are sleeping their tired eyes shed the pent-up tears and
are refreshed by them.

Angela was not left alone with Madame Bernard as much as she had
expected after the first few days, nor even as much as she might have
wished. The feeling against the Princess Chiaromonte was strong, and
as soon as it became known that Angela had found a safe refuge with
her former governess, she received several invitations from more or
less distant connections to spend some time with them in the country
during the coming summer. At the present juncture, in the height of
the season, it was natural that no one should want a forlorn young
girl in deep mourning to make a town visit. She would have been a
killjoy and a wet blanket in any house, that was clear, and nothing
could be more thoroughly respectable and proper than that she should
spend the first weeks under Madame Bernard's roof and protection.

Some of Angela's friends of her own age came to see her by and by and
offered to take her to drive in their mothers' carriages or motor
cars, but she would not go, and though she thanked them with grateful
words for thinking of her, most of them thought, and told each other,
that she had not been very glad to see them and would rather be left
alone. They supposed that she was still too much overcome to wish for
their society, and as young people who drop out of the world after
being in it a very short time are soon forgotten, they troubled
themselves very little about her. If she ever chose to come out of her
solitude, they said, she would be welcome again, but since she wished
to be left to herself it was very convenient to humour her, because
the Princess Chiaromonte had as good as declared that there were
'excellent reasons' for her own apparently heartless conduct. No one
knew what that meant, but when she spoke in that way it was more
blessed to accept her statement than to get her enmity by doubting it.
The Chiaromonte family were at liberty to settle their own affairs as
seemed best in their own eyes, and as the law could not interfere, no
one else felt inclined to do so. Angela had no near relations on her
mother's side to protect her or take her in.

Six weeks passed away without incident after Giovanni had left, and
she had received three letters from him--one from Naples, written
before going on board the steamer, one from Port Said, and one from
Massowah after his arrival there. The expedition was to start in three
days, he said; it had been waiting for him and the officer who was to
take the command, and who had gone with him.

A short time after receiving this last letter Angela was reading the
news from an evening paper to Madame Bernard, translating the
paragraphs offhand into French, by force of habit, because her old
governess had often made her do it for practice.

Suddenly her eyes became fixed, the colour left her face, and she
dropped the newspaper with a short, loud cry, falling back in her
chair at the same moment.

Madame Bernard snatched up the sheet and glanced at the place where
the girl had last been reading.

The expedition had fallen in with hostile natives a week after
starting and had been massacred to a man. The names of the dead were
given, and Giovanni's was the second on the list.




CHAPTER VI


Angela lived for weeks in a state of sleepless apathy, so far as her
companion could see. She scarcely spoke, and ate barely enough to keep
herself alive. She seemed not to sleep at all, for two or three times
during every night Madame Bernard got up and came to her room, and she
always found her lying quite motionless on her back, her eyes wide
open and staring at the tasteless little pattern of flowers stencilled
in colours on the ceiling. Once Madame Bernard proposed to take away
the night-light that burned in a cup on the floor, but Angela shook
her head almost energetically. She never opened a book either, nor
occupied herself in any way, but seemed content to sit still all day
and to lie awake all night, never complaining, and never even speaking
unless her friend asked her a direct question. Every morning at
sunrise she put on her hat and went to the ancient church of San
Crisogono, which is served by Trinitarian monks. Sometimes Madame
Bernard went with her, but more often she was accompanied by the one
woman-servant who cooked and did the housework.

The unhappy girl found neither consolation nor hope in the daily
service; she went to it because, somehow, it seemed to be the only
thing she could do for the dead. She knelt down every day on the same
spot, and remained kneeling till after the priest and the acolyte were
gone; she took her missal with her, but never looked at it, and her
lips never moved in prayer; she felt no impulse to go to confession,
nor any devotional craving for the Communion. The mass was a mere form
to her, but she attended it regularly, as if she expected that much of
herself and would not do less than the least that seemed to be her
duty. That was all. Prayer in any form of words frightened her, for it
soon brought her near to that blinding darkness which she had already
met twice and had learned to dread; her present misfortune was
incomparably greater than those that had gone before, and she was sure
that if the outer night rose round her again it would take her soul
down into itself to eternal extinction. If she had been physically
stronger, she might have tried to call this a foolish delusion; weak
as she was, and growing daily weaker, it seemed as certain as that her
body must perish instantly if she walked over a precipice. The past
was distorted, the present had no meaning, and there was no future;
she vaguely understood Dante's idea that the body may be left on
earth, apparently alive, for years after the soul has departed from
it, for the evil Alberigo's spirit told the poet that his own body and
Branca d'Oria's were still animated by demons when their souls were
already in the torment of the eternal ice. But Angela felt rather as
if her living self were a mere senseless shell, uninhabited by any
spirit, bad or good, and moved by the mechanics of nature rather than
by her own will or another's.

Madame Bernard watched her with growing anxiety as the days and weeks
brought no change. The little lodging in Trastevere was very silent,
and Coco sat disconsolately drooping his wings on his perch when his
mistress was out, as she was during more than half the day, giving the
lessons by which she and Angela lived. The girl sometimes did not move
from her chair throughout the long morning any more than if she had
been paralysed, or at most she tried to tend the flowers. The roses
were blooming now, and on fine days, when the windows were open, the
aromatic perfume of the young carnations floated in with the sunbeams.
Angela did not notice the scent, and for all the pleasure the blossoms
gave her they might have been turnips and potatoes. But there was a
feeble underlying thought of duty in plucking off a small withered
leaf here and there, and in picking out the tiny weeds that tried to
grow round the flower-stems. From very far away she heard Madame
Bernard telling her, an age ago, that she could tend the flowers and
take care of the parrot by way of helping in the house.

Coco regarded her efforts with melancholy contempt, and turned his
back on her when she came near him, and even when she changed the
water in his tin cup. As he only drank three or four drops in a day,
it probably seemed to him a work of supererogation. While his mistress
was out he rarely uttered a sound; but when he heard her footstep in
the short passage outside, he gave vent to his feelings and hailed her
return with boisterous shouts and unearthly whistling of old French
military tunes. Even the noise he made did not disturb Angela; she
hardly heard him, for her nerves were not overwrought, but deadened
almost to insensibility.

Madame Bernard consulted a young doctor, a man of talent, who was
taking lessons of her for the sake of his practice among foreigners.
She used to say that between her pupils, and their friends and
relations, she could get the best advice on any matter without paying
a penny for it. The young physician answered that he could not help
her much without seeing the patient, but that the best thing for
Angela would be to eat and sleep well and not to fret.

Some such idea had probably occurred to the little Frenchwoman, for
she laughed gaily in the doctor's face, and he, not being paid to look
serious, joined in her laughter.

'You cannot say it is bad advice,' he said, 'and you wanted me to say
something. Let me see the young lady, and I will tell you honestly
whether I know of anything that will do her good, as I would tell a
colleague.'

They agreed that he should call one evening on pretence of taking an
extra lesson in a leisure hour; he came at the appointed time, and
watched Angela narrowly during the short time she remained in the
room. When she was gone, he gave his opinion without hesitation.

'The best thing for her would be a good illness,' he said. 'You look
surprised! I will try to explain. That young lady is stronger than you
think. It would do her a world of good to shed tears, but she cannot
because her unconscious power of resistance has been exercised till it
has grown rigid. You have heard of Hindu devotees who hold up one arm
till it stiffens in that position, so that they could not move it if
they tried. That is an image of what I mean, unless it is the thing
itself. After learning the terrible news Donna Angela unconsciously
steeled herself against her natural impulse to break down. She has a
strong will, and the result is what you see. The strain of resisting
was so great that it deadened her to all sensation in a few hours. If
she could fall ill, the tension would relax; in my opinion it will do
so when her physical strength is worn out by starvation and lack of
sleep, but a simple specific malady, like the whooping-cough or the
measles, would be better for her. If you cannot break up her present
condition, and if she has any organic weakness of the heart, it may
stop beating one of these days. That is what is called dying of a
broken heart, my dear Madame Bernard. There is no medicine against
that like a broken leg!'

'Fie!' cried Madame Bernard. 'You have no human feeling at all!'

'I am sorry,' answered the physician, with a smile, 'but it is my
business to have a head instead. You asked my opinion and I have given
it, as I would to another doctor. The old-fashioned ones would laugh
at me, the younger ones would understand.'

'If you could only make the poor child sleep a little! Is there
nothing?'

'She is not neurasthenic,' the doctor objected. 'It would be of no use
to give her sleeping medicines, for after a few days they would have
no effect, except to excite her nerves unnaturally.'

'Or something to give her an appetite,' suggested Madame Bernard
vaguely.

'She has an excellent appetite if she only knew it. The reason why she
does not eat is that she does not know she is hungry, though she is
half starved. I served in the African campaign when I was a young
military surgeon. I have seen healthy men faint for want of food when
they had plenty at hand because they could not realise that they were
hungry in their intense preoccupation. Great emotions close the
entrance to the stomach, often for a considerable time. It is well
known, and it is easier than you think to form the habit of living on
next to nothing. It is the first step that counts.'

'As they said of Saint Denis when he carried his head three steps
after it was cut off,' said Madame Bernard thoughtfully, and without a
smile.

'Precisely,' the doctor assented. 'I myself have seen a man sit his
horse at a full gallop, without relaxing his hold, for fifty yards
after he had been shot through the head. The seat of the nerves that
direct automatic motion is not in the brain, but appears to be in the
body, near the spine. When it is not injured, what used to be called
unconscious cerebration may continue for several seconds after death.
Similarly, bodily habits, like feeling hunger or being insensible to
it, appear to have their origin in those ganglions and not in any sort
of thought. Consequently, thought alone, without a strong exercise of
the will, has little effect upon such habits of the body. When a man
does a thing he does not mean to do, and says "I cannot help it," he
is admitting this fact. If you were to ask Donna Angela if she means
to starve herself to death deliberately, she would deny it with
indignation, but would tell you that she really cannot eat, and
meanwhile she is starving. Give her a comparatively harmless illness
like the measles, severe enough to break up the ordinary automatic
habits of the body, and she will eat again, with an excellent
appetite. In all probability I could give her the measles by
artificial means, but unfortunately that sort of treatment is not yet
authorised!'

The young doctor, who was not by any means a dreamer, seemed much
amused at his own conclusion, which looks absurd even on paper, and
Madame Bernard did not believe a word he said. In questions of
medicine women are divided into two great classes, those who will
consult any doctor and try anything, and those who only ask the
doctor's opinion when they are forced to, and who generally do
precisely the opposite of what he suggests. This is a more practical
view and is probably the safer, if they must go to one of the two
extremes. Moreover, doctors are so much inclined to disagree that when
three of them give a unanimous opinion it is apt to be worthless.

The only immediate result of Madame Bernard's consultation with the
doctor was that she disappointed one of her pupils the next day in
order to gain an hour, which she devoted to making a very exquisite
'mousse de volaille' for Angela. The poor girl was much touched, but
could only eat two or three mouthfuls, and the effort she made to
overcome her repugnance was so unmistakable that the good little
Frenchwoman was more anxious for her than hurt at the failure.

She had tried two sciences, she said to herself, but the doctor of
medicine had talked the nonsense of theories to her, and the combined
wisdom of Vatel, Brillat-Savarin, and Carême had proved fruitless. A
person who could not eat Madame Bernard's 'mousse de volaille' could
only be cured by a miracle. Accordingly, she determined to consult a
churchman without delay, and went out early in the afternoon. Angela
did not notice that she was dressed with more than usual care, as if
for a visit of importance.

She had been gone about half-an-hour, and the young girl was sitting
in her accustomed place, listless and apathetic as usual, when the
door-bell rang, and a moment later the woman-servant came in, saying
that a foreign gentleman was on the landing who insisted on seeing
Angela, even though she was alone. After giving a long and not
flattering description of his appearance, the woman held out the card
he had given her. Angela glanced at it and read the name of Filmore
Durand, and above, in pencil, half-a-dozen words: 'I have brought you
a portrait.'

Angela did not understand in the least, though she tried hard to
concentrate her thoughts.

'Ask the gentleman to come in,' she answered at last, hardly knowing
what she said.

She turned her face to the window again, and in the course of thirty
seconds, when she was roused by Durand's voice in the room, she had
almost forgotten that he was in the house. She had not heard English
spoken since she had left his studio on the morning when her father
died, and she started at the sound. For weeks, nothing had made such
an impression on her.

She rose to receive the great painter, who was standing near the table
in the middle of the room, looking at her in surprise and real
anxiety, for she was little more than a shadow of the girl he had
painted six weeks or two months earlier. He himself had brought in a
good-sized picture, wrapped in new brown paper; it stood beside him on
the floor, reaching as high as his waist, and his left hand rested on
the upper edge. He held out the other to Angela, who took it
apathetically.

'You have been very ill,' he said in a tone of concern.

'No,' she answered. 'I am only a little tired. Will you not sit down?'

She sank into her seat again, and one thin hand lay on the cushioned
arm of the chair. Instead of seating himself, Durand lifted the
picture, still wrapped up, and set it upright on the table, so that it
faced her.

'I heard,' he said in a low voice, 'so I did this for you from memory
and a photograph.'

There was a sudden crackling and tearing of the strong paper as he
ripped it off with a single movement, and then there was absolute
silence for some time. Angela seemed not even to breathe, as she
leaned forward with parted lips and unwinking, wondering eyes.

Then, without even a warning breath, a cry broke from her heart.

'He is not dead! You have seen him again! He is alive--they have
cheated me!'

Then she choked and leaned back, pressing her handkerchief to her
mouth.

Instead of answering, the painter bent his head and looked down
sideways at his own astounding handiwork, and for the second time in
that year he was almost satisfied. Presently, as Angela said nothing
more, he was going to move the canvas, to show it in a better light,
but she thought he meant to take it away.

'No!' she cried imperatively. 'Not yet! Let me see it--let me
understand----'

Her words died away and she was silent again, her eyes fixed on the
portrait. At last she rose, came forward, and laid both her thin hands
on the narrow black and gold frame.

'I must have it,' she said. 'You must let me have it, though I cannot
pay for it. But I will some day. I will work till I can earn enough
money, or till I die--and if that comes soon, they will give you back
the picture. You cannot take it away!'

Durand saw that she had not understood.

'It is for you,' he said. 'I painted it to give to you. You see, after
your father died, I kept yours--I never meant them to have it, but it
seemed as if I owed you something for it, and this is to pay my debt.
Do you see?'

'How kind you are!' she cried. 'How very, very kind! I do not quite
follow the idea--my head is always so tired now--but I knew you would
understand how I should feel--if I accepted it without any return!'

So far as arithmetic went, the man of genius and the broken-hearted
girl were equally far from ordinary reckoning. Durand knew that by a
turn of luck he had been able to keep the only portrait he had ever
been sorry to part with when it was finished, and he was intimately
convinced that he owed somebody something for such an unexpected
pleasure; on her side, Angela was quite sure that unless the portrait
of the man she had loved was to be an equivalent for some sort of
obligation she could not be satisfied to keep it all her life unpaid
for.

It filled the little sitting-room with light and colour, as a Titian
might have done; it was as intensely alive as Giovanni Severi had
been--the eyes were full of those quick little coruscations of fire
that had made them so unlike those of other men, the impulsive
nostrils seemed to quiver, the healthy young blood seemed to come and
go in the tanned cheeks, the square shoulders were just ready to make
that quick, impatient little movement that had been so characteristic
of him, so like the sudden tension of every muscle when a thoroughbred
scents sport or danger. No ordinary artist would ever have seen all
there was in the man, even in a dozen sittings, but the twin gifts of
sight and memory had unconsciously absorbed and held the whole, and a
skill that was never outdone in its time had made memory itself
visible on the canvas. Something that was neither a 'harmless illness'
nor a 'miracle' had waked Angela from her torpor.

'How can I thank you?' she asked, after a long pause. 'You do not know
what it is to me to see his living face--you will call it an
illusion--it seems as if----'

She broke off suddenly and pressed her handkerchief to her lips again.

'Only what you call the unreal can last unchanged for a while,' the
painter said, catching at the word she had used, and thinking more of
his art than of her. 'Only an ideal can be eternal, but every honest
attempt to give it shape has a longer life than any living creature.
Nature makes only to destroy, but art creates for the very sake of
preserving the beautiful.'

She heard each sentence, but was too absorbed in the portrait to
follow his meaning closely. Perhaps it would have escaped her if she
had tried.

'Only good and evil are everlasting,' she said, almost unconsciously
repeating words she had heard somewhere when she was a child.

Durand looked at her quickly, but he saw that she was not really
thinking.

'What is "good"?' he asked, as if he were sure that there was no
answer to the question.

It attracted her attention, and she turned to him; she was coming back
to life.

'Whatever helps people is good,' she said.

'The French proverb says "Help thyself and God will help thee,"'
suggested Durand.

'No, it should be "Help others, and God will help you,"' Angela
answered.

The artist fixed his eyes on her as he nodded a silent assent; and
suddenly, though her face was so changed, he knew it was more like his
portrait of her than ever, and that the prophecy of his hand was
coming to fulfilment.

He stayed a moment longer, and asked if he could be of any service to
her or Madame Bernard. She thanked him vaguely, and almost smiled. He
felt instinctively that she was thinking of what she had last said,
and was wishing that some one would tell her how she might do
something for others, rather than that another should do anything for
her.

She went with him to the door at the head of the stairs and let him
out herself.

'Thank you,' she said, 'thank you! You don't know what you have done
for me!'

He looked at her in thoughtful silence for a few seconds, holding her
hand as if they were old friends.

'There is no such thing as death,' he said gravely.

And with this odd speech he left her and went slowly down the narrow
stone steps; and though she watched him till he disappeared at the
next landing, he did not once turn his head.

When she was in the sitting-room she set the framed picture on a
straight chair near the window and sat down before it in her
accustomed seat; and Durand's last words came back to her again and
again, as if they were begging to be remembered and understood. Her
memory brought with them many exhortations and sayings from the sacred
books, but none of them seemed to mean just what she knew that little
speech of his must mean if she could quite understand it.

She had come to life again unexpectedly, and the spell of her dreadful
solitude was broken. She did not think it strange that her eyes were
dry as she gazed at the well-loved face, while the inner voice told
her that there was 'no such thing as death.' The dead man had done his
duty, and he expected her to do hers until the time came for them to
meet for ever.

In the aimless wandering of her thoughts during the past weeks she had
only understood that he was gone. In an uncounted moment, while she
had been turning over the leaves of a book, or idly talking with
Madame Bernard, or plucking a withered leaf from one of the plants
outside the window, he had been fighting for his life and had lost it.
Perhaps she had been quietly asleep just then. She had heard people
say they were sure that if anything happened to those they dearly
loved, some warning would reach them; she had heard tales of persons
appearing at the moment of their death to those dearest to them, and
even to indifferent people. Such stories were but idle talk, for while
she had been reading the news out to Madame Bernard, she had been
expecting to hear that the expedition was advancing successfully on
its way, she had been wondering what chance there was of getting a
letter from the interior, she had been intimately convinced that
Giovanni was safe, well, and making good progress, when he had been
dead a fortnight.

Madame Bernard had read the details, so far as they were known, but
she had wisely said nothing except that the news was fully confirmed.
Angela herself had refused to touch a newspaper since that day; it had
been enough that he was gone--to know how, or even to guess, would be a
suffering she could not face. What had been found of the poor men who
had perished had been brought home; there had been a great military
funeral for them; their names were inscribed for ever on the roll of
honour. In time, when the political situation changed, an effort would
be made to avenge their death, no doubt; for every man who had been
murdered a hundred would be slain, or more, if possible, till even a
Scythian might feel satisfied that their angry spirits were appeased
by blood. Angela knew nothing of all this, for she never left the
house except to go to early mass every day, and Madame Bernard never
spoke of the dead man nor of the lost expedition.

When the governess came home, a little after sunset, Angela was still
sitting before the picture, her chin resting on her hand and her elbow
on her knee as she leaned forward to see better in the failing light.
The girl turned her head with a bright smile, and Madame Bernard
started in surprise when she saw the portrait.

'It is he!' she cried. 'It is he, to the very life!'

'Yes,' Angela answered softly, 'it is Giovanni. He has been telling me
that I must do my part, as he did his. He is waiting for me, but I
cannot go to him till my share is done.'

She was gazing at the face again, while Madame Bernard looked from it
to her in undisguised astonishment.

'I do not understand, my dear,' she said very gently. 'Who has brought
you this wonderful picture?'

She hardly expected an explanation, and she guessed that the portrait
was Durand's work, for few living painters could have made such a
likeness, and none would have painted it in that way, which was
especially his own. To her surprise Angela turned on her chair without
rising, and told her just what had happened, since he had come in
early in the afternoon bringing the picture with him. When she had
finished she turned to it again, as if there were nothing more to be
said, and at that moment Coco began to talk in a tone that made
further conversation impossible. Madame Bernard took him on her hand
and disappeared with him.

When she came back, Angela was standing on a chair holding up the
portrait with both hands and trying to hang it by the inner edge of
the frame on an old nail she had found already driven into the wall.
Madame Bernard at once began to help her, as if not at all surprised
at her sudden energy, though it seemed nothing less than miraculous.

They succeeded at last, and both got down from their chairs and drew
back two steps to judge of the effect.

'It is a little too high,' Angela said thoughtfully. To-morrow I will
get a cord and two rings to screw into the frame at the back, and then
we will hang it just as it should be.'

'Perhaps we could put it in a better light,' Madame Bernard suggested.
'The room is so dark now that one cannot judge of that.'

'He must be where he can see me,' Angela said.

Her friend looked puzzled, and the young girl smiled again, quite
naturally.

'I am not dreaming,' she said, as if answering a question not spoken.
'I do not mean that the picture can really see, any more than I
believe that what they call "miraculous images" of saints are the
saints themselves! But when I see the eyes of the portrait looking
straight at me, I feel that he himself must see me, from where he is;
and he will see me do my part, as he has done his. At least, I hope I
may.'

She went to her own room, and Madame Bernard followed her to light the
little lamp for her as she had always done of late. But to-day Angela
insisted on doing it herself.

'You must not wait on me any more,' said the girl. 'I have been very
idle for weeks, but I did not understand, and you will forgive me,
because you are so good and kind.'

'You are a little angel, my dear!' cried Madame Bernard, much
affected. 'They did right to name you Angela!'

But Angela shook her head, as she put the paper shade over the cheap
lamp, and then went to the window to close the inner shutters before
drawing the chintz curtains.

'I have been a very useless little angel,' she answered, 'and I am
sorry for it. But I mean to do better now, and you will help me, won't
you?'

'That is all I ask! But to tell the truth, I was discouraged to-day,
and I have been to ask the advice of a very good man. There! I have
told you, and I am glad of it, because I hate secrets! He has promised
to come and see you, and talk to you, but now that you are yourself
again----' She stopped, as if embarrassed.

'Who is he?' asked Angela with a shade of distrust. 'A priest?'

'Please do not be angry!' Madame Bernard began to repent of what she
had done. 'I was so much distressed--I felt that you were slipping out
of the world day by day, just dying of a broken heart, so I went to
see him this afternoon.'

'I am not going to die,' Angela said confidently. 'Who is he? I think
I know at last what I must do, without the advice of a priest. But
tell me who he is.'

'He is such a good man, my dear--Monsignor Saracinesca.'

'That is different,' Angela said, changing her tone at once. 'I shall
be very glad to see Monsignor Saracinesca. He is a real saint, if
there is one living.'




CHAPTER VII


There is a religious house in Rome, beyond the Tiber and not far from
Porta Portese, which I will call the Convent of the White Sisters of
Santa Giovanna d'Aza. Their order is a branch of a great and ancient
one, though it has not had a separate existence a very long time. The
convent contains one of the best private hospitals in Italy, and the
Sisters also go out as trained nurses, like those of several other
orders. But they do something more, which the others do not; for
almost every year two or three, or even four of them go out to the Far
East to work in the leper hospitals which missionaries have
established in Rangoon and elsewhere; and a good many have gone in the
last ten years, but few will ever return.

The convent is much larger than any one would suppose who judged
merely from the uninteresting stuccoed wall which faces the quiet
street, and in which there are a few plain windows without shutters
and a large wooden door, painted a dull green. This door, which is the
main entrance, is opened and shut by the portress as often as a
hundred times a day and more; but when it is open there is nothing to
be seen within but a dark vestibule paved with flagstones; and the
portress's wooden face is no more prepossessing than the wall itself.
If any one asks her a question, she answers civilly in a businesslike
tone, with a hard foreign accent, for she is the widow of one of the
Swiss Guards at the Vatican; but she is naturally silent, stolid,
mechanical, and trustworthy. She is a lay sister and is called Sister
Anna, and she lives in a small room on the left of the vestibule, as
you go in, five steps above the stone pavement. She is very rarely
relieved from her duties for a few hours at a time, and all the
patients must pass her when they enter or leave the house, as well as
the doctors, and the visitors whose smart carriages and motor cars
often stand waiting in the narrow street. Fifty times a day, perhaps,
the door-bell rings and Sister Anna deliberately flaps down the five
steps in her heavily-soled slippers to admit one person or another,
and fifty times, again, she flaps down to let them out again. The
reason why she does not go mad or become an imbecile is that she is
Swiss. That, at least, is how it strikes the celebrated surgeon,
Professor Pieri, who is at the convent very often because he has many
of his patients brought there to be operated on and nursed.

The truth is that the hospital is a thoroughly modern one, which has
been built as an extension of buildings that date from the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. It is managed on soundly scientific
principles, without the least fuss, or any 'board of trustees' or
'committee of management,' or any of that cumbrous administration
which makes so many public hospitals as intricate as labyrinths, only
to be threaded with a clue of red tape, and proportionately
unpractical.

There is a still and sunny garden within, surrounded by a wide and dry
cloister, above which the ancient building rises only one story on the
three sides of the square; but on the fourth side, which looks towards
the sun at noon, there are three stories, which have been built
lately, and the hospital wards are in that wing, one above the other.
On the opposite side, a door opens from the cloister to the choir of
the church, which has also an outer entrance from the street, now
rarely used; for the chaplain comes and goes through the cloister, the
vestibule, and the green door where the portress is.

Beyond her lodge there is a wide hall, with clerestory windows and
glass doors opening to the cloister and the garden; and from this hall
the hospital itself is reached by a passage through which all the
patients are taken. The Mother Superior's rooms are those above the
cloister on the further side of the garden, and have three beautiful
thirteenth century windows divided by pairs of slender columns, so
that each window has two little arches.

In the middle of the garden there is an old well with three arches of
carved stone that spring from three pillars and meet above the centre
of the well-head, and the double iron chain runs over a wheel, and has
two wrought copper buckets, one at each end of it; but the water is
now used only for watering the flowers. There are stone seats round
the well, too, on which three old nuns often sit and sun themselves on
fine days. They are the last of the Sisters of the old time, when
there was no hospital and no training school, and the nuns used to do
anything in the way of nursing that was asked of them by rich or poor,
with a good heart and a laudable intention, but without even the
simplest elements of modern prophylaxis, because it had not been
invented then. For that has all been discovered quite recently, as we
older men can remember only too well.

There are many roses in the garden, and where there is most sun there
is a large bed of carnations, but not of the finer sorts; they are
just plain red and white ones, that fill the air with a scent of warm
cloves on still mornings in the late spring, when it is beginning to
be hot. But if this description has seemed tedious, you must know that
Angela lived in the convent and worked there for five whole years
after Giovanni was lost in Africa; so that it was needful to say
something about her surroundings.

An accomplished psychologist would easily fill a volume with the
history of Angela's soul from the day on which she learned the bad
news till the morning when she made her profession and took the final
vows of her order in the little convent church. But one great
objection to psychological analysis in novels seems to be that the
writer never gets beyond analysing what he believes that he himself
would have felt if placed in the 'situation' he has invented for his
hero or heroine. Thus analysed, Angela Chiaromonte would not have
known herself, any more than those who knew her best, such as Madame
Bernard and her aunt the Princess, would have recognised her. I shall
not try to 'factorise' the result represented by her state of mind
from time to time; still less shall I employ a mathematical process to
prove that the ratio of _dx_ to _dy_ is twice _x_, the change in
Angela at any moment of her moral growth.

What has happened must be logical, just because it has happened; if we
do not understand the logic, that may or may not be the worse for us,
but the facts remain.

It is easy, too, to talk of a 'vocation' and to lay down the law
regarding it, in order to say that such and such a woman acted wisely
in entering a religious order, or that such another made a mistake.
The fact that there is no such law is itself the reason why neither a
man nor a woman is permitted nowadays to take permanent vows until
after a considerable period of probation, first as a 'postulant' and
then as a novice.

For my own part, when Angela Chiaromonte left Madame Bernard's
pleasant rooms in Trastevere and went into the convent hospital of
Santa Giovanna d'Aza through the green door, I do not believe that she
had the very smallest intention of becoming a nun, nor that she felt
anything like what devout persons call a 'vocation.' It was not to
disappear from the world for ever that she went there, and it was not
in order to be alone with her sorrow, though that would have been a
natural and human impulse; nor was it because she felt herself drawn
to an existence of asceticism and mystic meditation.

The prospect of work was what attracted her. She was a perfectly
healthy-minded girl, and though she might never cease to mourn the man
she had loved, it was to be foreseen that in all other respects she
might recover entirely from the terrible shock and live out a normal
life. Under ordinary circumstances that is what would have happened;
she would have gone back to the world after a time, outwardly the
same, though inwardly changed in so far as all possibilities of love
and marriage were concerned; she would have lived in society, year
after year, growing old gracefully and tenderly, as some unmarried
women do whose stories we never knew or have forgotten, but whose
hearts are far away, watching for the great To-morrow, beside a dead
man's grave, or praying before an altar whence the god has departed.
They are women whom we never call 'old maids,' perhaps because we feel
that in memory they are sharing their lives with a well-loved
companion whom we cannot see. That might have been Angela's future.

But a brutal fact put such a possibility out of the question. She was
a destitute orphan, living on the charity of her former governess,
whereas her nature was independent, brave, and self-reliant. When she
rose above the wave that had overwhelmed her, and opened her eyes and
found her senses again, her instinct was to strike out for herself,
and though she talked with Monsignor Saracinesca again and again, she
had really made up her mind after her first conversation with him. She
saw that she must work for her living, but at the same time she longed
to devote her life to some good work for Giovanni's sake. The
churchman told her that if she could learn to nurse the sick, she
might accomplish both ends.

He never suggested that she should become a nun, or take upon herself
any permanent obligation. He had seen much of human nature; the girl
was very young, and perhaps he underrated the strength of her love for
the dead man, and thought that she might yet marry happily and live a
normal woman's life. But there was no reason why she should not become
a trained nurse in the meantime, and there was room for her in the
nuns' hospital of Saint Joan of Aza, an institution which owes its
first beginnings and much of its present success to the protection of
the Saracinesca family, and more particularly to the Princess herself,
the beautiful Donna Corona of other days, and to her second son,
Monsignor Ippolito. The hospital was always in need of young nurses,
especially since a good many of the older ones were going to the Far
East, and when there was a choice the Mother Superior gave the
preference to applicants from the better classes.

The matter was therefore settled without difficulty, and Angela was
soon installed in the tiny room which remained her cell for years
afterwards. It contained a narrow iron bedstead, and during the day a
small brass cross always lay on the white coverlet; there was a chest
of drawers, a minute table on which stood an American nickeled alarum
clock; there was one rush-bottomed chair, and the only window looked
westwards over the low city wall towards Monteverde, where the powder
magazine used to stand before it was blown up. The window was latticed
half-way up, which did not hinder Angela from seeing the view when she
had time to look at it.

She wore a plain grey frock at first, but when she was in the wards it
was quite covered by the wide white cotton garment which all the
nurses wore when on duty. Occasionally Madame Bernard came and took
her for a walk, and sometimes she went out on an errand with one of
the nuns; but she did not care very much for that, possibly because
she was not under any restraint. The beautiful enclosed garden was
wide and sunny, and she could generally be alone there; when the
weather was fine she could wander about between the beds of roses and
carnations or sit on a bench, and if it rained she could walk up and
down under the cloisters. The three old nuns who came out to sun
themselves paid no attention to her, beyond nodding rather shakily
when she bent her head to them in respectful salutation. They had seen
more than a hundred girls enter the convent, to work and grow old like
themselves, and one more neither made any difference to them nor
possessed for them the least interest. That strange petrifaction had
begun in them which overtakes all very old monks and nuns who have
never had very active minds. From doing the same things, with no
appreciable variation, at the same hours for fifty, sixty, and even
seventy years, they become so perfectly mechanical that their bodies
are always in one of a limited number of attitudes, less and less
pronounced as great age advances, till they at last cease to move at
all and die, as the hands of a clock stop when it has run down.

But the three old nuns belonged to a past generation, and it was not
probable that the younger Sisters would ever be like them. The Mother
Superior was a small and active woman, with quick black eyes, a
determined mouth, and a strangely pale face. She seemed to be
incapable of being tired. Among themselves the novices called her the
little white volcano. When the one who had invented the epithet
repeated it to Monsignor Saracinesca in confession, and he gently told
her that it was wrong to speak disrespectfully of her superior, she
rather pertly asked him whether any one who lived under a volcano
could fail to 'respect' it; whereat he shook his head gravely inside
the confessional, but his spiritual mouth twitched with amusement, in
spite of himself. The four novices were inclined to distrust Angela at
first, however, as she was not even a postulant, and it was not till
she became one of themselves that she was initiated into their
language.

It was not long before this took place, however. From the first, she
showed a most unusual aptitude in learning the mechanical part of her
profession, and her extraordinary memory made it easy for her to
remember the lectures which were given for the nurses three times a
week, generally by the house surgeon, but occasionally by the great
Doctor Pieri, who had been a pupil of Basini of Padua and was a
professor in the University of Rome. He showed especial interest in
Angela, and the pert little novice wickedly suggested that he was
falling in love with her; but the truth was that he at once
distinguished in her the natural gifts which were soon to make her the
most valuable nurse at his disposal.

The Mother Superior expected that she would become vain and gave her
some energetic lectures on the evils of conceit. There was a sort of
fury of good about the pale woman that carried everything before it.
She was just, but her righteous anger was a ready firebrand, and when
it burst into flame, as often happened, her eloquence was
extraordinary. Her face might have been carved out of white ice, but
her eyes glowed like coals and her words came low, quick, and clear,
and wonderfully to the point. As a girl, her temper had been terrific,
and had estranged her from her own family; but her unconquerable will
had forged it into a weapon that never failed her in a just cause and
was never drawn in an unjust one. Monsignor Saracinesca sometimes
thought that Saint Paul must have had the same kind of fiery and
fearless temperament.

It sometimes outran facts, if it always obeyed her intention, as
happened one day when she privately gave Angela a sermon on vanity
which would have made the other novices tremble at the time and feel
very uncomfortable for several days afterwards. When she had wound up
her peroration and finished, she drew two or three fierce little
breaths and scrutinised the young girl's face; but to her surprise it
had not changed in the least. The clear young eyes were as steady and
quiet as ever; if they expressed anything, it was a quiet admiration
which the older woman had not hitherto roused in the younger members
of her community.

'Pray for me, Mother,' Angela said, 'and I will try to be less vain.'

The other looked at her again very keenly, and then, instead of
answering, asked a question.

'Why do you wish to be a nun?'

Angela had lately asked herself the same thing, but she replied with
some diffidence:

'If I can do a little good, by working very hard all my life, I hope
that it may be allowed to help the soul of a person who died
suddenly.'

The Mother Superior's white face softened a little.

'That is a good intention,' she said. 'If it is sincere and lasting,
you will be a good nun. You may begin your noviciate on Sunday if you
have made up your mind.'

'I am ready.'

'Very well. I have only one piece of advice to give you, and perhaps I
shall remind you of it often, for it was given to me very late, and I
should have been the better for it. Try to remember what I tell you.'

'I will remember, Mother.'

'It is this. Count your failures but not your successes. You cannot
surprise God by the amount of good you do. There are girls who enter
upon the noviciate just as hard-working students go up for an
examination, hoping to astonish their examiners by the amount they
know. That is well enough at the university, but it is all wrong in
religion. Work how you will, you cannot be perfect, and, if you were,
you could only be what God made man before sin came. Each student is
trying to beat all the others, and one succeeds. We are not trying to
outdo each other; there are no marks in our examination and there is
no competition. We are working together to save life in a world where
millions die for want of care. To do less than the best we can is
failure, for each of us, and the best we can all do together is very
little compared with all there is to be done. Faith, Hope, and Charity
are all we have to help us, all we can ask of Heaven. Believe, hope,
and help others while you live, and all will go well hereafter, never
fear! Not to help, not to believe, not to hope, even during one
moment, is to fail in that moment. Where the sum is light, it is easy
to count the dark places, but not the light itself. That is what I
mean, my daughter, when I say, keep account of your failures but not
of your successes. Try to remember it.'

'Indeed I will,' Angela answered.

She went back to her work, and the Mother Superior's words thereafter
became the rule of her life; but she was not sent for again to listen
to a lecture on vanity, and the small White Volcano was inclined to
think that it had made a mistake in breaking out, and inwardly offered
a conditional apology.

Angela worked hard, and made such progress that before the two years
of her noviciate were over Doctor Pieri said openly that she was the
best surgical nurse in the hospital, and one of the best for ordinary
illnesses, considering how limited her experience had been. The
nursing of wounds is more mechanical than the nursing of a fever, for
instance, and can be sooner learned by a beginner, where the surgeon
himself is always at hand. On the other hand, the value of surgical
nursing depends on relative perfection of detail and rigorous
adherence to the set rules of prophylaxis, whereas other nursing often
requires that judgment which only experience can give. Surgery is a
fine art that has reached a high degree of development in the
treatment of facts, about which good surgeons are generally right. A
great deal of noise is made over surgeons' occasional mistakes, which
are advertised by their detractors, but we hear little of their steady
and almost constant success. Medicine, on the other hand, must very
often proceed by guesswork; but for that very reason it covers up its
defects more anxiously, and is more inclined to talk loudly of its
victories. Every great physician admits that a good deal of his
science is psychological; and psychology deals with the unknown, or
with what is only partially knowable. A mathematician may smile and
answer that 'infinity' is much more than partially 'unknowable,' but
that, by using it, the differential calculus gives results of most
amazing accuracy, and is such a simple affair that, if its mere name
did not inspire terror, any fourth-form schoolboy could easily be made
to understand it, and even taught to use it. What we call the soul may
be infinite or infinitesimal, or finite, or it may be the Hegelian
Nothing, which is Pure Being under another name; whatever it is, our
acquaintance with it is not knowledge of it, since whatever we can
find out about it is based on the Criticism exercised by Pure Reason
and not on experience; and the information which Pure Reason gives us
about the soul is not categorical but antinomial; and by the time
medicine gets into these transcendental regions, consciously or
unconsciously, it ceases to be of much practical use in curing
'pernicious anaemia' or any similarly obscure disease.

All this digression only explains why Angela was a better nurse in
surgical cases than in ordinary illnesses after she had been two years
in training; but that circumstance is connected with what happened to
her later, as will be clear in due time.

In most respects she changed very little, so far as any one could see.
No one in the convent knew how she hoped against all reason, during
those two years, that Giovanni might yet be heard of, though there was
not the least ground for supposing that he could have escaped when all
the others had perished; and indeed, while she still hoped, she felt
that it was very foolish, and when she had a long talk with Monsignor
Saracinesca before taking the veil, she did not even speak of such a
possibility.

She had long ago decided that she would take the veil at the
expiration of the two years, but she wished to define her position
clearly to the three persons whom she cared for and respected most.
These were Madame Bernard, Monsignor Saracinesca, and the Mother
Superior, whose three characters were as different as it would have
been possible to pick out amongst the acquaintance of a lifetime.

Angela asked permission to go with Madame Bernard to the cemetery of
San Lorenzo, where a monument marked the grave of those who had fallen
in the expedition. It was a large square pillar of dark marble,
surmounted by a simple bronze cross. On the four sides there were
bronze tablets, on which were engraved the names of the officers and
men, and that of Giovanni Severi was second, for he had been the
second in command.

No one was near and Angela knelt down upon the lowest of the three
steps that formed the base. After a moment Madame Bernard knelt beside
her. The novice's eyes were fixed on the bronze tablet and her lips
did not move. Her companion watched her furtively, expecting to see
some sign of profound emotion, or of grief controlled, or at least the
shadow of a quiet sadness. But there was nothing, and after two or
three minutes Angela rose deliberately, went up the remaining steps,
and pressed her lips upon the first letters of Giovanni's name. She
turned and descended the steps with a serene expression, as Madame
Bernard got up from her knees.

'Death was jealous of me,' Angela said.

She had never heard of Erinna; she did not know that a maiden poetess
had made almost those very words immortal in one lovely broken line
that has come down to us from five and twenty centuries ago. In the
Everlasting Return they fell again from a maiden's lips, but they
roused no response; Madame Bernard took them for a bit of girlish
sentiment, and scarcely heeded them, while she wondered at Angela's
strangely calm manner.

They walked back slowly along the straight way between the tombs.

'I loved him living and I love him dead,' said the young novice
slowly. 'He cannot come back to me, but some day I may go to him.'

'Yes,' answered Madame Bernard without conviction.

The next world had always seemed very vague to her; and besides, poor
Giovanni had been a soldier, and she knew something of military men,
and wondered where they went when they died.

'You are a very good woman,' Angela continued, following her own train
of thought; 'do you think it is wrong for a nun to love a dead man?'

'Dear me!' exclaimed the little Frenchwoman in some surprise. 'How can
one love a man who is dead? It is impossible; consequently it is not
wrong!'

Angela looked at her quickly and then walked on.

'There is no such thing as death,' she said.

It was Filmore Durand's odd speech that had come back to her often
during two years; when she repeated it to herself she saw his portrait
of Giovanni, which still hung in Madame Bernard's sitting-room, and
presently it was not a picture seen in memory, but Giovanni himself.

Madame Bernard shrugged her shoulders and smiled vaguely.

'Death is a fact,' she said prosaically. 'It is the reason why we
cannot live for ever!'

The reason was not convincing to Angela, but as she saw no chance of
being understood, she went back to the starting-point.

'Then you do not think it can possibly be wrong for a nun to love some
one who is dead?' she asked, her tone turning the statement into a
question.

'Of course not!' cried the governess almost impatiently. 'You might as
well think yourself in love with his tombstone and then fancy it a
sin!'

So one of Angela's three friends had answered her question very
definitely. The answer was not worthless, because Madame Bernard was a
very honest, matter-of-fact woman; on the contrary, it represented a
practical opinion, and that is always worth having, though the view it
defines may be limited. Angela did not try to explain further what she
had meant, and Madame Bernard always avoided subjects she could not
understand. The two chatted pleasantly about other things as they
returned to the convent, and the little Frenchwoman trotted
contentedly back to her lodgings, feeling that the person she loved
best in the world was certain to turn out a very good and happy nun.

Angela was not yet so sure of this, and she took the first opportunity
of consulting Monsignor Saracinesca. They sat and talked together on
one of the stone seats in the cloistered garden. He is a tall, thin
man, with a thoughtful face and a quiet manner. In his youth he was
once entangled in the quarrels of a Sicilian family, as I have
narrated elsewhere, and behaved with great heroism. After that, he
laboured for many years as a simple parish priest in a fever-plagued
district, and he only consented to return to Rome when he realised
that his health was gravely impaired.

Angela put her question with her usual directness and watched his
face. He knew her story, so that there was nothing to explain.

'Is it wrong to love him still?' she asked.

But Monsignor Ippolito did not speak until his silence had lasted so
long that Angela was a little frightened; not that he had any real
doubt as to her intention, but because it was his duty to examine such
a case of conscience in all its aspects.

'What does your own instinct tell you?' he asked at last.

'That it will not be wrong,' Angela answered with conviction. 'But I
may be mistaken. That is why I come to you for advice.'

Again the churchman mused in silence for a while.

'I will tell you what I think,' he said, when he had made up his mind.
'There is a condition, which depends only on yourself, and of which
you are the only judge. You ask my advice, but I can only show you how
to ask it of your own heart. If your love for the man who is gone
looks forward, prays and hopes, it will help you; if it looks back
with tears for what might have been and with longing for what can
never be, it will hinder you. More than that I cannot say.'

'I look forward,' Angela answered confidently. 'I pray and I hope.'

'If you are sure of that, you are safe,' said Monsignor Saracinesca.
'No one but yourself can know.'

'I began to work here hoping and praying that if I could do any good
at all it might help him, wherever he is,' Angela went on. 'That is
the only vocation I ever felt, and now I wish to take the veil because
I think that as a professed nun I may be able to use better what
little I have learned in two years and a half than if I stay on as a
lay sister. It is not for myself, except in so far as I know that the
only way to help him is to do my best here. As I hope that God may be
merciful to him, so I hope that God will accept my work, my prayers,
and my faith.'

The prelate looked at the delicate face and earnest eyes, and the
quietly spoken words satisfied him and a little more. There could be
nothing earthly in such love as that, he was sure, and such simple
faith would not be disappointed. It was not the first time in his
experience as a priest that he had known and talked with a woman from
whom sudden death had wrenched the man she loved, or whom inevitable
circumstances had divided from him beyond all hope of reunion; but he
had never heard one speak just as Angela spoke, nor seen that look in
another face. He was convinced, and felt that he could say nothing
against her intention.

But she herself was not absolutely sure even then, and she went to the
Mother Superior that evening to ask her question for the last time.
The Mother was seated at her writing-table, and one strong electric
lamp shed its vivid light from under a perfectly dark shade upon the
papers that lay under her hand and scattered before her--bills,
household accounts, doctors' and nurses' reports, opened telegrams,
humble-looking letters written on ruled paper and smart notes in
fashionable handwritings. People who imagine that the Mother Superior
of a nursing order which has branches in many parts of the world
spends her time in meditation and prayer are much mistaken.

'Sit down,' said the small white volcano, without looking up or
lifting her thin forefinger from the column of figures she was
checking.

The room would have been very dark but for the light which the white
paper reflected upwards upon the nun's whiter face, and into the dark
air. Angela sat down at a distance as she was bidden, and waited some
minutes, till the Mother Superior had set her initials at the foot of
the sheet with a blue pencil, and raised her face to peer into the
gloom.

'Who is it?' she asked in a businesslike tone, still dazzled by the
light.

'I am Angela, Mother. May I ask you a question?'

'Yes.'

The voice had changed even in that single word, and was kind and
encouraging.

'Two years ago, before I became a novice, you asked me why I wanted to
be a nun, Mother. You thought my intention was good. Now that there is
still time before I make my profession, I have come to ask you once
again what you think.'

'So far as I know, I think you can be a good nun,' answered the Mother
Superior without waiting to hear more, for she never wasted time if
she could possibly help it.

Angela understood her and told her story quickly and clearly, without
a quiver or an inflection of pain in her voice. It was necessary, for
the Mother did not know it all, and listened with concentrated
attention. But before it was ended she had made up her mind what to
say.

'My dear child,' said she, 'I am not your confessor! And besides, I am
prejudiced, for you are a good nurse and I need you and wish you to
stay. Do you feel that there is any reason why you should be less
conscientious than you have been so far, if you promise to go on
working with us as long as you live?'

'No,' Angela answered.

'Or that there is any reason why you should have less faith in God,
less hope of heaven, or less charity towards your fellow-creatures if
you promise to give your whole life to God, in nursing those who
suffer, with the hope of salvation hereafter?'

'No, I do not feel that there can be any reason.'

'Then do not torment yourself with any more questions, for life is too
short! To throw away time is to waste good, and save evil. Believe
always, and then work with all your might! Work, work, work! Work done
for God's sake is prayer to God, and a thousand hours on your knees
are not worth as much as one night spent in helping a man to live--or
to die--when you are so tired that you can hardly stand, and every bone
in your body aches, and you are half-starved too! Work for every one
who needs help, spare every one but yourself, think of every one
before yourself. It is easy to do less than your best, it is
impossible to do more, and yet you must try to do more, always more,
till the end! That should be a nun's life.'

The Mother Superior had led that life till it was little less than a
miracle that she was still alive herself, and altogether a wonder that
her fiery energy had not eaten up the small frail earthly part of her
long ago.

'But it must not be for the sake of the end,' she went on, before
Angela could speak, 'else you will be working only for the hope of
rest, and you will try to kill yourself with work, to rest the sooner!
You must think of what you are doing because it is for others, not for
what it will bring you by and by, God willing. Pray to live long and
to do much more before you die, if it be good; for there is no end of
the sickness and suffering and pain in this world; but few are willing
to help, and fewer still know how!'

She was silent, but her eyes were speaking still as Angela saw them
looking at her over the shaded light, her pale features illuminated
only by the soft reflection from the paper on the table.

The young girl felt a deep and affectionate admiration for her, and
resolved never to forget the brave words, but to treasure them with
those others spoken two years ago: 'Count your failures but not your
successes.'

She rose to take her leave, and, standing before the writing-table,
with each hand hidden in the opposite sleeve, she bent her head
respectfully.

'Thank you, Mother,' she said.

The nun nodded gravely, still looking at her, but said nothing more,
and Angela left the room, shutting the door without noise. The Mother
Superior did not go back to her accounts at once, though her hand
mechanically drew the next sheet from the pile, so that it lay ready
before her. She was thinking of her own beginnings, more than twenty
years ago, and comparing her own ardent nature with what she knew of
Angela's: and then, out of her great experience of character, a doubt
arose and troubled her strangely, though she opposed it as if it had
been a temptation to injustice, or at least to ungenerous thinking. It
was a suspicion that such marvellous calm as this novice showed could
not be all real; that there was something not quite explicable about
her perfect submission, humility, and obedience; that under the
saintly exterior a fire might be smouldering which would break out
irresistibly some day, and not for good.

The woman who had been tried doubted the untried novice. Perhaps it
was nothing more than that, and natural enough; but it was very
disturbing, because she also felt herself strongly attached to Angela,
and to suspect her seemed not only unfair, but disloyal. Yet it was
the bounden duty of the Mother to study the characters of all who
lived under her authority and direction, and to forestall their
possible shortcomings by a warning, an admonition, or an encouraging
word, as the case might be.

She had done what she could, but she was dissatisfied with herself;
and at the very moment when Angela was inwardly repeating her stirring
words and committing them to memory for her lifetime, the woman who
had spoken them was tormented by the thought that she had not said
half enough, or still worse, that she had perhaps made a mistake
altogether. For the first time since she had fought her first great
battle with herself, she had the sensation of being near a mysterious
force of nature which she did not understand; but she had been twenty
years younger then, and the present issue was not to depend on her own
strength but on another's, and it involved the salvation of another's
soul.

It was long before she bent over the columns of figures again, yet she
did not reproach herself with having wasted time. The first of all her
many duties, and the most arduous, was to think for others; to work
for them was a hundred times easier and was rest and refreshment by
contrast.

Angela would have been very much surprised if she could have known
what was passing in the Mother Superior's mind, while she herself felt
nothing but relief and satisfaction because her decision had now
become irrevocable. If she had been bidden to wait another year, she
would have waited patiently and without a murmur, because she could
not be satisfied with anything less than apparent certainty; but
instead, she had been encouraged to take the final step, after which
there could be no return.

That was the inevitable. Human destiny is most tragic when the men and
women concerned are doing their very utmost to act bravely and
uprightly, while each is in reality bringing calamity on the other.

Acting on the only evidence she had a right to trust, the Mother
Superior knew that she would not be justified in hindering Angela from
taking the veil. Few had ever done so well in the noviciate, none had
ever done better, and her natural talent for the profession of nursing
was altogether unusual. There had never been one like her in the
hospital. As for her character, she seemed to have no vanity, no
jealousy, no temper, no moodiness. The Mother had never known such an
even and well-balanced disposition as hers. Would it have been wise to
keep her back longer, because she seemed too perfect? Would it have been
just? Would it not, indeed, have been very wrong to risk discouraging
her, now that she was quite ready? She was almost twenty-one years old
and had taken no step hastily. More than two years and a half had passed
since she had entered the convent, and in all that time no one had been
able to detect the smallest fault in her, either of weakness or of
hastiness, still less of anything like the pride she might actually have
felt in her superiority. To keep her back now would be to accuse
perfection of being imperfect; it would be as irrational as to call
excellence a failing. More than that, it would have a bad effect on the
whole community, a danger which could not be overlooked.

Three years later, the Mother understood the warning doubt that had
assailed her; and when a precious life was in the

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