That she would have done for me, I think, though they racked her to confess; and all might yet have gone well, had not the Lady Sophia, meddlesome like most self-righteous consciences, sent for her to question if, after all, her simple verses might not have been the instinctive expression of her leaning towards the cloister. My poor transparent angel managed to articulate a panic denial of any such tendency; though, indeed, there was no need to, to any but a blindworm. If ever little maid was built for loving, or to lay her pretty hair in a puddle for some rogue to reach heaven by, it was she. The sense of guilt would confound her, however; and, what between her duty to madam and her loyalty to me, she must have answered her examination so ambiguously as to raise some new doubts and suspicions in the minds of her inquisitors.
She flew back to me with very red eyes, and a fresh horror of the imposition she was forced to practise.
“I will never, never tell,” she sobbed, “though they tear me to pieces. But O, Diana! I don’t want to be a nun.”
I comforted her, though furious with the others for their Jesuitical practices on her innocence.
“Wait,” I cried, “and I will pay them both out! What right had they, after what I said, to try and torture a lie out of you? Don’t fear for the convent, child. I pledge my word you shall have a husband and fifty children, nun or no nun.”
“I want no husband,” she answered, blushing and clinging to me, “and no lover but you.”
I have taken pains to record her fond little reply, in view of an odious charge, once concocted to my injury, of my having traded upon my friend’s faith in me to rob her heart of its dearest possession. That, indeed, was, then and always, no less than her loved Diana, of whom none was ever permitted by her to take precedence. Any sacrifice which was designed to maintain those mutual relations she thought too cheap for discussion.
One result, however, of her “questioning” was that madam’s attitude towards me was thenceforth marked by a reserve and jealousy which, inasmuch as I was unconscious of having done anything to merit it, served only to prejudice me against a religion which could be used for a cloak to so much hypocrisy. I grew quickly disenamoured of my supposed vocation, and decided that faith, which seemed largely a matter of digestion, could be better realised through independence. In short, in the world I could reach beatitude through twenty self-indulgences to one in the convent; and, such being the case, and my constitution perfect, it seemed folly to take the short way.
Madam seized an early opportunity after this to inquire into my plans for retiring from the world and taking the veil. I confessed to her, in reply, that her late suspicions had engendered in me thoughts, a sense of grievance, inimical to my right contemplation of so momentous a sacrifice. She was very much shocked and troubled, and recommended me a stricter observance of all those self-obliterating virtues which are such a comfort to those who don’t practise them. She rebuked my pride; she prescribed fasting and discipline and maceration—tortures which would have killed a dray-man—in order to lower and submit my system to its final severance from the world. She would have had me at her mercy before she drove in the knife; only, unluckily for her, my constitution was impregnable. It flourished equally whether on bread and water or vol au vent; and, finally, she surrendered to it. I rather liked a little pious game we played, called the Moral Lotto, in which the discs were sins, and those left uncovered at the end entailed an obligation on the losers to maintain a particular guard against the temptations they expressed. Though we all, in the end, must have been warned through the calendar, from simony to powder-puffs, I believe the contest was so sanctified to her by intention that she read a design of Heaven in every missing counter; and the fact that I generally won, did more than many assurances to convince her that I was perhaps after all not so black as she had painted me.
But, between me and Father Pope, after that little malentendu, there was no quarter asked or given. He treated me with a persistent coarse rudeness, and I retaliated with all the interest of wit I dared. I dropped blobs of wax on his spectacles; left his Hagiology open under a drip from the ceiling; put crumbs of cheese in his cabinets of moth to tempt the mice in; and confessed his own most obvious sins to him as mine, for which I accepted furious penances as meekly as a lamb. He hated me, and I contrived at least to give him a substantial reason for such an abuse of his cloth.