“Good-night, Fanchette!”
“Good-night, your Highness, and fruitful dreams.”
The alcove where the Infanta slept had in it a little dim hanging lamp, which burnt all night. It was enough and no more to betray in shadowy contour the half-visionary sweetness of the face upon the pillow, the rounded shoulder, the waxen hand. She lay, on this night, so still, she hardly seemed to breathe. She was listening, her lips just parted, to the sounds in the great house dying away in the distance one by one. The last door boomed its remote thunder; the step of a sentry passed beneath her window, and attenuated and ceased; a profound stillness reigned everywhere. Then, sitting up, she sat thrilling a moment, and slid softly from her bed. Listening again, as if half fearful of what her own longing might bring upon her, she crept barefooted, in her ghostly night-robe, to the table where her treasure lay, and knelt, and put her arms about it, and buried her face in the fragrant leaves.
“My baby,” she whispered—“open, open your pretty eyes, and make me happy. Did I deny you? It was for love’s sake and your father’s, most dear. He would tell you so if he were here.”
CHAPTER XIV.
CONFESSION
Somewhere I have read or heard of a marine invertebrate, which, when its stomach disturbs it, throws the oppressive thing away and gets a new one. It is a beautifully simple solution of the problem of life—which problem unquestionably has its centre in those regions—and as triumphant in its utter banality as the method of Columbus with his egg or of Alexander with his Gordian knot. Without doubt, if man had been constructed on that principle, his history would have needed not a thousandth part of the apology which is now a necessary accompaniment of its recital. The myriad ills attendant on digestion, the brutalities, the tremors and the hallucinations, would have entirely lacked their excuse. Conceive the practical humour of the statement that one had no stomach for an enterprise; conceive such a solution of the saturnalian difficulty as Vitellius never dreamed. A permanent and undetachable stomach was certainly the actual curse which Satan inflicted on mankind.
The nearest approach to this impossibly beatific condition consists, as popularised by the Catholic and Universal Church, in throwing away one’s conscience and getting a new one. The priest conducts the process, and the medium is the confessional. Therein the distressing load may be cast, and therefrom the patient be discharged re-equipped. It has all the efficacy of the other, though at the same time hardly its simplicity. For one thing, one cannot do it alone by oneself; for another, a dose of penance is conditional on the treatment—usually a trifle, but sufficient to leave a taste in one’s mouth. However, it is a useful alternative.
Fanchette’s conscience did not often oppress her; but, on the rare occasions when it did, there was always this means at hand to rid herself of its burden. She would go to the little church in the village, ring up Father Leone, and empty her reservoir of sins upon that good man’s devoted head. Then, cleansed and chastened, she would come forth in a rare condition for fresh frolics, the first taste whereof would be comparable with that of a cigarette after a Turkish bath.
These moral “drenchings,” however, though easeful in their results, were painful enough in their process to make a resort to them unwelcome. Fanchette had a constitutional dislike to confessing herself guilty of anything—except of the best intentions; and it was only the recognised destination of those abstract virtues which drove her from time to time to appeal to Providence in the matter of their better understanding, so far as she was concerned. It was in some ways, in this connection, a convenience that Father Leone was both old and deaf; that he was, moreover, an absorbed herbalist, and, if the truth must be spoken, far more interested in vegetable physiology than in Christian ethics. Yet again, to accuse oneself to dull ears had its drawbacks, since the self-exposure necessitated could command no consolation of sympathy to ameliorate its own ugly nakedness. On the whole, perhaps, she would have preferred an intent and properly responsive listener; but, since that was not to be had, she must put up with what was. After all, to confess was the thing; and, if the priest was deaf, it was no business of hers to question Providence as to its selection or affliction of its own ministers.
Fanchette’s conscience had been troubling her, and one afternoon Fanchette went across to the church to renew it. She went very staid and unapproachable, paying no heed to the jests of rude men or the quizzings of gossips. A cavalier, walking up the street, espied the demure figure at a distance away, and dodged behind a corner to avoid recognition by it. Peeping thence, he saw the young woman approach the church, and disappear within its portals, when, convinced of her mission, he immediately came forth and followed in pursuit.