“He was full of Society Snippets,” said Murrel in his melancholy voice. “It all began with Lord Seawood dying about a year ago. The property went to his–his heiress, who it seems has ‘gone over’ as the saying is. She’s become a Catholic; and a very extraordinary sort of Catholic too. She has given up all this vast property to my friend the Abbot and his merry men; and gone down to work as a nurse in some Catholic settlement or other down in the Docks; Limehouse, I think, where Chinamen strangle their daughters according to the Twelve Immortal Principles.”
The pale librarian had sprung up with all the energy of knight-errantry; but his look was turned away from the towers of Seawood.
“I hardly understand it yet,” he said, “but it is all different. It is difficult but it is different. It is difficult because it seems strange to . . .”
“It seems strange,” asserted Murrel, “to go down to Limehouse and ask a Chinese strangler for The Honourable Rosamund Severne. But I ought to tell you on the authority of the Abbot, that she declares that her name is not Rosamund Severne. I understand you may find her if you enquire for Miss Smith.”
And at that once more did lunacy strike the librarian of Seawood like lightning out of heaven; and leaping over a hedge he went racing eastwards towards a pinewood that lay across his path, which might be presumed to be on the outskirts of Limehouse and offer opportunities for enquiring after Miss Smith.
It was rather more than three months later that the lunatics’ progress came to its appointed end, and this story with it. Its pace had changed from capering to something more like plodding and to threading the labyrinths of the lowest quarters of Limehouse. But it ended one night when a sort of green fog of dusk hung like the fumes of some drug of witchcraft, as he turned down a crack of narrow street, at the corner of which hung a painted paper lantern. A little further down the dim defile glowed another lantern; which looked less Chinese; and when he came close to it he saw it was a leaden cage fitted with large fragments of coloured glass, the rude outline showing a figure of St. Francis with a burning red angel behind him. Somehow this childish transparency seemed like a password and a signal of all that he had once sought to do on a great scale or Olive Ashley on a small one; and yet with some secret and vivid difference; that the lamp was lit from within.
So much was that great thirst for colour, which had filled his life, fed as from a goblet of flame, by that trivial sign and in this sordid place, that it scarcely surprised him to find himself in her presence, who stood crowned in his dreams as in the melodrama and the tragedy of other days. A straight dark dress hung on her from neck to heel, but it was of a normal pattern; and her red hair still looked like a crown.
With that queer awkward promptitude, that belonged to him alone, he said his simplest thought in plain words, “You are a nurse and not a nun.”
She smiled. “You don’t know much about nuns if you think that is the natural ending of a story–a story like ours. Believe me, there’s nothing in that sentimental notion that being a nun is a second best.”
“Do you really mean,” he said and then stopped.