Just now, however, the evening calm had stolen over her spirit, and she sat lost in thought, her memory, seldom active, going back to the days of her early childhood, as she glanced at the gold cross which she wore constantly round her neck.
Nella could not be said to have forgotten Catalina. She prayed for her morning and evening, and she knew that masses were constantly sung in the convent chapel for her deliverance; but the sorrow of her loss was regarded as too terrible for common speech. A cloud of horror hung over her memory, and Nella, whose simple, healthy nature easily adapted itself to new surroundings, rather shrank from the thought of her. Her father had never fulfilled his promise of coming to England; her nurse had been taken captive with Kate. She could vividly remember the night attack, when she had run out to see what was the matter, and found the others gone on her return, and carrying her thoughts back she could remember different trees and flowers, a house that seemed to her of wonderful splendour, a mother’s kiss, her bluff father’s voice, and, more clearly than anything else, the tall, pale young prince who had given her the jewel round her neck and bid her trust in God.
It must be remembered that though Nella’s memory enabled her to recall orange-trees and pomegranates, strange dresses and customs, and the “Moors” as familiar objects of dread, she never met with any one who had ever seen an orange-tree, or done more than hear of a Moor as a sort of emissary of evil. She had nothing therefore but her own childish impressions to fall back upon, which were confused and blurred, and she invariably pictured Catalina as her own double, grown to the same height, wearing the same clothes, and thinking the same thoughts. But the image seemed as far removed from her as if she had been taught to regard Catalina as among the saints in Paradise. Nella was not imaginative; she did not realise strange conditions; a sort of reserve had always veiled even from her own thoughts the present condition of her twin sister. But her convent life was almost over, and the change in her own existence made her thoughtful.
“I am thirteen,” she thought; “I have made my first communion, perhaps before many years I shall be married; but Catalina—”
Suddenly, for the first time, it came clearly before her mind that Catalina, if alive, could not be in the least like herself, could not be a Christian at all. Nella sprang to her feet and almost cried out as the thought stung her, and for the first time in her life she was seized with the intensest desire to know her sister’s fate; she felt as if she must discover what had become of her, as if the uncertainty so long acquiesced in had become suddenly intolerable to her.
The chapel bell began to ring for vespers; one of the nuns came into the garden and called Nella. She took up her wreath and followed into the chapel, and as she knelt and prayed, the twin sister whom she could no longer picture to herself seemed to call to her out of terrible and unknown darkness.
In the convent chapel, among the oak-wood and the cherry-blossoms of an English spring, Eleanor Northberry laid her garlands on a holy shrine and listened to the chanting of the vesper service; while the light faded away over the peaceful garden, and the last reflection of the sunset died out from the long fish-pond, and the nuns were left to the peace and the stillness of night.
The sun also dropped down to rest over another small inclosure, far away in the warm south. Round the royal palace of Muley Hassan, King of Fez, were magnificent gardens, and on the side devoted to the women was one, the very gem of them all. A kind of cloister surrounded it, built with the utmost elaboration of Moorish art, horseshoe arches, fretwork of the most exquisite forms, blazing with gold and silver, and glowing with the gorgeousness of Oriental colour. Flowers of almost tropical variety and beauty were growing in profusion, and in the centre was a fountain in which gold and silver fish were swimming. On the brink stood a young girl with a splendid wreath of crimson passion-flowers in her hand. She was dressed in a tunic of blue silk, wonderfully embroidered with coloured flowers, full white silk trousers were fastened round her ankles above her golden slippers; on her head was a rose-coloured turban, coquettishly set on the top of the long straight plait of hair that fell down her back. She seated herself on the rim of the fountain, and laying her flowers at her feet, listened to the distant sound of girlish voices laughing and chattering beyond the cloister, or to the noise of a number of parrots and other birds inclosed in a golden network at one corner of the garden.
The girl’s face was fair, with fine outlines, large blue eyes of a peculiar wistful softness, and with an expression gentle, dreamy, and somewhat passive. This was Leila, a Christian slave, the pet and plaything of the ladies of Muley Hassan’s harem; this was Katharine, Eleanor Northberry’s lost sister.
Strangely enough there had been a sort of outward similarity between the lives that were essentially so different. Each sister had been brought up in seclusion in a household of women. Catalina, like Nella, learnt to embroider and to sing; she too lived among birds and flowers and pleasant places. She too was taught to be obedient, to submit to rules; and the gentle nature obeyed more perfectly, and carried cushions and sang little songs or gathered flowers for the princesses, more aptly than Nella learnt her tasks or steadied her dancing steps in Northberry convent. But the little slave had been treated as a favourite toy, and nothing had occurred to drive her thoughts beyond herself. She had at once been separated from her nurse and taken to the palace, and though she could have told, if asked, her real name and have understood probably her own language, years of soft living separated her from any reminder of her old life.