After this they sat silent in the darkness for a long time. The presence of the nun filled Nancy with a sense of warm security and peace of mind. Gradually it seemed to her that this wait in the tunnel was a perfect expression of the dark pause in her life, which, beginning with the death of Bram, had ended in her visit to Brigham. A conviction was born in her brain, a conviction which with every minute of this immersion in absolute blackness became stronger, that somehow the presence of the nun was a comforting fact, the importance of which was not to be measured by her importance within the little space of the railway-carriage, but that the existence of this nun was going to influence the whole of her life, which must soon begin again when the train emerged from the tunnel. The curtain would rise once more upon the pantomime, and, whatever the vicissitudes that she as the heroine of it might have to endure, there would always be a Fairy Queen waiting in the wings to enter and shake her silver wand against the powers of Evil. It was very childish and sentimental to be sitting here in the dark dreaming like this, Nancy kept telling herself; but then once more the mystery of the tunnel would enfold her as one is enfolded by those strange half-sleepy clarities of the imagination that flash through the midway of the night when one lies in bed and hopes that the sense of illumination that is granted between a sleep and a sleep will return with daylight to illuminate the active life of the morning. Her thoughts about the nun reassumed their first portentousness; the comparison of her own life to a pantomime appeared once more with the superlative reality of a symbol that might enshrine the whole meaning of life. Then suddenly the lights went up, and after a few more minutes the train was on its way again.
Nancy was glad indeed on arriving at Euston toward two o’clock of a frore and foggy night to drive away with Sister Catherine in the queer conventual vehicle like a covered-in wagonette with four small grilled windows. To have argued with Miss Fewkes about her right to enter the tall thin house in Blackboy Passage at whatever hour she chose would have been the climax to the Brigham experience.
The Sisters of the Holy Infancy were a small community which was founded by one of several co-heiresses to a thirteenth-century barony by writ, dormant for many centuries. Instead of spending her money on establishing her right to an ancient title Miss Tiphaine de Cauntelo Edwardson preferred to endow this small community and be known as Mother Mary Ethelreda. The headquarters of the community were at Beaumanoir where Sister Catherine, the right-hand of the now aged foundress, had been visiting her. This was a Lancashire property which had formerly been held by Miss Edwardson’s ancestors and repurchased by her when she decided to enter the religious life. In London the house of the community was situated in St. John’s Wood where the Sisters were occupied in the management of an extremely good school. There was a third house in Eastbourne which was used chiefly as a home for impoverished maiden ladies.
Sister Catherine was head-mistress of St. Joseph’s School, and it was there that she took Nancy and Letizia from Euston. The porteress was overjoyed to see her, having been working herself up for the last two hours into a panic over the thought of a railway accident. The white guest-room was very welcome to Nancy after the fatigue of this long day, so long a day that she could not believe that it had only been fifteen hours ago that she set out from Euston to Brigham. She seemed to have lived many lives in the course of it—Bram’s life as a boy with his brother, old Mrs. Fuller’s eighty years of existence, Sister Catherine’s bright youth in Italy, and most wearingly of all, Letizia’s future even to ultimate old age and death. And when she did fall asleep she was travelling, travelling all the time through endless unremembered dreams.
In the morning Letizia greatly diverted some of the nuns by her observations on the image of the Holy Child over the altar, which was a copy of the famous image of Prague.
“Muvver, who is that little black boy with a crown on His head?”
“That is the baby Jesus, darling.”
“Why is He dressed like that? Is He going out to have tea with one of His little friends?”
Nancy really did not know how to explain why He was dressed like that, but hazarded that it was because He was the King of Heaven.
“What has He got in His hand, muvver? What toy has He got?”