“It must be wonderful,” breathed Frances.
“Yes, dear, quite wonderful, but that’s what the grace of a vocation is. Quite supernatural, I always think, to leave one’s home and everything and live such a life—detachment, you know, dear.”
“Of course,” ventured Frances, “it must be rather sad for the father and mother of a nun—to let her go, I mean.”
“Dreadful, my dear. But one would always feel so glad and thankful, though so dreadfully sorry—you know what I mean,” lucidly returned Lady Argent. “I really don’t know what one would do if one had a daughter a nun—say one’s only child—though, of course, even as a girl, I can hardly imagine dear Ludovic a nun, but one never knows——” Lady Argent looked distractedly into the fire.
“Sometimes,” she murmured, “I am afraid that I idolize Ludovic. I lie awake at night, you know, dear, wondering what I should do if he were ever to be burnt to death.”
“But why should he be burnt to death?” said the literal Frances fixing horrified eyes on her hostess.
“At the stake, you know, dear, just as so many martyrs have been, even in England—you know what Tyburn is, dear: so dreadful, I always think; and though one ought not to look upon any soul as being outside the pale of God’s grace, that terrible Queen Elizabeth, with Mary Stuart’s blood upon her head and everything—— So that if persecution should begin again—and, after all, dear, look at France, and all those poor good Dominicans turned out of their holy monastery—and if Ludovic was by that time a Catholic, as one prays and hopes, should I be able to let him go? Let alone being like the Mother of the Maccabees, though I always felt certain, even when I was a Protestant, that that was a sort of miracle, because one knows what one would feel about one, let alone seven—though really I dare say by the time those frightful tortures had begun on the youngest she had almost ceased to feel anything at all, except thankfulness that there were no more to come. But when I think how often I have wickedly rebelled at my poor Ludovic’s being lame——”
“Was he always?” gently inquired Frances.
“From the time he was a few weeks old, dear, and I’ve often thought that if I’d been a Catholic then, and put a pair of scapulars round my poor little darling’s neck, the accident would never have happened.”
On this melancholy reflection the door opened, and Lady Argent’s poor little darling came into the room.