“It isn’t that. God comes before one’s father or mother. It would be just as much my duty to become a Catholic now if all my nearest and dearest were against it. I must do what I think right.”
In the implacable self-righteousness which Frances mistook for principle, Ludovic saw his mother’s best ally.
“I do not suppose that she will ever yield, when it comes to what she thinks is a question of conscience,” he told Lady Argent that evening, who replied with surprise:
“I am so delighted that you think so, Ludovic. I always thought she was so very gentle and submissive that perhaps it would be only too easy for anyone to influence her, which would be so dreadful, now that she has really had light given her. Not that I want to judge dear Bertie rashly, but I am afraid it is quite possible that she may raise difficulties.”
“Quite possible,” Ludovic dryly assented.
It was not altogether without amusement that he foresaw Mrs. Tregaskis engaged in a contest of wills with the youngest and hitherto most easily dominated of her charges. That Frances herself anticipated just such a contest was evident, and Ludovic, almost in spite of himself, wondered whether she did not view the approaching conflict with more complacency than she knew.
As her long visit to the Wye Valley drew towards its close, Frances lost her shyness with Ludovic. Twice he took her across the valley to the cottage where the earlier years of her childhood had been spent, and marvelled at the gentle detachment of the looks she cast round her. Insensitive Frances could not be, but Ludovic realized afresh that reality, for her, would never lie on the material planes where most of us turn instinctively to seek it.
Her reserve once broken, she and Lady Argent would gently and interminably discuss the subject of conversion with a soft disregard for his presence and prejudice alike which almost involuntarily caused Ludovic a good deal of amusement.
“It would be such a help to you, dear child,” Lady Argent said on the eve of Frances’ return to Porthlew, “if you only had some friend quite near, to whom you could talk, because writing is never quite the same thing, as I found with Mother Serafina—you know, dear, the nun who did so much towards my conversion—when she said it was quite out of the question for her to come and stay here, and I must write to her instead. Which, of course, I did, and I still do at Christmas and Easter and any sort of Feast, but it was a most unsatisfactory correspondence—really most unsatisfactory.”
“Did the Superior have to read the letters?”