“I sent her upstairs as soon as we got back. Ludovic, I wish I knew what to do for her. She minds this dreadfully, poor child, and it’s so difficult to make her see it from a Catholic point of view. She was very, very good and brave, for fear of distressing her sister, but she kept on getting whiter and whiter, and in a way it was really a relief when we got away from the convent, and she could relax that dreadful strain.”
“It’s hard on her.”
“Dreadfully,” said Lady Argent, with tears in her eyes. “You see, what can one say to comfort her? Talking about the Will of God seems such a mockery, when she isn’t a Catholic.”
“My dear mother! Catholics haven’t got a monopoly of the Will of God.”
“I never for a moment said they had, Ludovic!” cried his mother agitatedly. “The rain falleth upon the just and the unjust, and all that, as I perfectly well know, but all I meant was that poor dear Rosamund can’t be expected to look upon it as being the Will of God at all. It just seems to her a sort of fanatical idea of making oneself as miserable as possible.”
“Unfortunately,” said her son dryly, “the misery isn’t confined to the fanatic. Other people suffer for his act, and have, as you may say, no compensating belief in the reward to follow.”
“That,” said Lady Argent very earnestly, “is the worst part of it. I mean, knowing that one is making the people one loves suffer. If there’s one thing absolutely certain, Ludovic, it is that Frances minds infinitely more for Rosamund’s sake than for her own—in fact, of course, she doesn’t mind at all, as far as she herself is concerned, since she’s deliberately chosen it. But you know what a little tender-hearted thing she is, and how devoted they’ve always been—and then you talk about her making Rosamund suffer! which, of course, she’s doing, poor little dear, but you may be sure it’s every bit as bad for her.”
“It seems to be a vicious circle,” remarked Ludovic grimly.
He began to limp up and down the length of the room, slowly.
The relation between Rosamund and Frances had always been a thought that could move him profoundly, for reasons which he had never sought to analyze. Perhaps it was the memory of the two children who had been brought across the valley to see his mother by Mrs. Tregaskis. At all events he could recall at will, and always with that sensation of acute and impotent compassion, the child Rosamund who had crouched on the ground to listen outside a closed door.