“Perhaps she’ll have left before then,” said Miss Blandflower hopefully, and Rosamund, far from exalted as her opinion generally was of Minnie’s prognostications, looked at her gratefully.
“Listen to my words of wisdom, dear, and you’ll see I’m right,” declared Minnie, encouraged by any unwonted signs of attention, so few of which ever came her way. “I undercumstumble our little Francesca—we shall see her trotting home one of these days, you mark my words.”
Little though Porthlew was in the habit of marking Miss Blandflower’s words, they brought a shred of comfort to Rosamund.
She was striving with passionate intensity to persuade herself that Frances would leave the convent before taking vows there, and that her desire for the religious life was only a phase.
Even when the months went on and her sister’s letters gave no sign of a possible return, Rosamund told herself that in the next letter Frances would ask to be taken away. She could not face any other possibility, and felt, as she had told Ludovic, as though her very imagination stopped at, and could never take in, the prospect of a future without Frances, with Frances permanently established in a strange, new life where one would never know anything of her inner existence, and might not even be told if she were ill or unhappy.
The thought to her was unendurable.
She had no natural tendency towards religion, and very little belief in any beneficent Deity, but she took to a sort of frenzied praying, that the God whom Frances worshipped might reject her sacrifice.
The material aspects of convent life, as Rosamund had seen them during her day at the convent, began to obsess her. She obtained books that told of the lives of nuns, the foundations of religious orders, and the rule prevailing there. The accounts of some of the physical austerities practised by the more ascetic orders turned her sick, and her nights began to be haunted by visions of Frances, starved and emaciated, bleeding under the self-imposed lash of a knotted scourge.
“I am exaggerating—I am going mad,” Rosamund told herself. “Frances is well and happy—her letters say so.”
“But her letters are read before they reach me.”