"And the spelling, oh dear!" put in the Countess....
This sort of thing is as gay and unfailing as a fountain. Thanks to the good oddities of my mother-tongue, on my very first evening in this strange land I was beginning to feel at home. Certainly I talked more than at any meal in the eighteen years before. Everywhere else I had been a child, a chattel: a thing to be bullied and silenced (Aunt Jael), tortured (Uncle Simeon), exhorted (the Saints), prayed for (Grandmother). The new unconstraint exhilarated me; my natural bent for talking came into its own. Here I was listened to, expected to shine, deferred to. I was clever: I was amusing: I was a lady!
Alone in my cosy bedroom, with the lamp lit, I reviewed my first impressions. How good it all was: comfort, ease, dainty food, fine surroundings; kindliness, deference; freedom, importance. Luxurious liberty filled me: after eighteen years of prison I had escaped. But would things continue as well as they had begun? Or were there new perils ahead? Then Conscience pricked. Is it right, this life of ease, this new atmosphere of careless liberty: is it of the Lord? What place has religion here? Where is God? Has any one of these fine folk spoken, or even thought, of holy things during one moment of this day? HAVE YOU?
It was late. I opened my Bible, and turned, involuntarily, inevitably, to the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. I read it through aloud. None of the old emotion, none of the old misery returned; as I read I tried almost to force it back. Where had fled the wretchedness of that other first night of a new life, in the dreary chamber at Torribridge? Where was the desperate luxurious loneliness of that time? Had the fatal atmosphere of France, the Papist Babylon, already in an hour magically completed a change that the easier times of the past few years had begun? Was I deprived of my oldest privilege, my misery? Had I become unworthy of unhappiness? I contrasted myself bitterly with the unhappy Mary of seven years back. Ease was poisoning my soul. I dwelt with perverse envy on the wretched little girl of that other night, and then fell to picturing all the unhappiness that had framed my life, from the long agony of my mother before she bore me to the daily oppression of the years that followed. Soon I was shedding tears of pity for my unhappy past self: weeping, if not for Zion. (More and more, as the contrasts of my new life developed, I indulged in this glad unhappiness of sentimental backward-looking, mimicked and dramatized the sincerity of my old child's misery, wallowed in retrospective self-pity, cried amid present ease: "Ah, what a sad life was mine!") That I could weep for it as past showed me how wide and sudden was the gulf between the new life and the old. I resolved to widen it.
Already a new person—an empty, a surface Mary, of whose existence within me I had sometimes had half-realized and swiftly-vanishing notions—seemed to have sapped the fortress of my soul, to have assumed command of "Me": a person with the same brain, the same will, the same body, but another soul, or no soul. My brain decided to stifle for a while the old Mary, to let this emptier, ease-fuller personality be all myself. Then at the end of a space of time, I should know which was the stronger, which was the realler Me. I never doubted but that I should be free to make my choice.
I chose my Resolutions carefully, prayed them aloud, put them on paper, sealed them in time-honoured envelope:—
(1) I will cease all visions and daydreams.
(2) I will abandon all magic tricks, numbers and hopes.
(3) I will play with none of my Terrors: Hell, Satan, Eternity.
(4) I will not brood. I will fight my distrust of happiness, my evil instinct that for every moment of pleasure the Lord will make me pay to the uttermost farthing.
(5) I will seek none of the ecstasies of religion; not try to experience the Rapture, nor dwell overmuch on holy things. Resting from a too great pleasure in God, at the end of the period I am setting myself I may find myself nearer to Him. (A wise experiment, whispered a Voice: perhaps God's, perhaps the Devil's.)
(6) Only, I will read His Word daily, and have for every moment the motto "What would He do?"
(7) Except at Christmas only, I will not think of Robbie. If at the end of the time, he is as clear and close as ever, I shall know myself and him better, just as with God (5).
ALL THESE THINGS, for the rest of this year 1866, eight months and more [precisely thirty-seven weeks I noticed with a twinge of emotion which was itself an involuntary breach of (2)], I do, with God's help, here and now RESOLVE.
M. L.
On the envelope I wrote in capitals "Very Private" in English and "Personnel" in French, added "April 17th, 1866" and signed "M. L."—the death-warrant of Mary I, proclamation from the throne of Mary II. And I undressed, and slept like a lady.