“That’s right! Run off to her dear Maurice,—her dear brave Maurice! Perhaps he’ll take her on his knees again, and she’ll play the sweet little innocent,—like that day when I peeped through the window!”
This final dart had hardly reached its objective before Lacrima without attempting any retort rushed from the room.
“I will go and see Maurice. I will! I will!” she murmured to herself as she ran down the broad oak staircase, and slipped out by the East door.
Simultaneously with these events, a scene of equal dramatic intensity, though of a very different character, was being enacted in the vicarage drawing-room.
Vennie, as we have noted, had resolved to postpone for the present her reception into the Catholic Church. She had also resolved that nothing on earth should induce her to reveal to her mother her change of creed until the thing was an accomplished fact. The worst, however, of the kind of mental suppression in which she had been living of late, is that it tends to produce a volcanic excitement of the nerves, liable at any moment to ungovernable upheavals. Quite little things—mere straws and bagatelles—are enough to set this eruption beginning; and when once it begins, the accumulated passion of the long days of fermentation gives the explosion a horrible force.
One perpetual annoyance to Vennie was her mother’s persistent fondness for family prayers. It seemed to the girl as though Valentia insisted on this performance, not so much out of a desire to serve God, as out of a sense of what was due to herself as the mistress of a well-conducted establishment.
Vennie always fancied she discerned a peculiar tone of self-satisfaction in her mother’s voice, as, rather loudly, and extremely clearly, she read her liturgical selections to the assembled servants.
On this particular morning the girl had avoided the performance of this rite, by leaving her room earlier than usual and taking refuge in the furthest of the vicarage orchards. Backwards and forwards she walked, in that secluded place, with her hands behind her and her head bent, heedless of the drenching dew which covered every grass-blade and of the heavy white mists that still hung about the tree-trunks. She was obliged to return to her room and change her shoes and stockings before joining her mother at breakfast, but not before she had prayed a desperate prayer, down there among the misty trees, for the eternal rest of James Andersen’s soul.
This little incident of her absence from prayers was the direct cause of the unfortunate scene that followed.
Valentia hardly spoke to her daughter while the meal proceeded, and when at last it was over, she retired to the drawing-room and began writing letters.