“So this is what it has come to, is it?” said the old lady at last. “And I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me, in this unkind, inconsiderate way, is that you’ve decided to become a nun!”
Vennie made a little movement with her head.
“You have?” cried Valentia, pale with anger. “You have made up your mind to do that? Well—I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Vennie! In spite of everything I’ve done for you; in spite of everything I’ve taught you; in spite of everything I’ve prayed for;—you can go and do this! Oh, you’re an unkind, ungrateful girl! But I know that look on your face. I’ve known it from your childhood. When you look like that there’s no hope of moving you. Go on, then! Do as you wish to do. Leave your mother in her old age, and destroy the last hope of our family. I won’t speak another word. I know nothing I can say will change you.” She sank down upon the chintz-covered sofa and covered her face with her hands.
Vennie cursed herself for her miserable want of tact. What demon was it that had tempted her to break her resolution? Then, suddenly, as she looked at her mother swaying to and fro on the couch, a strange impulse of hard inflexible obstinacy rose up in her.
These wretched human affections,—so unbalanced and selfish,—what a relief to escape from them altogether! Like the passing on its way, across a temperate ocean, of some polar iceberg, there drove, at that moment, through Vennie’s consciousness, a wedge of frozen, adamantine contempt for all these human, too-human clingings and clutchings which would fain imprison the spirit and hold it down with soft-strangling hands.
In her deepest heart she turned almost savagely away from this grey-haired woman, sitting there so hurt in her earthly affections and ambitions. She uttered a fierce mental invocation to that other Mother,—her whose heart, pierced by seven swords, had submitted to God’s will without a groan!
Valentia, who, it must be remembered, had not only married a Seldom, but was herself one of that breed, felt at that moment as though this girl of hers were reverting to some mad strain of Pre-Elizabethan fanaticism. There was something mediæval about Vennie’s obstinacy, as there was something mediæval about the lines of her face. Valentia recalled a portrait she had once seen of an ancestor of theirs in the days before the Reformation. He, the great Catholic Baron, had possessed the same thin profile and the same pinched lips. It was a curious revenge, the poor lady thought, for those evicted Cistercians, out of whose plundered house the Nevilton mansion had been built, that this fate, of all fates, should befall the last of the Seldoms!
The tolling of the bell, which hitherto had gone on, monotonously and insistently, across the drowsy lawn, suddenly stopped.
Vennie started and ran hurriedly to the door.
“They are burying James Andersen,” she cried, “and I ought to be there. It would look unkind and thoughtless of me not to be there. Good-bye, mother! We’ll talk of this when I come back. I’m sorry to be so unsatisfactory a daughter to you, but perhaps you’ll feel differently some day.”