"Your Joséphine."
Under this letter was hidden a crude little sketch of the cloister-end of some building on a sheet of drawing-paper, and near it, just outside a high wall, a fair outline of a thick cypress. There was nothing else in the box.
Nor did we ever learn another word or syllable of the life of those two in their lonely cottage. Whether Prynne built it himself or hired labourers for the work we never tried to discover. That he buried himself there with the passion of his lonely life, that these flaming lovers, cast off by God and the world, thought both well lost for what they found in each other, who can doubt? The love she inspired in him I can understand, for I have known her daughter; the love he woke in her, she being what she was, I do not dare to guess. What must that woman's soul have been? What storm of love must have swept her from her cloister-harbour—and on to what rocks, over what eternal depths! Deal gently with her, Church of her betrayal! Forgive her sins, I beg you, for she loved much.
CHAPTER XXII
FATE LAUGHS AND BAITS HER HOOK
I find to my surprise that these rambling chapters, intended, in the first place, as a sort of study of Margarita's development under the shock of applied civilisation, have grown rather into a chronicle of family history, a detail of tiny intimate events and memories that must surely disappoint Dr. M——l, at whose urgent instance they were undertaken. Margarita was, indeed, at that time, a fit subject for the thoughtful scientist, and hardly one of her conversations with her friends but would serve as a text for some learned psychological dissertation. But it would have been hard, even for a stony savant, to dissect that adorable personality! The points that I had intended to discuss are lost, I find, in her smile; the interest of her relations with the world, as it burst upon her in all its complications and problems, a grown woman, but ignorant as a savage and innocent as a child, is as nothing beside the interest of her relations with us who formed for so long her little special world. However, I cannot offer my scientist nor his distinguished colleague, Professor J——s, a mere tangle of personal reminiscences, so I must try to recall, as accurately as may be, the circumstances of Margarita's introduction to orthodox Christianity. At Miss Jencks's earnest petition Roger, who had grown really attached—as had we all—to the good creature, had finally yielded and allowed her to impart the outline of the New Testament story to her charge. I found her later, a moist handkerchief crumpled in her hand and a tiny worn leather volume on her lap.
"It didn't do, then?" I inquired sympathetically, for her plain, competent face was more disturbed by grief than I had ever seen it.