[CHAPTER VIII.]
HER GRACE'S GENTLEWOMAN.
I STAID with Master Davis two months or more, always hoping to hear from my uncle and always disappointed.
Every one was kind to me. Master and Mistress Davis treated me like a daughter in every respect, and I strove to behave like a dutiful child to them. Mistress Davis found me plenty to do, knowing, dear soul that she ever was, that to make me useful was the way to make me feel at home. I have learned a good many precious recipes for distilling and preserving, and I liked nothing better than putting them in practice.
Then Mistress Andrew Davis fell in love with my playing, and must needs have me give her lessons on the clarichord. She had a fair talent for music, and a sweet, bird-like voice, and I shall never forget her pretty, child-like joy when she was able to surprise her grave husband with a song and a lesson on the instrument he had given her. I pursued my Latin and French, and persuaded Mistress Davis to let me begin to teach the little Helen to read. She proved an apt scholar, and we had pleasant times over our books.
It was a wonderful new world that opened to me during those two months. As I said, I never in my life before had any deep convictions of religion. I had gone through the usual routine in the convent just as I worked my lace and sewed my white seam, but that was all. I had a great dread of death, and when any thing brought it home to me, I would redouble my observances and try to feel as I supposed really religious people felt. But it was all outside of me, so to speak. I believed in God, of course, but it was as a stern judge I thought of him—not by any means as a tender Father. The blessed Virgin was, indeed, kind and gentle, and if I coaxed her enough, she would perhaps command her son to be good to me at that dreadful day of doom.
But ever and always in the background of my mind—that is, after I began to think at all—was that fearful specter of Purgatory, the dread ordeal which must be passed before I could hope for the smallest taste of the bliss of Paradise. I do not mean to say that this was the case with all of our number. Some sweet souls there were who sucked the honey in spite of the thorn, and albeit sorely cumbered and distressed by the barriers which the pride and folly of men had piled in their way, did find access to the very Mercy Seat. Some found a real satisfaction in piling up prayer upon prayer; observance upon observance, thinking they were thereby heaping up merit not only for themselves but their friends. Others, and they were the most, were content to perform such tasks as they could not escape, in as easy a manner as possible, trusting to their religious profession and the offices of their patron saint to help them out at the last.
I had all my life been curious about books, ever since a chit of five years old, I had tumbled off a joint-stool whereon I had climbed to look at the great volume of the Morte d'Arthur which lay in the window-seat in the hall. I got a sound switching across my fingers for meddling, but neither the switching nor the tumble cured me of my hunger for books. This hunger had very little to feed it at Dartford, but it never died out, and I used to read over and over the few volumes we had till I knew them by heart.
It was not to be supposed that with such a disposition I would let the New Testament lie very long on my table without looking into it. I chanced to begin at the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles—that wonderful book, which always seems to me to have the rushing, mighty wind of the Pentecost blowing through it from beginning to end. It was a Sunday afternoon, I remember, and the streets were full of people waiting to see the King pass by going to see some great lord. I was not well, yet not so ill but I was sitting up by my window to watch the show. To while away the time, I took up the book, and I soon became so lost in it that the whole pageant passed by without my seeing it at all. I was still deep in its pages when Mistress Davis came to see how I fared, and so fully was I absorbed in the story that when she asked me where I had been, I answered her—
"At Jerusalem, madam!"