It was here that Philomène often took tea with her, and when full justice had been done to the toast and cakes, Isolde would take her seat in a low chair before the fire, and Philomène, curling herself up on the hearth-rug, much as Queen Mab might have done had she been invited, would lay her clasped hands in her godmother’s lap, and begin to “want to know.”
“Godmother,” she had said on one of these occasions, “I want to know if it is cruel to keep caged birds. Do you remember when you took me to church with you a few Sundays ago, and they went round singing the Litany? Well, just as the choir-men passed me they were saying, ‘and to show thy pity upon all prisoners and captives,’ and I thought at once of Master Mustardseed.”
“But Master Mustardseed came to you of his own accord,” replied Godmother in her kind, low voice, “and I think a canary might find it very difficult to fend for himself if you set him free in England. All the same, when you are grown up, you need never keep any caged birds if you do not want to.”
“Well then, you know the picture in the schoolroom with the baby in it, and the bird pecking at the ear of corn,” continued Philomène. “I had just made up such a nice story about it all, when Miss Mills told me that it was a ‘Flight into Egypt,’ and that I ought not to make a play of it. But how was I to know? They hadn’t any halos. And, O Godmother, I had just planned that the ugly idol had enchanted a prince and princess and had turned them into the donkey and the bird, and that the grass and the corn they were eating would turn them back again. Then I asked Miss Mills what the idol and the bird really did mean, but she could not tell me. She only said she supposed it must be some silly legend. Whenever Miss Mills does not know the answer to what I ask her, she says it must be a silly legend. What do they mean, Godmother?”
“The picture is a modern one,” said Isolde, “that is why the Holy Family are painted without halos, and Miss Mills was quite right about its being a legend. Your mother once told me all the different things that the painter had tried to express in his picture. The smoke above the trees is supposed to come from an inn, where the inn-keeper and his wife have just refused to give shelter to the travellers, and it is said that their children’s children are the gipsies, who have now no settled home or shelter of their own. Then there is another story that when the idols of Egypt recognized the true God, they fell down and were broken. The bird with the outspread wings is the human soul, and the Lord is feeding it with the Bread of Life.”
“Still you don’t think the Holy Family will mind my having made up the other story about them, do you?” inquired Philomène anxiously. But Godmother only shook her head and smiled.
Philomène certainly asked a great many questions, but then Isolde was never tired of answering them. Yet though she loved her goddaughter dearly, it was not entirely for her own sake. For she was Rachel’s child.
Rachel and Isolde had known each other almost all their lives. As little children they strung daisy chains and made cowslip balls together, as school-girls they helped each other with their compositions on Simon de Montfort and the pleasures of a country walk, and when they had grown to womanhood, Rachel’s marriage in no way lessened their friendship. It was while she lay dying that she confided her baby to the love of her friend. “Be good to her, beloved, as you have been to me, and I should like her to be called Isolde Philomène—Isolde.”
A portrait of Rachel in her wedding-dress hung in Isolde’s boudoir, and Philomène had grown to love the sweet face and the white folds of the train. On entering the room her first glance was always for godmother, and the second for her mother’s portrait.