“Why, you know you never did,” said Sister Susan, with her usual confident tone, and indeed Edgar felt that she must be right. “You took her for a Sister,” she added, with a merry laugh.
“How should I know the difference?” asked piteously the young man.
“Why, she had not this, nor this, nor this,” said the Sister, triumphantly touching one part of her dress after another. “She had on a simple black dress, and cloak, and veil—that was all. A good little girl,” she continued, “our orphans are all fond of her, and she is very nice to those young sisters of hers, who are much more taken out now-a-days than she is, and carry everything before them—especially since she went off so much, poor dear.”
“Has she gone off?” Edgar asked, more and more interested, he could scarcely tell why.
“Oh, dreadfully; lost her pretty colour, and her hair used to come out in handfuls; she has been obliged to have it cut off to save it. She is not like what she was, poor thing; but I hope,” added Sister Susan devoutly, “that thinking so much more seriously than she used to do, the change will be of great benefit to her soul.”
“Poor Miss—! You have not told me her name,” said Edgar.
“Haven’t I?” said Sister Susan. “Dear, dear, there is the bell for chapel, and I can’t stay with you any longer. There are a few benches near the door where strangers are allowed to go, if you wish to stay for evensong.”
Edgar stayed, chiefly, I fear, out of mere listlessness, and took his place in the corner by the door allotted to Philistines of the male gender, with much submission and docility. The little chapel was very richly decorated, the light intercepted by small painted windows, the walls one mass of mural ornament. He compared it in his imagination, with a smile, to the bare little convent chapels he had seen and heard of in countries where the institution appeared more natural. Here there was a profusion of ecclesiastical luxury, an absolute parade of decoration. It struck him with a double sense of incongruity, but there was no one to whom he could express this evil sentiment: Sister Susan did not appear again as he had hoped, and he wended his way back to town with some additional information, which he had not possessed when he left. Why should he be so curious about Miss ——, the nameless one? He had thought her another Sister, and entertained no profuse curiosity in respect to her at first; but now it seemed to him that only a little more light might make her visible to him. There was no reason why he should find her out, or why he should wish to do so; but great is the perversity of human nature—perhaps this was the special reason why the thought occupied him so much.
It was very strange to so friendly a soul to have no friends whom he could go to, whom he could talk to, no friendly house where the door would open to him, and faces smile at his sight. It is true that for three years he had been severed, to a great degree, from domestic pleasures, which do not thrive at foreign centres of cosmopolitan resort—but yet he had never been without a large circle of acquaintances, and had occasionally seen the old friends of his boyhood here and there; but in London, in October and November, whom could he expect to see? The stray man who dropped in now and then at the club, was on the wing between two country houses, or was going to join a party somewhere, or home to his people. Some men, of course, must live in London, but these men, I presume, did not go much to their club, or else they were so little among the number of Edgar’s friends that they did not count. Now and then one would join him at dinner, or in one of the long walks he took, and he made a friend or two at the Museum, among the books and prints. But he was like an Australian emigrant, or other exile in savage places. These were all men, and he never saw the face of a woman except in the streets or shops, unless it was his landlady, who did not interest him.
How strangely different from the old days, in which so many fair women would smile and listen to the young man who was at once so rich and so original, a great landed proprietor, with the opinions of a revolutionary. It was not his downfall, however, which had made all the difference, which was a comfort to him; for, indeed, the families whom he had once visited were out of London. Sometimes it occurred to him that if the Thornleighs had been in town, he would have gone to them and asked leave to be admitted just once or twice, for pure charity, and he had walked several times past their house in Berkeley Square, and gazed at its closed shutters with half a notion of calling on the housekeeper, at least, and asking to see the place in which he had spent so many pleasant hours. He used to live all over again his first visit to London, with an amused pleasure in recalling all his own puzzles and difficulties. He seemed to himself to have been a boy then, almost a child, playing with fate and his life, and understanding nothing of all that was around him. To have ten thousand a year one time, and no income at all the next, but only a hundred pounds in the bank “to fall back upon,” and the vague promise of a post as Queen’s Messenger at Christmas—what a change it was! Though to be sure, even now, Edgar said to himself, there were more people in London worse off than he, than there were people who were better off. A hundred pounds in the bank is, in reality, a fortune—as long as you can keep it there; and a man who has the post of Queen’s Messenger is independent, which is as much as any prince can be.