“You are quite right, Signora,” Mr. Vane said, “and the same thought has passed through my own mind. I do not know if I shall be thought prepared to receive so soon, but will ask. It would be something for me to remember all my life that I had made my first communion there, and in company with all my family.”
The daughters were silent, both looking down, touched and awed by their father’s words. With all their affection and confidence, they never had known anything of his deeper feelings or more serious intentions than what their intuitive sympathy had divined. Some things they tacitly guessed, some he tacitly acknowledged; but for a spoken confidence, either given or demanded, they had each and all been more free, sometimes, with strangers. And so accustomed had the girls become to this real reserve under an appearance of perfect ease that they listened at first almost with terror to the Signora’s challenge.
“I think the children would be pleased,” Mr. Vane added gently, understanding their silence.
Then they both looked up with a quick smile and a simultaneous “Oh! yes, papa,” but said no more.
There was still another thin ice
that the Signora had to break. She understood quite well the disposition and habits of Bianca’s lover, and wished particularly to bring him in with them on this occasion. A man of a noble and poetical nature, he was, perhaps, in danger of resting contented with a religious feeling born of an enthusiastic appreciation of the beauty of the church, and, while obeying its express commands in the performance of duty, of waiting for the command to be given. He watched with delight the steps of the Prince’s Daughter, his loyal word or blow was always ready for those who attacked her; but he seemed to prefer to be an admiring spectator rather than an actor, and to do only so much as would keep him in the acknowledged number of her followers. The Signora suspected that he contented himself with an Easter Communion, and that there was many a night when he lay down to sleep without recommending himself to God, and many a morning when he rose without giving thanks for another day. If he looked out at the early dawn with delight in its beauty, he felt that he had praised God; and if, gazing up into the starry midnight, he thought of the shadowy earth as a hammock swung by invisible cords from a thick tree full of golden blossoms, it seemed to him that he had kissed the hand that rocked him to sleep. Intoxicated by the beauty of the works of God, he exulted in the freedom from baseness which the magical draught gave him, and could scarcely believe that in some unwary hour he might draw in a drop of poison with the honey. He had been wont to say that the virtue of the long-suffering Job had been preserved, not so much by shutting his bodily eyes and praying,
as by opening his eyes, and looking about where flood and stream, and snow and hail and dew taught each its lesson, unmarred by earthly glosses; that that man was surer to fear God who looked at the leviathan making the deep boil like a pot, leaving a shining path behind him over the waters, and saying this is the work of God, than the man who, when he would raise his soul, left his senses behind, and strove to climb to a knowledge of the power of God without them.
The Signora knew all this, and admired Marion, winged creature that he was; but she wished him to practise a little more the plain and simple duties of religion. She observed that he made no motion to assent to her proposal, and made haste to take for granted that he would assent, and spare him a promise.
“Then,” she said, “since we are to have this heavenly audience together, let us make a small part of the preparation together. How lovely it would be if we could every night say our prayers together, or a part of them, at least! We will not have company late, and Marion lives near us, and can take his little starlit walk half an hour later without any inconvenience. Let us say certain prayers together expressly in preparation for this communion. We are five. Each one shall choose a prayer.”
She scarcely paused, feeling that there was still a shyness to overcome, and that her proposal had been bold and unusual. The thought fired instead of checking her.