‘Now, Miss Jennings,’ said I, gently but with some emphasis ‘you must let nothing that Lady Monson does vex you. You have done your duty; she is on board this yacht; I shall grow fretful if I think you intend to waste a single breath of the sweetness of your heart upon the arid air of Madame Henrietta’s desert nature. I dare say you have scarcely closed your eyes all night through thinking about her.’
‘About her and other things.’
‘Why tease yourself? A sister is a sister only so long as she chooses to act and feel as one. It is indeed a tender word—a sweet relationship. But if a woman coolly cuts all family ties——’
She shook her head, smiling. ‘Your views are too hard, Mr. Monson. You would argue of a sister as you would of a wife. We must bear with the shame, the degradation, the wickedness of those we have loved, of those we still love spite of bitter repulse. There is no one, I am sure, would dare kneel down in prayer if it was believed that God’s mercy depended upon our own actions. All of us would feel cut off.’
Not all, I thought, looking at her, but I sat silent awhile, feeling rebuked. I was a young man then; I can turn back now, scarred as I am by many years of life’s warfare, and see that I was hard, too hard in those thoughtless days of mine; that knowing little or nothing of suffering myself, I knew little or nothing of the deep and wondrous vitality of human sympathy. You find many corridors in human nature when you enter, but sympathy is the only way in; and to miss that door is merely to go on walking round the edifice.
I ate for a little in silence and then said, ‘I suppose, as you have seen almost nothing of your sister, you are unable to form an opinion of her state of mind?’
‘She is naturally of a cold nature,’ she answered; ‘dispositions such as hers, I think, do not greatly vary, let what will happen to them. Though one knows not what passion, feeling, emotion may have its fangs buried in such hearts, yet suffering has to pass through too many wraps to find expression.’
I smiled. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I know what you mean. She is like a person who lies buried in half a dozen coffins; a shell, then lead, then oak and so on. Nothing but the last trumpet could influence the ashes inside.’
‘But why did you ask that question, Mr. Monson?’