The girth of the figure had increased, and the face showed traces of having been heavily scored by the pa.s.sing of some twenty or thirty years, but this time the strong mouth was smiling frankly, and the eyes had lost their brooding look and were directed upwards with an ardent and animated expression. The hands, so plump as to show mere indents in place of knuckles across their remarkable breadth, grasped a small crucifix.

Under the first portrait Alex read the inscription "Angele Predoux a dix-huit ans."

Beneath the picture of the nun, Angele's not very distinguished patronymic had been replaced by the t.i.tle of "Mere Candide de Sacre Coeur," and still supplemented by the announcement:

"Fondatrice et Superieure de son Ordre."

Old-fashioned though the dress in the photograph looked to Alex' eyes, she was yet astonished that any woman so nearly of her own time should have founded a religious Order. She had always supposed vaguely that the educational variety of religious Orders which she knew flourished in Europe had taken their existence from the old-established Dominican or Benedictine communities.

But it seemed now that a new foundation might come into being under the auspice of so youthful and plebeian-seeming a pioneer as Angele Predoux.

Alex wondered how she had set about it. A grotesque fancy flitted through her mind as to the fashion in which Sir Francis and Lady Isabel might be expected to receive an announcement that Alex or Barbara felt called upon to found a new religious Order.

Alex could not help dismissing the imaginary situation thus conjured up with a slight shudder, and the conviction that Angele Predoux, if her position had been in any degree tenable, must have been an orphan.

Wishing all the time that Mother Gertrude would come to her, she glanced through the first few pages of the book.

It somehow slightly amazed her to read of the Founder of a religious Order as a little girl, who had, like herself, pa.s.sed through the successive phases of babyhood, schooldays and the society of her compeers in the world.

"And to what end," inquired the author of the _esquisse_, when Angele Predoux had celebrated her twenty-first birthday at a ball given on her behalf by an adoring grandfather--"to what end?"

Alex repeated the question to herself, and marvelled rather vaguely as various replies floated through her mind. Life all led to something, she supposed, and for the first time it occurred to her that she herself had never aimed at anything save the possession of that which she called happiness. What had been Angele Predoux's aim?--what was that of Mother Gertrude? Certainly not human happiness.

Life was disappointing enough, Alex reflected drearily. One was always waiting, always looking forward to the next stage, as though it must reveal the secret solution to the great question of _why_. Alex'

thoughts turned to Noel Cardew and the sick misery and disappointment engendered by her engagement.

The door opened and she sprang up.

"Oh, I am so glad you have come at last."

"Were you getting impatient? I'm sorry, but you know our time is not our own."

The nun sat down, and Alex flung, rather than sat herself in her favourite position on the floor, her arms resting on the Superior's knee.

"What is the matter?" asked Mother Gertrude. "What was troubling you just before I came in, Alex?"

"You always know," said Alex, in quick, pa.s.sionate recognition of an intuition that it had hitherto been her share to exercise on behalf of another, never to receive.

"Your face is not so very difficult to read, and I think I know you pretty well by this time."

"Better than any one," said Alex, in all good faith, and unaware that certain aspects of herself, such as she showed to Barbara, or to her father and mother when they angered or frightened her, had never yet been called forth in the Superior's presence, and probably never would be.

"Well, what was it? Was it our Mother Foundress?"

"How did you know?" gasped Alex, unseeing of the still open book lying on the table.

Mother Gertrude did not refer to it. She pa.s.sed her hand slowly over the upturned head. Alex had thrown off her hat.

"I was looking at the picture of her. It seemed so difficult to realize that any one who actually formed a new religious Order could live almost now-a-days and be a girl just like myself."

"G.o.d bestows His gifts where He pleases! Sometimes the call sounds where one might least expect to hear it--in the midst of the world, and worldly pleasure, sometimes in the midst of the disappointment and grief of the world."

Alex did not speak, but continued to gaze up at the nun. Mother Gertrude went on speaking slowly:

"You see, Alex, sometimes it is necessary for a soul, a loving and undisciplined one especially, to learn the utter worthlessness of human love, in order that it may turn and see the Divine Love waiting for it."

"But all human love isn't worthless," said Alex almost pleadingly, her eyes dilating.

"Surely a finite love is worthless compared to an Infinite," said the nun gently. "We can hardly imagine it, Alex, with our little, limited understanding, but there is a love that satisfies the most exacting of us--asking, indeed _all_, and yet willing to accept so little, and, above all, giving with a completeness to which no human sympathy, however deep and tender, can ever attain."

Alex heard only the ring of utter conviction permeating every word uttered in that deep, ardent voice, and listening to the mystic, heard nothing of the fanatic.

"But not every one," she stammered.

The nun did not pretend to misunderstand her.

"Many are called," she said, "but few are chosen. Do you want me to tell you a little of all that is promised to those who leave all things for His sake?"

"Yes," said Alex, her heart throbbing strangely.

XVII

Lawn-Tennis

Looking back long afterwards, to that last week of the brilliant Jubilee season in London and to the two months that followed, spent in a house near Windsor, taken princ.i.p.ally to gratify Cedric's pa.s.sion for tennis, Alex could never remember whether the first definite suggestion of her entering the religious life had come from herself or from Mother Gertrude.

Neither she nor Barbara had been taken to Cowes that year, and the first fortnight spent at the Windsor house, which stood in a large, rambling garden, full of roses, close to the river, reminded her strangely of the summer holidays they had spent together as children.

Cedric, very sunburnt and st.u.r.dy, played tennis with a sort of concentrated, c.u.mulative enthusiasm, took part in innumerable cricket matches--possessing already a very real reputation in Eton circles as a promising slow bowler and a very reliable bat--and occasionally took his sisters on the river. Barbara, on whom late nights in London had told, slept half the morning, and then practised "serves" at tennis a.s.siduously under her brother's coaching, while Pamela, already a hoyden, romped screaming over the lawn, in a fashion that in Alex' and Barbara's nursery days would have met with instant and drastic punishment. But old Nurse was lenient with the last and youngest of her charges, and now-a-days her guardianship was almost a nominal one only.

Alex was preoccupied, aimlessly brooding over one absorbing interest, as in the summer holidays that the Clare children had spent at Fiveapples Farm.

Just as then she had waited and looked and longed for Queenie's letters, so now she waited for those of Mother Gertrude.

Day after sunlit day, she stood at the bottom of the straggling, over-grown paddock that gave on to the dusty high-road, and waited for the afternoon post to be delivered.

She was often disappointed, but never with the sick intensity of dismay that had marked every fresh stage in her realization of Queenie Torrance's indifference to friendship.

Mother Gertrude only wrote when she could find a little spare time, and left by far the greater number of Alex' daily outpourings to her unanswered, but she read them all--she understood, Alex told herself in a pa.s.sion of pure grat.i.tude--and she thought of her child and prayed daily for her.

Her letters began, "My dearest child," and Alex treasured the words, and the few earnest counsels and exhortations that the letters contained.

It was much easier to carry out those exhortations at Windsor than it had been in London. Alex went almost every day to a small Catholic church, of which Holland had discovered the vicinity, and sometimes spent the whole afternoon in the drowsy heat of the little building, that was almost always empty.

Her thoughts dwelt vaguely on her own future, and on the craving necessity for self-expression, of which Mother Gertrude had made her more intensely aware than she knew. Could it be that her many failures were to prove only the preliminary to an immense success, predestined for her out of Eternity? The allurement of the thought soothed Alex with an infinite sweetness.