Part 38 (2/2)
”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 fas.h.i.+on 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 guardians.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p.
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.
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