Part 41 (1/2)
The thought brought with it a tingling admixture of bitter disappointment and of poignant rapture.
She realized almost despairingly that she could no longer stand in the hall clasping Mother Gertrude's letter unconsciously to her.
Already light, flying feet were approaching from the garden.
”I came to look for you, Alex,” said Barbara breathlessly in the doorway. ”They're going to give the prizes. What are you doing?”
”I'm coming,” said Alex mechanically. She was rather surprised that Barbara should have taken the trouble to come for her.
”Did mother send you?”
”No,” said Barbara simply; ”but I thought it would look very bad if you kept out of the way of it because you happened to play badly and not win a prize.”
So Alex a.s.sisted at the prize-giving, and saw Lady Essie accept the jingling, Indian silver bangles that were so much in fas.h.i.+on, with frank pleasure and grat.i.tude, and saw consolation prizes awarded to Cedric and to his partner, who appeared entirely delighted, although she had done nothing at all to deserve distinction.
”You ought to have a prize, you know,” she heard Ralph McAllister tell Barbara. ”If you'd had a better partner you'd have won easily. You play much better than Lady Essie, really!”
It was not in the least true that Barbara played better than Lady Essie, or nearly so well, but she put on a little, gratified, complacent smile, that apparently satisfied Ralph McAllister quite as well as modest disclaimers.
Alex kept out of her partner's way, and avoided his eye. Not much probability that _he_ would address flattering speeches to her!
All the time a subconscious emotion was surging through her at the thought of Mother Gertrude's letter and what it contained.
”The life you are leading does not satisfy you. You will never find that what the world can offer will satisfy you.”
It was true enough, Heaven knew, Alex thought drearily, as she addressed perfunctory and obviously absent-minded civilities to her mother's guests.
In the sense of depression engendered by the afternoon's failure, no less than by the sight of McAllister's evident delight in Barbara's demure, patently-artificial, alternate coyness and gaiety, Alex realized both her own eternal dissatisfaction with her surroundings and the subtle allurement of a renunciation that should yet promise her all that she most longed for.
XVIII
Crisis
When Alex went back to London in the beginning of October, it was with a sensation as though an enormous gulf of time had been traversed between her visits to the convent in the hot, arid summer days and her return there. For one thing the cold weather had set in early and with unusual severity, and the sight of fires and winter furs seemed to succeed with startling rapidity to the roses and lawn-tennis at Windsor.
In her first greeting with Mother Gertrude, too, Alex was strongly conscious of that indefinable sensation of having made some strange, almost unguessed-at progress in a direction of which she was only now becoming aware. It frightened her when the Superior, gazing at her with those light, steady eyes that now held a depth of undisguised tenderness, spoke firmly, with an implication that could no longer be denied or ignored.
”So the great decision is taken, little Alex. And if peace has not yet come to you, do not feel dismayed. It will come, as surely as I stand here and tell you of it. But there may be--there must be--conflict first.”
Whether she spoke of the conflict which Alex foresaw, half with dread and half with exultation, as inevitable between herself and her surroundings, or of some deeper, inward dissension in Alex' own soul, she could not tell.
But there was both joy and a certain excitement in having her destiny so much taken for granted, and the mystical and devotional works to which the Superior gave her free access worked upon her imagination, and dispelled many of her lingering doubts. Those which lay deepest in her soul, she never examined. She was almost, though not quite, unaware of their existence, and to probe deeper into that faint, underlying questioning would have seemed a disloyalty equally to that intangible possession which she had begun to think of as her vocation, and to Mother Gertrude. The sense of closer companions.h.i.+p--of a more intimate spiritual union expressed, though never explicitly so in words, in her relation with the Superior, was unutterably precious to Alex. In the joy that it brought her she read merely another manifestation and the consolation to be found in the way of the Spirit.
A feeling of impending crisis, however, hung over the hurrying days of that brief November, when the convent parlour in the afternoons was illuminated by a single gas-jet that cast strange, clean-cut shadows on the white-washed walls.
Just before Christmas Sir Francis spoke:
”What is this violent attraction that takes you out with your maid in the opposite direction to your mother's expeditions with Barbara?” he suddenly inquired of Alex one evening, very stiffly.