God's Good Man, Marie Corelli [me reader .txt] 📗

seemed deceitful,—so many parsons’ eyes are!—but I looked well into them to-day,—and they’re not the usual eyes of a parson at all,—they’re just the eyes of a British sailor who has watched rough seas all his life,—and such eyes are always true!”

XV

On the following Monday afternoon Cicely Bourne, to whom Walden had so successfully telegraphed Maryllia’s commands, arrived. She was rather an odd-looking young person. Her long thin legs were much too long for the shortness of her black cashmere frock, which was made ‘en demoiselle,’ after the fashion adhered to in French convents, where girls are compelled to look as ugly as possible, in order that they may eschew the sin of personal vanity,—her hair, of a rich raven black, was plaited in a stiff thick braid resembling a Chinese pigtail, and was fastened at the end with a bow of ribbon,—and a pair of wonderfully brilliant dark eyes flashed under her arching brows, suggesting something weird and witchlike in their roving glances, and giving an almost uncanny expression to her small, sallow face. But she was full of the most exuberant vitality,—she sparkled all over with it and seemed to exhale it in the mere act of breathing. Brimful of delight at the prospect of spending the whole summer with her friend and patroness, to whom she owed everything, and whom she adored with passionate admiration and gratitude, she dashed into the old-world silence and solitude of Abbot’s Manor like a wild wave of the sea, crested with sunshine and bubbling over with ripples of mirth. Her incessant chatter and laughter awoke the long- hushed echoes of the ancient house to responsive gaiety,—and every pale lingering shadow of dullness or loneliness fled away from the exhilarating effect of her presence, which acted at once as a stimulant and charm to Maryllia, who welcomed her arrival with affectionate enthusiasm.

“But oh, my dear!” she exclaimed—“What a little school-guy they have made of you! You must have grown taller, surely, since November when I saw you last? Your frock is ever so much too short!”

“I don’t think I’ve grown a bit,”—said Cicely, glancing down at her own legs disparagingly—“But my frock wore shabby at the bottom, and the nuns had a fresh hem turned up all round. That reduced its length by a couple of inches at least. I told them as modestly as I could that my ankles were too vastily exposed, but they said it didn’t matter, as I was only a day-boarder.”

Maryllia’s eyebrows went up perplexedly.

“I don’t see what that has to do with it,”—she said—“Would you have preferred to live in the Convent altogether, dear?”

“Grand merci!” and Cicely made an expressive grimace—“Not I! I should not have had half as many lessons from Gigue, and I should never have been able to write to you without the Mere Superieure spying into my letters. That’s why none of the girls are allowed to have sealing wax, because all their letters are ungummed over a basin of hot water and read before going to post. Discipline, discipline! Torquemada’s Inquisition was nothing to it! Of course I had to tell the Mere Superieure that you had sent for me, and that I should be away all summer. She asked heaps of questions, but she got nothing out of me, so of course she wrote to your aunt. But that doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Not in the least,”—answered Maryllia, decisively,—“My aunt has nothing whatever to do with me now, nor I with her. I am my own mistress.”

“And it becomes you amazingly!” declared Cicely—“I never saw you looking prettier! You are just the sweetest thing that ever fell out of heaven in human shape! Oh, Maryllia, what a lovely, lovely place this is! And is it all yours?—your very, very own?”

“My very, very own!” and Maryllia, in replying to the question, felt a thrill of legitimate pride in the beautiful old Tudor house of her ancestors,—“I wish I had never been taken away from it! The more I see of it, the more I feel I ought not to have left it so long.”

“It is real home, sweet home!” said Cicely, and her great eyes grew suddenly sad and wistful, as she slipped a caressing arm round her friend’s waist—“How grateful I am to you for asking me to come and stay in it! Because, after all, I am only a poor little peasant,— with a musical faculty!”

Maryllia kissed her affectionately.

“You are a genius, my dear!” she said—“There’s is no higher supremacy. What does Gigue say of you now?”

“Gigue is satisfied, I think. But I don’t really know. He says I’m too precocious—that my voice is a woman’s before I’m a girl. It’s abnormal—and I’m abnormal too. I know I am,—and I know it’s horrid—but I can’t help it! Whers’a the piano?”

“There isn’t one in the house,” said Maryllia, smiling; “Abbot’s Manor has always lived about a hundred and fifty years behind the times. But I’ve sent for a boudoir grand—it will be here this week. Meanwhile, won’t this do?” and she pointed to a quaint little instrument occupying a recess near the window—“It’s a spinet of Charles the Second’s period---”

“Delightful!” cried Cicely, ecstatically—“There’s nothing sweeter in the whole world to sing to!”

Opening the painted lid with the greatest tenderness and care, she passed her hands lightly over the spinet’s worn and yellow ivory keys and evoked a faint fairy-like tinkling.

“Listen! Isn’t it like the wandering voice of some little ghost of the past trying to speak to us?” she said—“And in such sweet tune, too! Poor little ghost! Shall I sing to you? Shall I tell you that we have a sympathy in common with you, even though you are so old and so far, far away!”

Her lips parted, and a pure note, crystal clear, and of such silvery softness as to seem more supernatural than human, floated upward on the silence. Maryllia caught her breath, and listened with a quickly beating heart,—she knew that the voice of this child whom she had rescued from a life of misery, was a world’s marvel.

“Le douce printemps fait naitre,— Autant d’amours que de fleurs; Tremblez, tremblez, jeunes coeurs! Des qu’il commence a paraitre Il faut cesser les froideurs.”

Here with a sudden brilliant roulade the singer ran up the scale to the C in alt, and there paused with a trill as delicious and full as the warble of a nightingale.

“Mais ce qu’il a de douceurs Vous coutera cher peut-etre! Tremblez, tremblez jeunes coeurs, Le douce printemps fait naitre, Autant d’amours que de fleurs!”

She ceased. The air, broken into delicate vibrations, carried the lovely sounds rhythmically outward, onward and into unechoing distance.

She turned and looked at Maryllia—then smiled.

“I see you are pleased,”—she said.

“Pleased! Cicely, I don’t believe anyone was ever born into the world to sing as you sing!”

Cicely looked quaintly meditative.

“Well, I don’t know about that! You see there have been several millions of folks born into the world, and there may have been just one naturally created singer among them!” She laughed, and touched a chord on the spinet. “The old French song exactly suits this old French instrument. I see it is an ancient thing of Paris. Gigue says I have improved—but he will never admit much, as you know. He has forbidden me to touch the C in alt, and I did it just now. I cannot help it sometimes—it comes so easy. But you must scold me, Maryllia darling, when you hear me taking it,—I don’t want to strain the vocal cords, and I always forget I’m only fourteen; I feel—oh! ever so much older!—ages old, in fact!” She sighed, and stretched her arms up above her head. “What a perfect room this is to sing in! What a perfect house!—and what a perfect angel you are to have me with you!”

Her eyes filled with sudden tears of emotion, but she quickly blinked them away.

“Et ce cher Roxmouth?” she queried, suddenly, glancing appreciatively at the rippling gold-brown lights and shades of her friend’s hair, the delicate hues of her complexion, and the grace of her form—“Has he been to see you in this idyllic retreat?”

Maryllia gave a slight gesture of wearied impatience.

“Certainly not! How can you ask such a question, Cicely! I left my aunt on purpose to get rid of him once and for all. And he knows it;—yet he has written to me every two days regularly since I came here!”

“Helas!—ce cher Roxmouth!” murmured Cicely, with a languid gesture imitative of the ‘society manner’ of Mrs. Fred Vancourt,—“Parfait gentilhomme au bout des ongles!”

Maryllia laughed.

“Yes,—Aunt Emily all over!” she said—“How tired I am of that phrase! She knows as well as anybody that Roxmouth, for all his airs of aristocratic propriety, is a social villain of the lowest type of modern decadence, yet she would rather see me married to him than to any other man she has ever met. And why? Simply because he will be a Duke! She would like to say to all her acquaintances—‘My niece is a Duchess.’ She would feel a certain fantastic satisfaction in thinking that her millions were being used to build up the decayed fortunes of an English nobleman’s family, as well as to ‘restore’ Roxmouth Castle, which is in a bad state of repair. And she would sacrifice my heart and soul and life to such trumpery ambitions as these!”

“Trumpery ambitions!” echoed Cicely—“My dear, they are ambitions for which nearly all women are willing to scramble, fight and die! To be a Duchess! To dwell in an ancient ‘restored’ castle of once proud English nobles! Saint Moses! Who wouldn’t sacrifice such vague matters as heart, life and soul for the glory of being called ‘Your Grace’ by obsequious footmen! My unconventional Maryllia! You are setting yourself in rank, heretical opposition to the conventionalities of society, and won’t all the little conventional minds hate you for it!”

“It doesn’t matter if they do,”—rejoined Maryllia—“I have never been loved since my father’s death,—so I don’t mind being hated.”

“I love you!” said Cicely, with swift ardour—“Don’t say you have never been loved!”

Maryllia caught her hand tenderly and kissed it.

“I was not thinking of you, dear!” she said—“Forgive me! I was thinking of men. They have admired me and flirted with me,—many of them have wanted to marry me, in order to get hold of Aunt Emily’s fortune with me,—but none of them have ever loved me. Cicely, Cicely, I want to be loved!”

“So do I!” said Cicely, with answering light in her eyes—“But I don’t see how it’s going to be done in my case! You may possibly get your wish, but I!—why, my dear, I see myself in futur-oe as a ‘prima donna assoluta’ perhaps, with several painted and padded bassi and tenori making sham love to me in opera till I get perfectly sick of cuore and amore, and cry out for something else by way of a change! I am quite positive that love,—love such as we read of in poetry and romance, doesn’t really exist! And I have another fixed opinion—which is, that the people who write most about it have never felt it. One always expresses best, even in a song, the emotions one has never experienced.”

Maryllia looked at her in a little wonder.

“Do you really think that?”

“I do!