“Fortunately I am a very good sailor,” Kitty answered. “I’ve never been seasick yet.”
The Mother Superior returned with a small, neat parcel.
“They’re handkerchiefs that I’ve had made for the name-day of my mother,” she said. “The initials have been embroidered by our young girls.”
Sister St. Joseph suggested that Kitty would like to see how beautifully the work was done and the Mother Superior with an indulgent, deprecating smile untied the parcel. The handkerchiefs were of very fine lawn and the initials embroidered in a complicated cipher were surmounted by a crown of strawberry leaves. When Kitty had properly admired the workmanship the handkerchiefs were wrapped up again and the parcel handed to her. Sister St. Joseph, with an “eh bien, Madame, je vous quitte” and a repetition of her polite and impersonal salutations, went away. Kitty realised that this was the moment to take her leave of the Superior. She thanked her for her kindness to her. They walked together along the bare, whitewashed corridors.
“Would it be asking too much of you to register the parcel when you arrive at Marseilles?” said the Superior.
“Of course I’ll do that,” said Kitty.
She glanced at the address. The name seemed very grand, but the place mentioned attracted her attention.
“But that is one of the châteaux I’ve seen. I was motoring with friends in France.”
“It is very possible,” said the Mother Superior. “Strangers are permitted to view it on two days a week.”
“I think if I had ever lived in such a beautiful place I should never have had the courage to leave it.”
“It is of course a historical monument. It is scarcely intimate. If I regretted anything it would not be that, but the little château that we lived in when I was a child. It was in the Pyrenees. I was born within sound of the sea. I do not deny that sometimes I should like to hear the waves beating against the rocks.”
Kitty had an idea that the Mother Superior, divining her thought and the reason for her remarks, was slyly making fun of her. But they reached the little, unpretentious door of the convent. To Kitty’s surprise the Mother Superior took her in her arms and kissed her. The pressure of her pale lips on Kitty’s cheeks, she kissed her first on one side and then on the other, was so unexpected that it made her flush and inclined to cry.
“Goodbye, God bless you, my dear child.” She held her for a moment in her arms. “Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.”
The convent door closed for the last time behind her.
LXIX
Waddington walked with Kitty up the hill and they turned aside for a moment to look at Walter’s grave; at the memorial arch he said goodbye to her, and looking at it for the last time she felt that she could reply to the enigmatic irony of its appearance with an equal irony of her own. She stepped into her chair.
One day passed after the other. The sights of the wayside served as a background to her thoughts. She saw them as it were in duplicate, rounded as though in a stereoscope, with an added significance because to everything she saw was added the recollection of what she had seen when but a few short weeks before she had taken the same journey in the contrary direction. The coolies with their loads straggled disorderly, two or three together, and then a hundred yards behind one by himself, and then two or three more; the soldiers of the escort shuffled along with a clumsy walk that covered five and twenty miles a day; the amah was carried by two bearers and Kitty, not because she was heavier, but for face’s sake, by four. Now and then they met a string of coolies lolloping by in line with their heavy burdens, now and then a Chinese official in a sedan who looked at the white woman with inquisitive eyes; now they came across peasants in faded blue and huge hats on their way to market and now a woman, old or young, tottering along on her bound feet. They passed up and down little hills laid out with trim rice fields and farmhouses nestling cosily in a grove of bamboos; they passed through ragged villages and populous cities walled like the cities in a missal. The sun of the early autumn was pleasant, and if at daybreak, when the shimmering dawn lent the neat fields the enchantment of a fairy tale, it was cold, the warmth later was very grateful. Kitty was filled by it with a sense of beatitude which she made no effort to resist.
The vivid scenes with their elegant colour, their unexpected distinction, and their strangeness, were like an arras before which, like mysterious, shadowy shapes, played the phantoms of
