Babylon. Volume 3. Allen Grant
own natures are usually the exact ones who most often bitterly reproach themselves for their moral shortcomings in this matter?
When the rector came to open the envelope by-and-by in his own study, he found it contained a letter in French from a Russian countess, then in London, who proposed spending the winter in Italy. ‘Madame had seen M. O’Donovan’s Advertisement in a journal of his country, and would be glad to learn from Monsieur some particulars about the young lady whom he desired to recommend to families. Madame required a governess for one little girl, and proposed a salary of 2,500 francs.’ The old man’s eyes brightened at the idea of so large an offer – one hundred pounds sterling – and then he laid down the letter again, and cried gently to himself, as old people sometimes do, for a few minutes. After that, he reflected that Georgey Wroe’s daughter was a very good girl, and deserved any advancement that he could get for her; and Georgey was a fine young fellow himself, and as clever a hand at managing a small smack in a squall off the Chesil as any fisherman, bar none, in all England. God bless his soul, what a run that was they had together, the night the ‘Sunderbund’ East Indiaman went to pieces off Deadman’s Bay, from Seaton Bar right round the Bill to Lulworth! He could mind even now the way the water broke over the gunwale into Georgey’s face, and how Georgey laughed at the wind, and swore it was a mere breeze, and positively whistled to it. Well, well, he would do what he could for Georgey’s daughter, and he must look out (with a stifled sigh) for some other good girl to take care of Lucy’s precious little ones.
So he sat down and wrote off such a glowing account of Minna’s many virtues to the Russian countess in London – an account mainly derived from his own calm inner belief as to what a perfect woman’s character ought to be made up of – that the Russian countess wrote back to say she would engage Mdlle. Wroe immediately, without even waiting to see her. Till he got that answer, Mr. O’Donovan never said a word about the matter to Minna, for fear she might be disappointed; but as soon as it arrived, and he had furtively dried his eyes behind his handkerchief, lest she should see how sorry he was to lose her, he laid the two letters triumphantly down before her, and said, in a voice which seemed as though he were quite as much interested in the event as she was: ‘There you see, my dear, I’ve found somebody at last for you to go to Rome with.’ Minna’s head reeled and her eyes swam as she read the two letters to herself with some difficulty (for her French was of the strictly school-taught variety); but as soon as she had spelt out the meaning to her own intense satisfaction, she flung her arms round old Mr. O’Donovan’s neck, and kissed him twice fervently. Mr. O’Donovan’s eyes glistened, and he kissed her in return gently on her forehead. She had grown to be to him almost like a daughter, and he loved her so dearly that it was a hard wrench to part from her. ‘And you know, my dear,’ he said to her with fatherly tenderness, ‘you won’t mind my mentioning it to you, I’m sure, because I need hardly tell you how much interest I take in my old friend Georgey’s daughter; but I think it’s just as well the lady’s a foreigner, and especially a Russian, because they’re not so particular, I believe, about the conventionalities of society as our English mothers are apt to be; and you’ll probably get more opportunities of seeing young Churchill when occasion offers than you would have done if you’d happened to have gone abroad with an English family.’
When Minna went away from the country rectory, at very short notice, some three weeks later, Mary the housemaid observed, with a little ill-natured smile to the other village gossips, that it wasn’t before it was time, neither; for the way that that there Miss Wroe, as she called herself, had been carrying on last month or two along of poor old master, and him a clergyman, too, and old enough to know better, but there, what can you expect, for everybody knows what an old gentleman is when a governess or anybody can twist him round her little finger, was that dreadful that really she often wondered whether a respectable girl as was always brought up quite decent and her only a fisherman’s daughter, too, as master hisself admitted, but them governesses, when they got theirselves a little eddication and took a sitooation, was that stuck-up and ridiculous, not but what she made her always keep her place, for that matter, for she wasn’t going to be put down by none of your governesses, setting themselves up to be ladies when they wasn’t no better nor she was, but at any rate it was a precious good thing she was gone now before things hadn’t gone no further, for if she’d stayed, why, of course, there wouldn’t have been nothing left for her to do, as had always lived in proper families, but to go and give notice herself afore she’d stop in such a sitooation.
And Mrs. Upjohn, the doctor’s wife, smiled blandly when Mary spoke to her about it, and said in a grave tone of severe moral censure: ‘Well, there, Mary, you oughtn’t to want to meddle with your master’s business, whatever you may happen to fancy. Not but what Miss Wroe herself certainly did behave in a most imprudent and unladylike manner; and I can’t deny, of course, that she’s laid herself open to every word of what you say about her. But then, you know, Mary, she isn’t a lady; and, after all, what can you expect from such a person?’ To which Mary, having that profound instinctive contempt for her own class which is sometimes begotten among the essentially vulgar by close unconscious introspection, immediately answered: ‘Ah, what indeed!’ and went on unrebuked with her ill-natured gossip. So high and watchful is social morality amid the charming Arcadian simplicity of our outlying English country villages.
But poor little Minna, waking up that very morning in the Via Clementina, never heeded their venomous backbiting one bit, and thought only of going to see her dear Colin. What a surprise it would be to him to see her, to be sure; for Minna, fearful that the scheme might fall through before it was really settled, had written not a word to him about it beforehand, and meant to surprise him by dropping in upon him quite unexpectedly at his studio without a single note of warning.
‘Ah, my dear,’ the countess said to her, when Minna, trembling, asked leave to go out and visit her cousin – that dim relationship, so inevitable among country folk from the same district, had certainly more than once done her good service – ‘you have then a parent at Rome, a sculptor? Yes, yes, I recall it; that good Mr. O’Donovan made mention to me of this parent. He prayed me to let you have the opportunity from time to time of visiting him. These are our first days at Rome. For the moment, Olga will demand her vacations: she will wish to distract herself a little with the town, before she applies herself seriously to her studies of English. Let us say to-day, then: let us say this very morning. You can go, my child: you can visit your parent: and if his studio encloses anything of artistic, you pass me the word, I go to see it. But if they have the instinct of the family strong, these English! I find that charming; it is delicious: it is all that there is of most pure and poetical. She wishes to visit her cousin, who is a sculptor and whom she has not seen, it is now a long time; and she blushes and trembles like a French demoiselle who comes from departing the day itself from the gates of the convent. One would say, a lover. I find it most admirable, this affection of the family, this lasting reminiscence of the distant relations. We others in Russia, we have it too: we love the parent: but not with so much empressement. I find that trait there altogether essentially English.’
Mrs. Upjohn would have considered the countess ‘scarcely respectable,’ and would have avoided her acquaintance carefully, unless indeed she happened to be introduced to her by the squire’s lady, in which case, of course, her perfect propriety would have been sufficiently guaranteed: but, after all, which of them had the heart the most untainted? To the pure all things are pure: and contrariwise.
So Minna hastened out into those unknown streets of Rome, and by the aid of her self-taught Italian (which was a good deal better than her French, so potent a tutor is love) she soon found her way down the Corso, and off the side alley into the narrow sunless Via Colonna. She followed the numbers down to the familiar eighty-four of Colin’s letters, and there she saw upon the door a little painted tin-plate, bearing in English the simple inscription: ‘Mr. C. Churchill’s Studio.’ Minna’s heart beat fast for a moment as she mounted the stairs unannounced, and stood within the open door of Colin’s modelling room.
A few casts and other sculptor’s properties filled up the space between the door and the middle of the studio. Minna paused a second, and looked timidly from behind them at the room beyond. She hardly liked to come forward at once and claim acquaintance: it seemed so strange and unwomanly so to announce herself, now that she had actually got to face it. A certain unwonted bashfulness