Margaret Oliphant - Whiteladies

The breakfast-table was spread in the smaller dining-room, a room furnished with quaint old furniture like the hall, which looked out upon nothing but the grass and trees of the garden, bounded by an old mossy wall, as old as the house. The windows were all open, the last ray of the morning sun slanting off the shining panes, the scent of the flowers coming in, and all the morning freshness. Miss Susan came downstairs full of unusual energy, notwithstanding her sleepless night. She had decided upon something to do, which is always satisfactory to an active mind; and though she was beyond the age at which people generally plan long journeys with pleasure, the prick of something new inspired her and made a stir in her veins. “People live more when they stir about,” she said to herself, when, with a little wonder and partial amusement at herself, she became conscious of this sensation, and took her seat at the breakfast-table with a sense of stimulated energy which was very pleasant.

Miss Augustine came in after her sister, with her hands folded in her long sleeves, looking more than ever like a saint out of a painted window. She crossed herself as she sat down. Her blue eyes seemed veiled so far as external life went. She was the ideal nun of romance and poetry, not the ruddy-faced, active personage who is generally to be found under that guise in actual life. This was one of her fast-days – and indeed most days were fast-days with her. She was her own rule, which is always a harsher kind of restraint than any rule adapted to common use. Her breakfast consisted of a cup of milk and a small cake of bread. She gave her sister an abstracted kiss, but took no notice of her lively looks. When she withdrew her hands from her sleeves a roll of paper became visible in one of them, which she slowly opened out.

“These are the plans for the chantry, finished at last,” she said. “Everything is ready now. You must take them to the vicar, I suppose, Susan. I cannot argue with a worldly-minded man. I will go to the almshouses while you are talking to him, and pray.”

“The vicar has no power in the matter,” said Miss Susan. “So long as we are the lay rectors we can build as we please; at the chancel end at least.”

Augustine put up her thin hands, just appearing out of the wide sleeves, to her ears. “Susan, Susan! do not use those words, which have all our guilt in them! Lay rectors! Lay robbers! Oh! will you ever learn that this thought is the misery of my life?”

“My dear, we must be reasonable,” said Miss Susan. “If you like to throw away – no, I mean to employ your money in building a chantry, I don’t object; but we have our rights.”

“Our rights are nothing but wrongs,” said the other, shaking her head, “unless my poor work may be accepted as an expiation. Ours is not the guilt, and therefore, being innocent, we may make the amends.”

“I wonder where you got your doctrines from?” said Miss Susan. “They are not Popish either, so far as I can make out; and in some things, Austine, you are not even High Church.”

Augustine made no reply. Her attention had failed. She held the drawings before her, which at last, after many difficulties, she had managed to bring into existence – on paper at least. I do not think she had very clear notions in point of doctrine. She had taken up with a visionary mediævalism which she did not very well understand, and which she combined unawares with many of the ordinary principles of a moderate English Church-woman. She liked to cross herself, without meaning very much by it, and the idea of an Austin Chantry, where service should be said every day, “to the intention of” the Austin family, had been for years her cherished fancy, though she would have been shocked had any advanced Ritualists or others suggested to her that what she meant was a daily mass for the dead. She did not mean this at all, nor did she know very clearly what she meant, except to build a chantry, in which daily service should be maintained forever, always with a reference to the Austins, and making some sort of expiation, she could not have told what, for the fundamentals in the family. Perhaps it was merely inability of reasoning, or perhaps a disinclination to entangle herself in doctrine at all, that made her prefer to remain in this vagueness and confusion. She knew very well what she wanted to do, but not exactly why.

While her sister looked at her drawings Miss Susan thought it a good moment to reveal her own plans, with, I suppose, that yearning for some sort of sympathy which survives even in the minds of those who have had full experience of the difficulty or even impossibility of obtaining it. She knew Augustine would not, probably could not, enter into her thoughts, and I am not sure that she desired it – but yet she longed to awaken some little interest.

“I am thinking,” she said, “of going away – for a few days.”

Augustine took no notice. She examined first the front elevation, then the interior of the chantry. “They say it is against the law,” she remarked after awhile, “to have a second altar; but every old chantry has it, and without an altar the service would be imperfect. Remember this Susan; for the vicar, they tell me, will object.”

“You don’t hear what I say, then? I am thinking of – leaving home.”

“Yes, I heard – so long as you settle this for me before you go, that it may be begun at once. Think, Susan! it is the work of my life.”

“I will see to it,” said Miss Susan with a sigh. “You shall not be crossed, dear, if I can manage it. But you don’t ask where I am going or why I am going.”

“No,” said Augustine calmly; “it is no doubt about business, and business has no share in my thoughts.”

“If it had not a share in my thoughts things would go badly with us,” said Miss Susan, coloring with momentary impatience and self-assertion. Then she fell back into her former tone. “I am going abroad, Austine; does not that rouse you? I have not been abroad since we were quite young, how many years ago? – when we went to Italy with my father – when we were all happy together. Ah me! what a difference! Austine, you recollect that?”

“Happy, were we?” said Augustine looking up, with a faint tinge of color on her paleness; “no, I was never happy till I saw once for all how wicked we were, how we deserved our troubles, and how something might be done to make up for them. I have never really cared for anything else.”

This she said with a slight raising of her head and an air of reality which seldom appeared in her visionary face. It was true, though it was so strange. Miss Susan was a much more reasonable, much more weighty personage, but she perceived this change with a little suspicion, and did not understand the fanciful, foolish sister whom she had loved and petted all her life.

“My dear, we had no troubles then,” she said, with a wondering look.

“Always, always,” said Augustine, “and I never knew the reason, till I found it out.” Then this gleam of something more than intelligence faded all at once from her face. “I hope you will settle everything before you go,” she said, almost querulously; “to be put off now and have to wait would surely break my heart.”

“I’ll do it, I’ll do it, Austine. I am going – on family business.”

“If you see poor Herbert,” said Augustine, calmly, “tell him we pray for him in the almshouses night and day. That may do him good. If I had got my work done sooner he might have lived. Indeed, the devil sometimes tempts me to think it is hard that just when my chantry is beginning and continual prayer going on Herbert should die. It seems to take away the meaning! But what am I, one poor creature, to make up, against so many that have done wrong?”