Indeed the notes Hugo Jocelyn had left for her might have given her
some little trouble and embarrassment, but she did not pause to
consider difficulties. When a human creature resolves to dare and to
do, no impediment, real or imaginary, is allowed to stand long in the
way. An impulse pushes the soul forward, be it ever so reluctantly--the
impulse is sometimes from heaven and sometimes from hell--but as long
as it is active and peremptory, it is obeyed blindly and to the full.
This little ignorant and unworldly girl passed the rest of the night in
tidying the beloved room where she had spent so many happy hours, and
setting everything in order,--talking in whispers between whiles to the
ghostly presence of the "Sieur Amadis" as to a friend who knew her
difficult plight and guessed her intentions.
"You see," she said, softly, "there is no way out of it. It is not as
if I were anybody--I am nobody! I was never wanted in the world at all.
I have no name. I have never been baptised. And though I know now that
I have a mother, I feel that she is nothing to me. I can hardly believe
she is my mother. She is a lady of fashion with a secret--and _I_ am
the secret! I ought to be put away and buried and forgotten!--that
would be safest for her, and perhaps best for me! But I should like to
live long enough to make her wish she had been true to my father and
had owned me as his child! Ah, such dreams! Will they ever come true!"
She paused, looking up by the dim candle-light at the arms of the
"Sieur Amadis"--who "Here seekinge Forgetfulnesse did here fynde
Peace"--and at the motto "Mon coeur me soutien."
"Poor 'Sieur Amadis!'" she murmured--"He sought forgetfulness!--shall I
ever do the same? How strange it will be not to WISH to
remember!--surely one must be very old, or sad, to find gladness in
forgetting!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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