The house was chiefly remarkable for queer passages, which, beginning
from the roof of the old tower, above the Father's chamber, radiated
about, emerging in unexpected places. The priests' holes had offered to
the persecuted clergy of old times the choice between being grilled erect
behind a chimney, or of lying flat in a chamber about the size of a
coffin near the roof, where the martyr Jesuits lived on suction, like the
snipe, absorbing soup from a long straw passed through a wall into a
neighbouring garret.
'Those were cruel times,' said Father Riccoboni, who presently, at
luncheon, showed that he could thoroughly appreciate the tender mercies
of the present or Christian era. Logan watched him, and once when,
something that interested him being said, the Father swept the table with
his glance without raising his head, a memory for a fraction of a moment
seemed to float towards the surface of Logan's consciousness. Even as
when an angler, having hooked a salmon, a monster of the stream, long the
fish bores down impetuous, seeking the sunken rocks, disdainful of the
steel, and the dark wave conceals him; then anon is beheld a gleam of
silver, and again is lost to view, and the heart of the man rejoices--even
so fugitive a glimpse had Logan of what he sought in the depths of
memory. But it fled, and still he was puzzled.
Logan loafed out after luncheon to a seat on the lawn in the shade of a
tree. They were all to be driven over to an Abbey not very far away,
for, indeed, in July, there is little for a man to do in the country.
Logan sat and mused. Looking up he saw Miss Willoughby approaching,
twirling an open parasol on her shoulder. Her face was radiant; of old
it had often looked as if it might be stormy, as if there were thunder
behind those dark eyebrows. Logan rose, but the lady sat down on the
garden seat, and he followed her example.
'This is better than Bloomsbury, Mr. Logan, and cocoa _pour tout potage_:
singed cocoa usually.'
'The _potage_ here is certainly all that heart can wish,' said Logan.
'The chrysalis,' said Miss Willoughby, 'in its wildest moments never
dreamed of being a butterfly, as the man said in the sermon; and I feel
like a butterfly that remembers being a chrysalis. Look at me now!'
'I could look for ever,' said Logan, 'like the sportsman in Keats's
_Grecian Urn_: "For ever let me look, and thou be fair!"'
'I am so sorry for people in town,' said Miss Willoughby. 'Don't you
wish dear old Milo was here?'
Milo was the affectionate nickname--a tribute to her charms--borne by
Miss Markham at St. Ursula's.
'How can I wish that anyone was here but you?' asked Logan. 'But,
indeed, as to her being here, I should like to know in what capacity she
was a guest.'
The Clytemnestra glance came into Miss Willoughby's grey eyes for a
moment, but she was not to be put out of humour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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