“Are there any bad angels?” she cried, to give her impatience vent.
He had risen up, and stood swaying indolently from one foot to the other. “Bad angels? Oh yes,” he said; “abundance; very different from devils, who are honest--like the fiends in the pictures, unmistakable. The others, you know, deceive. Don’t you remember?--
‘How there looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; And how he knew it was a fiend, That miserable knight.’”
He turned and went into the _salone_, repeating these words in an undertone to himself. But there was in his face none of the bitterness or horror with which they must have been said by one who had ever in his own person made that discovery. He was quite calm, meditative, marking with a slight intonation and movement of his head the cadence of the poetry.
Frances stayed behind in the darkness. She had not the practice which we acquire in later life; she could not hide the excitement which was still coursing through her veins. She went to the corner of the loggia which was nearest the sea, and caught in her face the rush of the rising breeze, which flung at her the first drops of the coming rain. A storm on that soft coast is a welcome break in the monotony of the clear skies and unchanging calm. After a while her father called to her that the rain was coming in, that the windows must be shut; and she hurried in, brushing by Domenico, who had come to close everything up, and who looked at her reproachfully as she rushed past him. She came behind her father’s chair and leaned over to kiss him. “I have got a little wet, and I think I had better go to bed,” she said.
“Yes, surely, if you wish it, my dear,” said Mr Waring. Something moist had touched his forehead, which was too warm to be rain. He waited politely till she had gone before he wiped it off. It was the edge of a tear, hot, miserable, full of anger as well as pain, which had made that mark upon his high white forehead. It made him pause for a minute or two in his reading. “Poor little girl!” he said, with a sigh. Perhaps he was not so insensible as he seemed.
It is a common impression that happiness and unhappiness are permanent states of mind, and that for long tracts of our lives we are under the continuous sway of one or other of these conditions. But this is almost always a mistake, save in the case of grief, which is perhaps the only emotion which is beyond the reach of the momentary lightenings and alleviations and perpetual vicissitudes of life. Death, and the pangs of separation from those we love, are permanent, at least for their time; but in everything else there is an ebb and flow which keeps the heart alive. When Frances Waring told the story of this period of her life, she represented herself unconsciously as having been oppressed by the mystery that over-shadowed her, and as having lost all the ease of her young life prematurely in a sudden encounter with shadows unsuspected before. But as a matter of fact, this was not the case. She had a bad night--that is, she cried herself asleep; but once over the boundary which divides our waking thoughts from the visions of the night, she knew no more till the sun came in and woke her to a very cheerful morning. It is true that care made several partially successful assaults upon her that day and for several days after. But as everything went on quite calmly and peacefully, the impression wore off. The English family found out, as was inevitable, where Mr Waring lived, without any difficulty; and first the father came, then the mother, and finally the pair together, to call. Frances, to whom a breach of decorum or civility was pain unspeakable, sat trembling and ashamed in the deepest corner of the loggia, while these kind strangers encountered Mariuccia at the door. The scene, as a matter of fact, was rather comic than tragic, for neither the visitors nor the guardian of the house possessed any language but their own; and Mr and Mrs Mannering had as little understanding of the statement that Mr Waring did not “receive” as Frances had expected.