Apparently, when the victorious fifteen or eleven came into the refectory for supper, the whole school jumped upon the tables and cheered and broke the chairs on the floor and smashed the crockery—for a given time, until the Reverend Mother rang a hand-bell. That is of course the Catholic tradition—saturnalia that can end in a moment, like the crack of a whip.
I don't, of course, like the tradition, but I am bound to say that it gave Nancy—or at any rate Nancy had—a sense of rectitude that I have never seen surpassed.
It was a thing like a knife that looked out of her eyes and that spoke with her voice, just now and then.
It positively frightened me.
I suppose that I was almost afraid to be in a world where there could be so fine a standard.
I remember when she was about fifteen or sixteen on going back to the convent I once gave her a couple of English sovereigns as a tip.
She thanked me in a peculiarly heartfelt way, saying that it would come in extremely handy.
I asked her why and she explained.
There was a rule at the school that the pupils were not to speak when they walked through the garden from the chapel to the refectory.
And, since this rule appeared to be idiotic and arbitrary, she broke it on purpose day after day.
In the evening the children were all asked if they had committed any faults during the day, and every evening Nancy confessed that she had broken this particular rule.
It cost her sixpence a time, that being the fine attached to the offence.
Just for the information I asked her why she always confessed, and she answered in these exact words:
"Oh, well, the girls of the Holy Child have always been noted for their truthfulness.
It's a beastly bore, but I've got to do it."
I dare say that the miserable nature of her childhood, coming before the mixture of saturnalia and discipline that was her convent life, added something to her queernesses.
Her father was a violent madman of a fellow, a major of one of what I believe are called the Highland regiments.
He didn't drink, but he had an ungovernable temper, and the first thing that Nancy could remember was seeing her father strike her mother with his clenched fist so that her mother fell over sideways from the breakfast-table and lay motionless.
The mother was no doubt an irritating woman and the privates of that regiment appeared to have been irritating, too, so that the house was a place of outcries and perpetual disturbances.
Mrs Rufford was Leonora's dearest friend and Leonora could be cutting enough at times.
But I fancy she was as nothing to Mrs Rufford.
The Major would come in to lunch harassed and already spitting out oaths after an unsatisfactory morning's drilling of his stubborn men beneath a hot sun.
And then Mrs Rufford would make some cutting remark and pandemonium would break loose.
Once, when she had been about twelve, Nancy had tried to intervene between the pair of them.
Her father had struck her full upon the forehead a blow so terrible that she had lain unconscious for three days.
Nevertheless, Nancy seemed to prefer her father to her mother.
She remembered rough kindnesses from him.
Once or twice when she had been quite small he had dressed her in a clumsy, impatient, but very tender way.
It was nearly always impossible to get a servant to stay in the family and, for days at a time, apparently, Mrs Rufford would be incapable.
I fancy she drank.
At any rate, she had so cutting a tongue that even Nancy was afraid of her—she so made fun of any tenderness, she so sneered at all emotional displays.
Nancy must have been a very emotional child.
Then one day, quite suddenly, on her return from a ride at Fort William, Nancy had been sent, with her governess, who had a white face, right down South to that convent school. She had been expecting to go there in two months' time. Her mother disappeared from her life at that time.
A fortnight later Leonora came to the convent and told her that her mother was dead.
Perhaps she was.
At any rate, I never heard until the very end what became of Mrs Rufford.
Leonora never spoke of her.
And then Major Rufford went to India, from which he returned very seldom and only for very short visits; and Nancy lived herself gradually into the life at Branshaw Teleragh.
I think that, from that time onwards, she led a very happy life, till the end.
There were dogs and horses and old servants and the Forest.
And there were Edward and Leonora, who loved her.
I had known her all the time—I mean, that she always came to the Ashburnhams' at Nauheim for the last fortnight of their stay—and I watched her gradually growing.
She was very cheerful with me. She always even kissed me, night and morning, until she was about eighteen.
And she would skip about and fetch me things and laugh at my tales of life in Philadelphia.
But, beneath her gaiety, I fancy that there lurked some terrors.
I remember one day, when she was just eighteen, during one of her father's rare visits to Europe, we were sitting in the gardens, near the iron-stained fountain.
Leonora had one of her headaches and we were waiting for Florence and Edward to come from their baths.
You have no idea how beautiful Nancy looked that morning.
We were talking about the desirability of taking tickets in lotteries—of the moral side of it, I mean.
She was all in white, and so tall and fragile; and she had only just put her hair up, so that the carriage of her neck had that charming touch of youth and of unfamiliarity.