Читать книгу Jewel sowers. A novel онлайн

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“You like such a prospect?” her aunt asked quietly.

She nodded again.

“It will be very hard work, and I am not as strong as I used to be.”

Rosalie held out her hands and looked at them triumphantly. Then she pointed to herself, and smiled.

“You think you could undertake some of it?”

So together they wrote a letter accepting the post, and a week later left their old home, with all its memories and associations, to settle in a fifth storey dwelling amongst the skylights.

Rosalie felt her prayer in part was answered. They were not to be separated after all. Hard as the work might be, it meant freedom and the company she loved. She was content, went to the temple, knelt humbly and returned thanks. Then she went on praying for a voice with a faith born of simplicity and her own idea of God.

One day a priest found her praying there. He inquired the cause. Like the stranger, he was not long in finding it. He put his hand upon her head, and blessed her in the name of the Serpent’s three tails. Then he went back to the priests’ lodgings, and kept his story for supper. He was a jolly man, of the earth earthy, and his idea of the Serpent was that his golden coils were lucrative. The priest was not bad-hearted; he was simply mediocre. But he had a sense of humour—and who, indeed, but the soured and stupid have not?—and the idea of a girl kneeling by the altar railings (he had never seen her, as on that one unique occasion, step beyond) praying persistently to be allowed to talk when plainly she was physically beyond it tickled his sense of funniness. He laughed and shook till the tears ran down his face.