The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (9.1896)

By Henry Harland 37

She was nothing if not Catholic, if not Ecclesiastical; but I
don’t in the least mean that she was particularly devout. She
observed all requisite forms, of course: went, as occasion demanded,
to mass, to vespers, to confession ; but religious fervour was the
last thing she suggested, the last thing she affected. I never
heard her talk of Faith or Salvation, of Sin or Grace, nor indeed
of any matters spiritual. She was quite frankly a woman of the
world, and it was the Church as a worldly institution, the Church
corporal, the Papacy, Papal politics, that absorbed her interests.
The loss of the Temporal Power was the wrong that filled the
universe for her, its restoration the cause for which she lived.
That it was a forlorn cause she would never for an instant even
hypothetically admit. “ Remember Avignon, remember the
Seventy Years,” she used to say, with a nod that seemed to attri-
bute apodictic value to the injunction.

“ Mark my words, she’ll live to be Pope yet,” a ribald young
man murmured behind her chair. “ Oh, you tell me she is a
woman. I’ll assume it for the sake of the argument—I’d do any-
thing for the sake of an argument. But remember Joan, remember
Pope Joan ! ” And he mimicked his Aunt Elizabeth’s inflection
and her conclusive nod.

*

* *

I had not been in Rome since that universe-filling wrong was
perpetrated—not since I was a child of six or seven—when, a
youth approaching twenty, I went there in the autumn of 1879 ;
and I recollected Aunt Elizabeth only vaguely, as a lady with a
face like a chapel, in whose presence—I had almost written in
whose precincts—it had required some courage to breathe. But
my mother’s last words, when I left her in Paris, had been, “Now
mind you call on your Aunt Elizabeth at once. You mustn’t

let