But the Sorells, all the same, had some foreign and excitable blood in
them. Their story of themselves was that they were French Huguenots,
expelled in 1685, who had settled in England and, coming of a military
stock, had naturally sought careers in the English army. There are
points in this story which are puzzling; but the foreign touch in my
mother, and in the Governor--to judge from the only picture of him which
remains--was unmistakable. Delicate features, small, beautifully shaped
hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and
quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all
her trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physical
characteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression--as of an
old stock run to seed. The stock had been reinvigorated in my mother,
and one of its original elements which certainly survived in her
temperament and tradition was of great importance both for her own life
and for her children's. This was the Protestant--the _French_
Protestant--element; which no doubt represented in the family from which
she came a history of long suffering at the hands of Catholicism.
Looking back upon her Protestantism, I see that it was not the least
like English Evangelicalism, whether of the Anglican or dissenting type.
There was nothing emotional or "enthusiastic" in it--no breath of Wesley
or Wilberforce; but rather something drawn from deep wells of history,
instinctive and invincible. Had some direct Calvinist ancestor of hers,
with a soul on fire, fought the tyranny of Bossuet and Madame de
Maintenon, before--eternally hating and resenting "Papistry"--he
abandoned his country and kinsfolk, in the search for religious liberty?
That is the impression which--looking back upon her life--it often makes
upon me. All the more strange that to her it fell, unwittingly,
imagining, indeed, that by her marriage with a son of Arnold of Rugby
she was taking a step precisely in the opposite direction, to be, by a