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The Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 7. I Am Found - Chapter 111 |
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_ SEVENTH PART. I AM FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVENTH CHAPTER "It's all my fault," he said. He had led me to the garden-house, which stood among the bluebells at the end of the orchard, and was striding to and fro in front of it. "I knew perfectly what the attitude of the Church would be, and I ought to have warned you." I had never before seen him so excited. There was a wild look in his eyes and his voice was quivering like the string of a bow. "Poor old Father Dan! He's an old angel, with as good a heart as ever beat under a cassock. But what a slave a man may be to the fetish of his faith! Only think what he says, my darling! The guilty party! I'll never believe you are the guilty party, but consider! The guilty party may never marry! No good clergyman of any Christian Church in the world dare marry her! What an infamy! Ask yourself what the churches are here for. Aren't they here to bring salvation to the worst of sinners? Yet they cast out the woman who has sinned against her marriage vow--denying her access to the altar and turning her out of doors--though she may have repented a thousand times, with bitter, bitter tears!" He walked two or three paces in front of the garden-house and then came back to me with flaming eyes. "But that's not your case, anyway," he said. "Father Dan knows perfectly that your marriage was no marriage at all--only a sordid bit of commercial bargaining, in which your husband gave you his bad name for your father's unclean money. It was no marriage in any other sense either, and might have been annulled if there had been any common honesty in annulment. And now that it has tumbled to wreck and ruin, as anybody might have seen it would do, you are told that you are bound to it to the last day and hour of your life! After all you have gone through--all you have suffered--never to know another hour of happiness as long as you live! While your husband, notwithstanding his brutalities and infidelities, is free to do what he likes, to marry whom he pleases! How stupid! How disgusting! how damnable!" His passionate voice was breaking, he could scarcely control it. "Oh, I know what they'll say. It will be the old, old song, 'Whom God hath joined together.' That's what this old Church of ours has been saying for centuries to poor women with broken hearts. Has the Church itself got a heart to break? No--nothing but its cast-iron laws which have been broken a thousand times and nobody a penny the worse." "But I wonder," he continued, "I wonder why these churchmen, who would talk about the impossibility of putting asunder those whom God has joined together, don't begin by asking themselves how and when and where God joins them. Is it in church, when they stand before the altar and are asked a few questions, and give a few answers? If so, then God is responsible for some of the most shocking transactions that ever disgraced humanity--all the pride and vanity and deliberate concubinage that have covered themselves in every age, and are covering themselves still, with the cloak of marriage." "But no," said Martin, "it's not in churches that God marries people. They've got to be married before they go there, or they are never married at all--never! They've got to be married in their _hearts_, for that's where God joins people together, not in churches and before priests and altars." I sat listening to him with a rising and throbbing heart, and after another moment he stepped into the garden-house, and sat beside me. "Mary," he said, in his passionate voice, "that's our case, isn't it? God married us from the very first. There has never been any other woman for me, and there never has been any other man for you--isn't that so, my darling? . . . Then what are they talking about--these churches and churchmen? It's _they_ who are the real divorcers--trying to put those asunder whom God Himself has joined together. That's the plain sense of the matter, isn't it?" I was trembling with fear and expectation. Perhaps it was the same with me as it had been before; perhaps I wanted (now more than ever) to believe what Martin was saying; perhaps I did not know enough to be able to answer him; perhaps my overpowering love and the position I stood in compelled me to agree. But I could not help it if it seemed to me that his clear mind--clear as a mountain river and as swift and strong--was sweeping away all the worn-out sophistries. "Then what . . . what are we to do?" I asked him. "Do? Our duty to ourselves, my darling, that's what we have to do. If we cannot be married according to the law of the Church, we must be married according to the law of the land. Isn't that enough? This is our own affair, dearest, ours and nobody else's. It's only a witness we want anyway--a witness before God and man that we intend to be man and wife in future." "But Father Dan?" "Leave him to me," said Martin. "I'll tell him everything. But come into the house now. You are catching a cold. Unless we take care they'll kill you before they've done." Next day he leaned over the back of my chair as I sat in the _chiollagh_ with baby in my lap, and said, in a low tone: "I've seen Father Dan." "Well?" "The old angel took it badly. 'God forbid that you should do that same, my boy,' he said, 'putting both yourself and that sweet child of mine out of the Church for ever.' 'It's the Church that's putting us out,' I told him. 'But God's holy law condemns it, my son,' he said. 'God's law is love; and He has no other law,' I answered." I was relieved and yet nervous, glad and yet afraid. A week passed, and then the time came for Martin to go to Windsor for his investiture. There had been great excitement in Sunny Lodge in preparation for this event, but being a little unwell I had been out of the range of it. At the moment of Martin's departure I was in bed, and he had come upstairs to say good-bye to me. What had been happening in the meantime I hardly knew, but I had gathered that he thought pressure would be brought to bear on me. "Our good old Church is like a limpet on the shore," he said. "Once it gets its suckers down it doesn't let go in a hurry. But sit tight, little woman. Don't yield an inch while I'm away," he whispered. When he left me I reached up to see him going down the road to the railway station. His old father was walking proudly by his side, bare-headed as usual and still as blithe as a boy. Next day I was startled by an unexpected telegram. It came from a convent in Lancashire and was addressed to "Mary O'Neill, care of Doctor Conrad." It ran: "_Am making a round of visits to the houses of our Society and would like to see you on my way to Ireland. May I cross to-morrow? Mother Magdalene_." _ |
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