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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 112 |
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_ SEVENTH PART. I AM FOUND ONE HUNDRED AND TWELFTH CHAPTER She arrived the following afternoon--my dear Reverend Mother with the pale spiritual face and saint-like eyes. Except that her habit was now blue and white instead of black, she seemed hardly changed in any respect since our days at the Sacred Heart. Finding that I was in bed, she put up at the "Plough" and came every day to nurse me. I was naturally agitated at seeing her again after so many years and such various experiences, being uncertain how much she knew of them. Remembering Martin's warning, I was also fairly certain that she had been sent for, but my uneasiness on both heads soon wore off. Her noiseless step, her soft voice, and her sweet smile soothed and comforted me. I began to feel afresh the influence she had exercised over me when I was a child, and to wonder why, during my dark time in London, I had never thought of writing to her. During the first days of her visit she said nothing about painful things--never mentioning my marriage, or what had happened since she saw me last. Her talk was generally about our old school and my old schoolfellows, many of whom came to the convent for her "retreats," which were under the spiritual direction of one of the Pope's domestic prelates. Sometimes she would laugh about our Mother of the Novices who had "become old and naggledy"; sometimes about the little fat Maestro of the Pope's choir who had cried when I first sang the hymn to the Virgin, ("Go on, little angel,"); and sometimes about the two old lay sisters (now quite toothless) who still said I might have been a "wonderful washerwoman" if I had "put my mind to it." I hate to think that my dear Reverend Mother was doing this consciously in order to break down my defences, but the effect was the same. Little by little, during the few days she was with me, she bridged the space back to my happy girlhood, for insensibly I found myself stirred by the emotions of the convent, and breathing again the air of my beloved Rome. On the afternoon of the fourth day of her visit I was sitting up by her side in front of my window, which was wide open. It was just such a peaceful evening as our last one at Nemi. Not a leaf was stirring; not a breath of wind in the air; the only sounds we heard were the lowing of the cattle waiting to be milked, the soft murmur of the sea, and the jolting of a springless cart that was coming up from the shore, laden with sea wrack. As the sun began to sink it lit blazing fires in the windows of the village in front--especially in the window of my mother's room, which was just visible over the tops of the apple trees in the orchard. The Reverend Mother talked of Benediction. If she were in Rome she would be in church singing the _Ora pro nobis_. "Let us sing it now. Shall we?" she said. At the next moment her deep majestic contralto, accompanied by my own thin and quavering soprano, were sending out into the silent air the holy notes which to me are like the reverberations of eternity:
"Mary, I am leaving you to-morrow." "So soon?" "Yes, but I can't go without telling you why I came"--and then her mission was revealed to me. She had heard about my marriage and the ruin it had fallen to; my disappearance from home and the circumstances of my recovery; my husband's petition for divorce and the disclosures that had followed it. But sad and serious and even tragic as all this might be, it was as nothing (in the eyes of the Church and of God) compared with the awful gravity of the step I now contemplated--a second marriage while my husband was still alive. She had nothing to say against Martin. Except the facts that concerned myself she had never heard a word to his discredit. She could even understand those facts, though she could not condone them. Perhaps he had seen my position (married to a cruel and unfaithful husband) and his pity had developed into love--she had heard of such happenings. "But only think, my child, what an abyss he is driving you to! He asks you to break your marriage vows! . . . Oh, yes, yes, I can see what he will say--that pressure was put upon you and you were too young to know what you were doing. That may be true, but it isn't everything. I thought it wrong, cruelly wrong, that your father should choose a husband for you without regard to your wish and will. But it was you, not your father, who made your marriage vows, and you can never get away from that--never!" Those marriage vows were sacred; our blessed Saviour had said they could never be broken, and our holy Church had taken His Commandment for law. "Think, my child, only think what would happen to the world if every woman who has made an unhappy marriage were to do as you think of doing. What a chaos! What an uprooting of all the sacred ties of home and family! And how women would suffer--women and children above all. Don't you see that, my daughter?" The security of society lay in the sanctity of marriage; the sanctity of marriage lay in its indissolubility; and its indissolubility centred in the fact that God was a party to it. "Perhaps you are told that your marriage will be your own concern only and that God and the Church have nothing to do with it. But if women had believed that in all ages, how different the world would be to-day! Oh, believe me, your marriage vow is sacred, and you cannot break it without sin--mortal sin, my daughter." The moral of all this was that I must renounce Martin Conrad, wash my heart clean of my love of him, shun the temptation of seeing him again, and if possible forget him altogether. "It will be hard. I know it will he hard, but. . . ." "It will be quite impossible," I said as well as I could, for my very lips were trembling. I had been shaken to the depths of my soul by what the Reverend Mother said, but remembering Martin's warning I now struggled to resist her. "Two years ago, while I was living with my husband I tried to do that and I couldn't," I said. "And if I couldn't do it then, when the legal barrier stood between us, how can I do it now when the barrier is gone?" After that I told her of all I had passed through since as a result of my love for Martin--how I had parted from him when he went down to the Antarctic; how I had waited for him in London; how I had sacrificed family and friends and home, and taken up poverty and loneliness and hard work for him; how I had fallen into fathomless depths of despair when I thought I had lost him; and how joy and happiness had returned only when God, in His gracious goodness, had given him back. "No, no, no", I cried. "My love for Martin can never be overcome or forgotten--never as long as I live in the world!" "Then," said the Reverend Mother (she had been listening intently with her great eyes fixed on my hot and tingling face), "then," she said, in her grave and solemn voice, "If that is the case, my child, there is only one thing for you to do--to leave it." "Leave it?" "Leave the world, I mean. Return with me to Rome and enter the convent." It would be impossible to say how this affected me--how it shook me to the heart's core--how, in spite of my efforts to act on my darling's warning, it seemed to penetrate to the inmost part of my being and to waken some slumbering instinct in my soul. For a long time I sat without speaking again, only listening with a fluttering heart to what the Reverend Mother was saying--that it was one of the objects of the religious life to offer refuge to the tortured soul that could not trust itself to resist temptation; and that taking my vows as a nun to God would be the only way (known to and acknowledged by the Church) of cancelling my vows as a wife to my husband. "You will be a bride still, my child, but a bride of Christ. And isn't that better--far better? You used to wish to be a nun, you know, and if your father had not come for you on that most unhappy errand you might have been one of ourselves already. Think of it, my child. The Mothers of our convent will be glad to welcome you, if you can come as a willing and contented Sister. And how can I leave you here, at the peril of your soul, my daughter?" I was deeply moved, but I made one more effort. I told the Reverend Mother that, since the days when I had wished to be a nun, a great change had come over me. I had become a woman, with all a woman's passions--the hunger and thirst for love, human love, the love of the good man who loved me with all his soul and strength. Therefore I could never be a willing and contented Sister. I should only break the peace and harmony of their house. And though she were to put me down in the lowest cell of her convent, my love would follow me there; it would interrupt my offices, it would clamour through my prayers, and I should always be unhappy--miserably unhappy. "Not so unhappy there as you will be if you remain in the world and carry out your intention," said the Reverend Mother. "Oh believe me, my child, I know you better than you know yourself. If you marry again, you will never be able to forget that you have broken your vow. Other women may forget it--frivolous women--women living in society and devoting their lives to selfish pleasures. Such women may divorce their husbands, or be divorced by them, and then marry again, without remembering that they are living in a state of sin, whatever the civil law may say--open and wicked and shameless sin. But you will remember it, and it will make you more unhappy than you have ever been in your life before." "Worse than that," she continued, after a moment, "it will make your husband unhappy also. He will see your remorse, and share it, because he will know he has been the cause. If he is a good man the mere sight of your grief will torture him. The better man he is the more will he suffer. If you were a runaway nun he would wish to take you back to your convent, for though it might tear his heart out to part with you, he would want to restore your soul. But being a wife who has broken her marriage vows he will never be able to do anything. An immense and awful shadow will stand between you and darken every hour of your lives that is left." When the Reverend Mother had done I sat motionless and speechless, with an aching and suffocating heart, staring down on the garden over which the night was falling. After a while she patted my cold hand and got up to go, saying she would call early in the morning to bid me good-bye. Her visit to Ireland would not last longer than three weeks, and after that she might come back for me, if I felt on reflection (she was sure I should) that I ought to return with her to Rome. I did not reply. Perhaps it was partly because I was physically weak that my darling's warning was so nearly overcome. But the moment the door closed on the Reverend Mother a conviction of the truth of what she had said rushed upon me like the waves of an overflowing sea. Yet how cruel! After all our waiting, all our longing, all our gorgeous day-dreams of future happiness! When I was going to be a bride, a happy bride, with my lost and stolen girlhood coming back to me! For the second time a dark and frowning mountain had risen between Martin and me. Formerly it had been my marriage--now it was my God. But if God forbade my marriage with Martin what was I to do? What was left in life for me? Was there anything left? I was sitting with both hands over my face, asking myself these questions and struggling with a rising tempest of tears, when I heard baby crying in the room below, and Christian Ann hushing and comforting her. "What's doing on the _boght_, I wonder?" A few minutes later they came upstairs, Isabel on her grandmother's arm, in her nightdress, ready for bed. "If it isn't the wind I don't know in the world what's doing on the _millish_," said the old lady. And then baby smiled through the big round beads that stood in her sea-blue eyes and held out her arms to me. Oh God! Oh God! Was not _this_ my answer? _ |
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