Chapter I: Am Found (2)

Even then I faced about for a moment to the Big House with some vain idea of making peace with Aunt Bridget and then slipping upstairs to my mother's room--having such a sense of joyous purity that I wished to breathe the sacred air my blessed saint had lived in.

But the end of it all was that I found myself on the steps of the Presbytery, feeling breathlessly happy, and telling myself, with a little access of pride in my own gratitude, that it was only right and proper that I should bring my happiness where I had so often brought my sorrow--to the dear priest who had been my friend since the day of my birth and my darling mother's friend before.

Poor old Father Dan! How good I was going to be to him!

ONE HUNDRED AND TENTH CHAPTER

A few minutes afterwards I was tripping upstairs (love and hope work wonderful miracles!) behind the Father's Irish housekeeper, Mrs. Cassidy, who was telling me how well I was looking ("smart and well extraordinary"), asking if it "was on my two feet I had walked all the way," and denouncing the "omathauns" who had been "after telling her there wasn't the width of a wall itself betune me and the churchyard."

I found Father Dan in his cosy study lined with books; and being so much wrapped up in my own impetuous happiness I did not see at first that he was confused and nervous, or remember until next day that, though (at the sound of my voice from the landing) he cried "Come in, my child, come in," he was standing with his back to the door as I entered--hiding something (it must have been a newspaper) under the loose seat of his easy-chair.

"Father," I said, "have you heard the news?"

"The news. . . ."

"I mean the news in the newspaper."

"Ah, the news in the newspaper."

"Isn't it glorious? That terrible marriage is over at last! Without my doing anything, either! Do you remember what you said the last time I came here?"

"The last time. . . ."

"You said that I, being a Catholic, could not break my marriage without breaking my faith. But my husband, being a Protestant, had no compunction. So it has come to the same thing in the end, you see. And now I'm free."

"You're free . . . free, are you?"

"It seems they have been keeping it all away from me--making no defence, I suppose--and it was only this morning I heard the news."

"Only this morning, was it?"

"I first saw it in a newspaper, but afterwards Martin himself came to tell me."

"Martin came, did he?"

"He doesn't care in the least; in fact, he is glad, and says we can be married at any time."

"Married at any time--he says that, does he?"

"Of course nothing is arranged yet, dear Father, but I couldn't help coming to see you about it. I want everything to be simple and quiet--no display of any kind."

"Simple and quiet, do you?"

"Early in the morning--immediately after mass, perhaps."

"Immediately after mass. . . ."

"Only a few wild flowers on the altar, and the dear homely souls who love me gathered around."

"The dear, homely souls. . . ."

"It will be a great, great thing for me, but I don't want to force myself upon anybody, or to triumph over any one--least of all over my poor father, now that he is so sick and down."

"No, no . . . now that he is so sick and down."

"I shall want you to marry us, Daddy Dan--not the Bishop or anybody else of that kind, you know."

"You'll want me to marry you--not the Bishop or anybody else of that kind."

"But Father Dan," I cried, laughing a little uneasily (for I had begun to realise that he was only repeating my own words), "why don't you say something for yourself?"

And then the cheery sunshine of the cosy room began to fade away.

Father Dan fumbled the silver cross which hung over his cassock (a sure sign of his nervousness), and said with a grave face and in a voice all a-tremble with emotion:

"My child. . . ."

"Yes?"

"You believe that I wouldn't pain or distress or shock you if I could avoid it?"

"Indeed I do."

"Yet I am going to pain and distress and shock you now. I . . . I cannot marry you to Martin Conrad. I daren't. The Church thinks that you are married already--that you are still the wife of your husband."

Though my dear priest had dealt me my death-blow, I had not yet begun to feel it, so I smiled up into his troubled old face and said:

"But how can the Church think that, dear Father? My husband has no rights over me now, and no duties or responsibilities with respect to me. He can marry again if he likes. And he will, I am sure he will, and nobody can prevent him. How, then, can the Church say that I am still his wife?"

"Because marriage, according to the law of the Church, can only be dissolved by death," said Father Dan. "Haven't I told you that before, my daughter? Didn't we go over it again and again when you were here the last time?"

"Yes, yes, but I thought if somebody else sought the divorce--somebody who had never believed in the indissolubility of marriage and wasn't bound by the law of the Church . . . we've heard of cases of that kind, haven't we?"

Father Dan shook his head.

"My poor child, no. The Church thinks marriage is a sacred covenant which no difference of belief, no sin on either side, can ever break."

"But, Father," I cried, "don't you see that the law has already broken it?"

"Only the civil law, my daughter. Remember the words of our blessed and holy Redeemer: '_Every one that putteth away his wife and marrieth another committeth adultery; and he that marrieth one that is put away committeth adultery.'_ . . . My poor child, my heart bleeds for you, but isn't that the Divine Commandment?"

"Then you think," I said (the room was becoming dark and I could feel my lip trembling), "you think that because I went through that marriage ceremony two years ago . . . and though the civil law has dissolved it . . . you think I am still bound by it, and will continue to be so . . . to the end of my life?"

Father Dan plucked at his cassock, fumbled his print handkerchief, and replied:

"I am sorry, my child, very, very sorry."

"Father Dan," I said sharply, for by this time my heart was beginning to blaze, "have you thought about Martin? Aren't you afraid that if our Church refuses to marry us he may ask some other church to do so?"

"Christ's words must be the final law for all true Christians, my daughter. And besides. . . ."

"Well?"

"Besides that. . . ."

"Yes?"

"It blisters my tongue to say it, my child, knowing your sufferings and great temptations, but. . . ."

"But what, dear Father?"

"You are in the position of the guilty party, and therefore no good clergyman of any Christian Church in the world, following the Commandment of his Master, would dare to marry you."

What happened after that I cannot exactly say. I remember that, feeling the colour flying to my face, I flung up my hands to cover it, and that when I came to full possession of my senses again Father Dan (himself in a state of great agitation) was smoothing my arms and comforting me.

"Don't be angry with your old priest for telling you the truth--the bitter truth, my daughter."

He had always seen this dark hour coming to him, and again and again he had prayed to be delivered from it--in the long nights of his fruitless wanderings when I was lost in London, and again since I had been found and had come home and he had looked on, with many a pang, at our silent hopes and expectations--Martin's and mine, we two children.

"And when you came into my little den to-day, my daughter, with a face as bright as stars and diamonds, God knows I would have given half of what is left of my life that mine should not be the hand to dash the cup of your happiness away."

As soon as I was sufficiently composed, within and without, Father Dan led me downstairs (praying God and His Holy Mother to strengthen me on my solitary way), and then stood at the door in his cassock to watch me while I walked up the road.

It was hardly more than half an hour since I had passed over the ground before, yet in that short time the world seemed to have become pale and grey--the sun gone out, the earth grown dark, the still air joyless, nothing left but the everlasting heavens and the heavy song of the sea.

As I approached the doctor's house Martin came swinging down the road to meet me, with his strong free step and that suggestion of the wind from the mountain-tops which seemed to be always about him.

"Hello!" he cried. "Thought you were lost and been hunting all over the place for you."

But as he came nearer and saw how white and wan my face was, though I was doing my best to smile, he stopped and said:

"My poor little woman, where have you been, and what have they been doing to you?"

And then, as well as I could, I told him.

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_."

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:

"Mater purissima
Ora pro nobis.
Mater castissima
Ora pro nobis."

When we had finished I found my hand lying in her lap. Patting it gently she said:

"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?

ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEENTH CHAPTER

In her different way Christian Ann had arrived at the same conclusion. Long before the thought came to me she had conceived the idea that Father Dan and the Reverend Mother were conspiring to carry me off, and in her dear sweet womanly jealousy (not to speak of higher and nobler instincts) she had resented this intensely.

For four days she had smothered her wrath, only revealing it to baby in half-articulate interviews over the cradle ("We're no women for these nun bodies, going about the house like ghosts, are we, _villish_?"), but on the fifth day it burst into the fiercest flame and the gentle old thing flung out at everybody.

That was the morning of the departure of the Reverend Mother, who, after saying good-bye to me in my bedroom, had just returned to the parlour-kitchen, where Father Dan was waiting to take her to the railway station.

What provoked Christian Ann's outburst I never rightly knew, for though the door to the staircase was open, and I could generally catch anything that was said in the room below (through the open timbers of the unceiled floor), the soft voice of the Reverend Mother never reached me, and the Irish roll of Father Dan's vowels only rumbled up like the sound of a drum.

But Christian Ann's words came sharp and clear as the crack of a breaker, sometimes trembling with indignation, sometimes quivering with emotion, and at last thickening into sobs.

"Begging your pardon, ma'am, may I ask what is that you're saying to the Father about Mary O'Neill? . . . Going back to Rome is she? To the convent, eh? . . . No, ma'am, that she never will! Not if I know her, ma'am. Not for any purpose in the world, ma'am. . . . Temptation, you say? You know best, ma'am, but I don't call it overcoming temptation--going into hidlands to get out of the way of it. . . . Yes, I'm a Christian woman and a good Catholic too, please the Saints, but asking your pardon, ma'am, I'm not thinking too much of your convents, or believing the women inside of them are living such very unselfish lives either, ma'am."

Another soft rumble as of a drum, and then--

"No, ma'am, no, that's truth enough, ma'am. I've never been a nun myself, having had better work to do in the world, ma'am. But it's all as one--I know what's going on in the convents, I'm thinking. . . . Harmony and peace, you say? Yes, and jealousy and envy sometimes, too, or you wouldn't be women like the rest of us, ma'am. . . . As for Mary O'Neill, _she_ has something better to do too, I'm thinking. . . . After doing wrong, is she? Maybe she is, the _boght millish_, maybe we all are, ma'am, and have need of God's mercy and forgiveness. But I never heard that praying is the only kind of penance He asks of us, ma'am. And if it is, I wouldn't trust but there are poor women who are praying as well when they're working over their wash-tubs as some ones when they're saying their rosaries and singing their Tantum Ergos. . . ."

Another interruption and then--"There's Bella Kinnish herself who keeps the corner shop, ma'am. Her husband was lost at the 'mackerel' two years for Easter. He left her with three little children and a baby unborn, and Bella's finding it middling hard to get a taste of butcher's meat, or even a bit of loaf-bread itself for them, ma'am. And when she's sitting late at night, as the doctor's telling me, and all the rest of the village dark, darning little Liza's stockings, and patching little Willie's coat, or maybe nursing the baby when it's down with the measles, the Lord is as pleased with her, I'm thinking, as with some of your nun bodies in their grand blue cloaks taking turn and turn to kneel before the tabernacle."

There was another rumble of apologetic voices after that (both Father Dan's and the Reverend Mother's), and then came Christian Ann's clear notes again, breaking fast, though, and sometimes threatening to stop.

"What's that you're saying, ma'am? . . . Motherhood a sacred and holy state also? 'Deed it is, ma'am! That's truth enough too, though some ones who shut themselves up in convents don't seem to think so. . . . A mother's a mother, and what's more, her child is her child, wedlock or no wedlock. And if she's doing right by her little one, and bringing it up well, and teaching it true, I don't know that when her time comes the Lord will be asking her which side of her wedding-day it was born on. . . .

"As for Mary O'Neill, ma'am, when you're talking and talking about her saving her soul, you're forgetting she has her child to save too, ma'am. God gave her the _boght villish_, and is she to run away from it? It's a fine blessing would be on her for that, isn't it? . . . Father Dan, I'm surprised at you--such a terrible, cruel, shocking, unnatural thing as you're thinking. I thought you were a better man than that--I really did. . . . And as for some ones that call themselves Mothers, they're no mothers at all and never will be--tempting a poor woman in her trouble to leave her child to be a charge on other people. . . ."

Still another rumble of soft voices and then--

"Not that I'm thinking of myself, ma'am. Dear heart, no! It's only too eager I'd be to have the lil angel to myself. There she is on the hearthrug, ma'am, and if anything happens to Mary O'Neill, it's there she'll be for the rest of _my_ life, and it's sorry I am for the darling's sake that my time cannot be longer. . . .

"But Mary O'Neill isn't for leaving her little one to go into any convent. 'Deed no, ma'am! There would be no rest on her if she did. I'm a mother myself and I know what she'd be feeling. You might put the black hood on her head, but Nature's a wonderful powerful thing, and she'd never go to bed at night or get up in the morning without thinking of her baby. 'Where's she now?' she'd be asking herself. 'What's happening to my motherless child?' she'd be saying. And as the years went on she'd be thinking, 'Is she well, and has she taken her first communion, and is she growing up a good woman, and what's the world doing on her?' . . .

"No, ma'am, no! Mary O'Neill will go into no convent while her child is here to be cared for! 'Deed she won't! Not Mary O'Neill! I'll never believe it of her! Never in this world!"

I heard nothing more for a long time after that--nothing but a noise in my own head which drowned all other noises. And when I recovered my composure the Reverend Mother and Father Dan must have gone, for there was no sound in the room below except that of the rocking-chair (which was going rapidly) and Christian Ann's voice, fierce but broken as if baby had cried and she was comforting her.

Then a great new spirit came to me. It was Motherhood again! The mighty passion of motherhood--which another mighty passion had temporarily overlaid--sweeping down on me once more out of the big, simple, child-like heart of my Martin's mother.

In the fever of body and brain at that moment it seemed to solve all the problems of life for me.

If the Commandment of God forbade me to marry again because I had already taken vows before the altar (no matter how innocently or under what constraint), and if I had committed a sin, a great sin, and baby was the living sign of it, there was only one thing left me to do--to remain as I was and consecrate the rest of my life to my child.

That would be the real expiation, not burying myself in a convent. To live for my child! Alone with her! Here, where my sin had been, to work out my atonement!

This pleased and stirred and uplifted me very much when I first thought of it. And even when I remembered Martin, and thought how hard it would be to tear myself away from the love which waited with open arms for me (So near, so sweet, so precious), there seemed to be something majestic, almost sublime, in the sacrifice I was about to make--the sacrifice of everything in the world (except one thing) that was dearer to me than life itself.

A sort of spiritual pride came with the thought of this sacrifice. I saw myself as a woman who, having pledged herself to God in her marriage and sinned against the law in breaking her marriage vows, was now going to accept her fate and to humble herself before the bar of Eternal Justice.

But oh, what a weak, vain thing I was, just when I thought I was so strong and noble!

After a long day in which I had been fighting back the pains of my poor torn heart and almost persuading myself that I had won a victory, a letter came by the evening post which turned all my great plans to dust and ashes.

The letter was from Martin. Only four little pages, written in my darling's rugged hand, half serious and half playful, yet they made the earth rock and reel beneath me.

"MY DEAR LITTLE WOMAN,--_Just back from Windsor. Stunning 'do.'
Tell you all about it when I get back home. Meantime up to my eyes
in work. Arrangements for next Expedition going ahead splendidly.
Had a meeting of the committee yesterday and settled to sail by the
'Orient' third week in August, so as to get down to Winter Quarters
in time to start south in October.

"Our own little affair has got to come off first, though, so I'll
see the High Bailiff as soon as I return.

"And what do you think, my 'chree'? The boys of the 'Scotia' are
all coming over to Ellan for the great event. 'Deed, yes, though,
every man-jack of them! Scientific staff included, not to speak of
O'Sullivan and old Treacle--who swears you blew a kiss to him. They
remember you coming down to Tilbury. Aw, God bless me soul, gel,
the way they're talking of you! There's no holding them at all at
all!

"Seriously, darling, you have no time to lose in making your
preparations. My plan is to take you to New Zealand and leave you
at Wellington (good little town, good people, too) while I make my
bit of a trip to the Pole.

"We'll arrange about Girlie when I reach home, which will be next
week, I hope--or rather fear--for every day is like a month when
I'm away from you.

"But never mind, little woman! Once I get this big Expedition over
we are not going to be separated any more. Not for a single day as
long as we live, dearest! No, by the Lord God--life's too short for
it._

"MART."

ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEENTH CHAPTER

After I had read this letter I saw that my great battle, which I had supposed to be over, was hardly begun.

Martin was coming home with his big heart full of love for me, and my own heart ran out to meet him.

He intended to sail for New Zealand the second week in August, and he expected to take me with him.

In spite of all my religious fears and misgivings, I asked myself why I should not go? What was to prevent me? What sin had I really committed? What was there for reparation? Was it anything more than the letter of the Divine law that I had defied and broken?

My love was mine and I was his, and I belonged to him for ever. He was going out on a great errand in the service of humanity. Couldn't I go to be his partner and helpmate? And if there _had_ been sin, if the law of God _had_ been broken, wouldn't that, too, be a great atonement?

Thus my heart fought with my soul, or with my instincts as a child of the Church, or whatever else it was that brought me back and back, again and again, in spite of all the struggles of my love, to the firm Commandment of our Lord.

Father Dan had been right--I could not get away from that. The Reverend Mother had been right, too--other women might forget that they had broken the Divine law but I never should. If I married Martin and went away with him, I should always be thinking of the falseness of my position, and that would make me unhappy. It would also make Martin unhappy to witness my unhappiness, and that would be the worst bitterness life could bring.

Then what was left to me? If it was impossible that I should bury myself in a convent it was equally impossible that I should live alone, and Martin in the same world with me.

Not all the spiritual pride I could conjure up in the majesty and solemnity of my self-sacrifice could conquer the yearning of my heart as a woman. Not all my religious fervour could keep me away from Martin. In spite of my conscience, sooner or later I should go to him--I knew quite well I should. And my child, instead of being a barrier dividing us, would be a natural bond calling on us and compelling us to come together.

Then what was left to a woman in my position who believed in the Divine Commandment--who could not get away from it? Were all the doors of life locked to her? Turn which way she would, was there no way out?

Darker and darker every day became this question, but light came at last, a kind of light or the promise of light. It was terrible, and yet it brought me, oh, such immense relief!

I am almost afraid to speak of it, so weak and feeble must any words be in which I attempt to describe that unforgetable change. Already I had met some of the mysteries of a woman's life--now I was to meet the last, the greatest, the most tragic, and yet the kindest of them all.

I suppose the strain of emotion I had been going through had been too much for my physical strength, for three days after the arrival of Martin's letter I seemed to be really ill.

I am ashamed to dwell on my symptoms, but for a moment I am forced to do so. My eyes were bright, my cheeks were coloured, and there was no outward indication of any serious malady. But towards evening I always had a temperature, and in the middle of the night (I was sleeping badly) it rose very high, with a rapid pulse and anxious breathing, and in the morning there was great exhaustion.

Old Doctor Conrad, who had been coming to me twice a day, began to look very grave. At last, after a short examination, he said, rather nervously:

"I should like a colleague from Blackwater to consult with me. Will you receive him?"

I said "Yes" on one condition--that if the new doctor had anything serious to say he should report it first to me.

A little reluctantly Martin's father agreed to my terms and the consulting physician was sent for. He came early the next day--a beautiful Ellan morning with a light breeze from the sea bringing the smell of new-mown hay from the meadows lying between.

He was an elderly man, and I could not help seeing a shadow cross his clean-shaven face the moment his eyes first fell on me. They were those tender but searching eyes which are so often seen in doctors, who are always walking through the Valley of the Shadow and seem to focus their gaze accordingly.

Controlling his expression, he came up to my bed and, taking the hand I held out to him, he said:

"I trust we'll not frighten you, my lady."

I liked that (though I cared nothing about my lost title, I thought it was nice of him to remember it), and said I hoped I should not be too restless.

While he took out and fixed his stethoscope (he had such beautiful soft hands) he told me that he had had a daughter of my own age once.

"Once? Where is she now?" I asked him.

"In the Kingdom. She died like a Saint," he answered.

Then he made a long examination (returning repeatedly to the same place), and when it was over and he raised his face I thought it looked still more serious.

"My child," he said (I liked that too), "you've never spared yourself, have you?"

I admitted that I had not.

"When you've had anything to do you've done it, whatever it might cost you."

I admitted that also. He looked round to see if there was anybody else in the room (there was only the old doctor, who was leaning over the end of the bed, watching the face of his colleague) and then said, in a low voice:

"Has it ever happened that you have suffered from privation and hard work and loss of sleep and bad lodgings and . . . and exposure?"

His great searching eyes seemed to be looking straight into my soul, and I could not have lied to him if I had wished, so I told him a little (just a little) about my life in London--at Bayswater, in the East End and Ilford.

"And did you get wet sometimes, very wet, through all your clothes?" he asked me.

I told him No, but suddenly remembering that during the cold days after baby came (when I could not afford a fire) I had dried her napkins on my body, I felt that I could not keep that fact from him.

"You dried baby's napkins on your own body?" he asked.

"Sometimes I did. Just for a while," I answered, feeling a little ashamed, and my tears rising.

"Ah!" he said, and then turning to the old doctor, "What a mother will do for her child, Conrad!"

The eyes of Doctor Conrad (which seemed to have become swollen) were still fixed on the face of his colleague, and, speaking as if he had forgotten that I was present with them in the room, he said:

"You think she's very ill, don't you?"

"We'll talk of that in your consulting-room," said the strange doctor.

Then, telling me to lie quiet and they would come back presently, he went downstairs and Martin's father followed him.

Nurse came up while they were away (she had taken possession of me during the last few days), and I asked her who were in the parlour-kitchen.

"Only Father Donovan and Mrs. Conrad--and baby," she told me.

Then the doctors came back--the consultant first, trying to look cheerful, and the old doctor last, with a slow step and his head down, as if he had been a prisoner coming back to court to receive sentence.

"My lady," said the strange doctor, "you are a brave woman if ever there was one, so we have decided to tell you the truth about your condition."

And then he told me.

I was not afraid. I will not say that I was not sorry. I could have wished to live a little longer--especially now when (but for the Commandment of God) love and happiness seemed to be within my grasp.

But oh, the relief! There was something sacred in it, something supernatural. It was as if God Himself had come down to me in the bewildering maze that was haunted by the footsteps of my fate and led me out of it.

Yet why these poor weak words? They can mean so little to anybody except a woman who has been what I was, and she can have no need of them.

All fear had vanished from my thoughts. I had no fear for myself, I remembered, and none for baby. The only regret I felt was for Martin--he loved me so; there had never been any other woman in the world for him.

After a moment I thanked the doctors and hoped I had not given them too much trouble. Doctor Conrad seemed crushed into stupefaction and said nothing; but the strange doctor tried to comfort me by saying there would be no pain, and that my malady was of a kind that would probably make no outward manifestation.

Being a woman to the end I was very glad of that, and then I asked him if it would last long. He said No, not long, he feared, although everything was in God's hands and nobody could say certainly.

I was saying I was glad of that too, when my quick ears caught a sound of crying. It was Christian Ann, and Father Dan was hushing her. I knew what was happening--the good souls were listening at the bottom of the stairs.

My first impulse was to send nurse to say they were not to cry. Then I had half a mind to laugh, so that they might hear me and know that what I was going through was nothing. But finally I bethought me of Martin, and asked that they might both be brought up, for I had something to say to them.

After a moment they came into the room, Christian Ann in her simple pure dress, and Father Dan in his shabby sack coat, both looking very sorrowful, the sweet old children.

Then (my two dear friends standing together at the foot of the bed) I told them what the doctor had said, and warned them that they were to tell nobody else--nobody whatever, especially Martin.

"Leave _me_ to tell _him_," I said. "Do you faithfully promise me?"

I could see how difficult it was for them to keep back their tears, but they gave me their word and that was all I wanted.

"My boy! My poor boy _veen!_ He's thinking there isn't another woman in the world like her," said Christian Ann.

And then Father Dan said something about my mother extracting the same promise concerning myself, when I was a child at school.

After that the Blackwater doctor stepped up to say good-bye.

"I leave you in good hands, but you must let me come to see you again some day," he said, and then with a playful smile he added: