After my mother's death there was no place left for me in my father's
house.
Betsy Beauty (who was now called Miss Betsy and gave herself more than
ever the airs of the daughter of the family) occupied half her days with
the governess who had been engaged to teach her, and the other half in
driving, dressed in beautiful clothes, to the houses of the gentry round
about.
Nessy MacLeod, called the young mistress, had become my father's
secretary, and spent most of her time in his private room, a privilege
which enlarged her pride without improving her manners.
Martin Conrad I did not see, for in reward for some success at school
the doctor had allowed him to spend his Easter holidays in London in
order to look at Nansen's ship, the _Fram_, which had just then arrived
in the Thames.
Hence it happened that though home made a certain tug at me, with its
familiar sights and sounds, and more than once I turned with timid steps
towards my father's busy room, intending to say, "Please, father, don't
send me back to school," I made no demur when, six or seven days after
the funeral, Aunt Bridget began to prepare for my departure.
"There's odds of women," said Tommy the Mate, when I went into the
garden to say good bye to him "They're like sheep's broth, is women. If
there's a head and a heart in them they're good, and if there isn't you
might as well be supping hot water. Our Big Woman is hot water--but
she'll die for all."
Within a fortnight I was back at the Convent, and there the Reverend
Mother atoned to me for every neglect.
"I knew you would come back to me," she said, and from that hour onward
she seemed to be trying to make up to me for the mother I had lost.
I became deeply devoted to her. As a consequence her spirit became my
spirit, and, little by little, the religious side of the life of the
Convent took complete possession of me.
At first I loved the church and its services because the Reverend Mother
loved them, and perhaps also for the sake of the music, the incense, the
flowers and the lights on the altar; but after I had taken my communion,
the mysteries of our religion took hold of me--the Confessional with its
sense of cleansing and the unutterable sweetness of the Mass.
For a long time there was nothing to disturb this religious side of my
mind. My father never sent for me, and as often as the holidays came
round the Reverend Mother took me with her to her country home at Nemi.
That was a beautiful place--a sweet white cottage, some twenty
kilometres from Rome, at the foot of Monte Cavo, in the middle of the
remains of a mediæval village which contained a castle and a monastery,
and had a little blue lake lying like an emerald among the green and red
of the grass and poppies in the valley below.
In the hot months of summer the place was like a Paradise to me, with
its roses growing wild by the wayside; its green lizards running on the
rocks; its goats; its sheep; its vineyards; its brown-faced boys in
velvet, and its gleesome girls in smart red petticoats and gorgeous
outside stays; its shrines and its blazing sunsets, which seemed to
girdle the heavens with quivering bands of purple and gold.
Years went by without my being aware of their going, for after a while I
became entirely happy.
I heard frequently from home. Occasionally it was from Betsy Beauty, who
had not much to say beyond stories of balls at Government House, where
she had danced with the young Lord Raa, and of hunts at which she had
ridden with him. More rarely it was from Aunt Bridget, who usually began
by complaining of the ever-increasing cost of my convent clothes and
ended with accounts of her daughter's last new costume and how well she
looked in it.
From Nessy MacLeod and my father I never heard at all, but Father Dan
was my constant correspondent and he told me everything.
First of my father himself--that he had carried out many of his great
enterprises, his marine works, electric railways, drinking and dancing
palaces, which had brought tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of
thousands of pounds to Ellan, though the good Father doubted the
advantage of such innovations and lamented the decline of piety which
had followed on the lust for wealth.
Next of Aunt Bridget--that she was bringing up her daughter in the ways
of worldly vanity and cherishing a serpent in her bosom (meaning Nessy
MacLeod) who would poison her heart some day.
Next, of Tommy the Mate--that he sent his "best respec's" to the
"lil-missy" but thought she was well out of the way of the Big Woman who
"was getting that highty-tighty" that "you couldn't say Tom to a cat
before her but she was agate of you to make it Thomas."
Then of Martin Conrad--that he was at college "studying for a doctor,"
but his heart was still at the North Pole and he was "like a sea-gull in
the nest of a wood pigeon," always longing to be out on the wild waves.
Finally of the young Lord Raa--that the devil's dues must be in the man,
for after being "sent down" from Oxford he had wasted his substance in
riotous living in London and his guardian had been heard to say he must
marry a rich wife soon or his estates would go to the hammer.
Such was the substance of the news that reached me over a period of six
years. Yet welcome as were Father Dan's letters the life they described
seemed less and less important to me as time went on, for the outer
world was slipping away from me altogether and I was becoming more and
more immersed in my spiritual exercises.
I spent much of my time reading religious books--the life of Saint
Teresa, the meditations of Saint Francis of Sales, and, above all, the
letters and prayers of our Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, whose love of
the Sacred Heart was like a flaming torch to my excited spirit.
The soul of Rome, too, seemed to enter into my soul--not the new Rome,
for of that I knew nothing, but the old Rome, the holy city, that could
speak to me in the silence of the night within the walls of my
convent-school, with its bells of the Dominican and Franciscan
monasteries on either side, its stories of miracles performed on the
sick and dying by the various shrines of the Madonna, its accounts of
the vast multitudes of the faithful who came from all ends of the earth
to the ceremonials at St. Peter's, and, above all, its sense of the
immediate presence of the Pope, half a mile away, the Vicar and
mouthpiece of God Himself.
The end of it all was that I wished to become a nun. I said nothing of
my desire to anybody, not even to the Reverend Mother, but day by day my
resolution grew.
Perhaps it was natural that the orphaned and homeless girl should plunge
with all this passion into the aurora of a new spiritual life; but when
I think how my nature was made for love, human love, the love of husband
and children, I cannot but wonder with a thrill of the heart whether my
mother in heaven, who, while she was on earth, had fought so hard with
my father for the body of her child, was now fighting with him for her
soul.
I was just eighteen years of age when my desire to become a nun reached
its highest point, and then received its final overthrow.
Mildred Bankes, who had returned to Rome, and was living as a novice
with the Little Sisters of the Poor, was about to make her vows, and the
Reverend Mother took me to see the ceremony.
Never shall I forget the effect of it. The sweet summer morning,
tingling with snow-white sunshine, the little white chapel in the
garden of the Convent, covered with flowers, the altar with its lighted
tapers, the friends from without clad in gay costumes as for a festival,
the bishop in his bright vestments, and then, Mildred herself, dressed
as a bride in a beautiful white gown with a long white veil and attended
by other novices as bridesmaids.
It was just like a marriage to look upon, except for the absence of a
visible bridegroom, the invisible one being Christ. And the taking of
the vows was like a marriage service too--only more solemn and sacred
and touching--the bride receiving the ring on her finger, and promising
to serve and worship her celestial lover from that day forward, for
better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as
long as life should last and through the eternity that was to follow it.
I cried all through the ceremony for sheer joy of its loveliness; and
when it was over and we went into the refectory, and Mildred told me she
was returning to England to work among the fallen girls of London, I
vowed in my heart, though I hardly understood what she was going to do,
that I would follow her example.
It was something of a jar to go back into the streets, so full of noise
and bustle; and all the way home with the Reverend Mother I was forming
the resolution of telling her that very night that I meant to be a nun,
for, stirred to the depths of my soul by what I had seen and remembering
what my poor mother had wished for me, I determined that no other life
would I live under any circumstances.
Then came the shock.
As we drew up at our door a postman was delivering letters. One of them
was for the Reverend Mother and I saw in a moment that it was in my
father's handwriting. She read it in silence, and in silence she handed
it to me. It ran:
"_Madam,
"I have come to Rome to take back my daughter. I believe her education
will now be finished, and I reckon the time has arrived to prepare her
for the change in life that is before her.
"The Bishop of our diocese has come with me, and we propose to pay our
respects to you at ten o'clock prompt to-morrow morning.
"Yours, Madam_,
"DANIEL O'NEILL."