Then the priest entered and the Litany began. It was sung throughout.
Almost the whole of the service was sung. Never had Benediction seemed
so beautiful, so pathetic, so appealing, so irresistible.
By the time the _Tantum ergo_ had been reached and the sweet female
voices, over the soft swell of the organ, were rising to the vaulted
roof in sorrowful reparation for the sins of all sinners in the world
who did not pray for themselves, the religious life was calling to me as
it had never called before.
"Come away from the world," it seemed to say. "Obedience to your
heavenly Father cancels all duty to your earthly one. Leave everything
you fear behind you, and find peace and light and love."
The service was over, the nuns had dropped their veils and gone out as
slowly and noiselessly as they had come in (the last of them with her
head down): the sacristan with his long rod was extinguishing the
candles on the altar; the church was growing dark and a lay-sister in
black was rattling a bunch of keys at the door behind me before I moved
from my place beside the rails.
Then I awoke as from a dream, and looking longingly back at the dark
corridor down which the nuns had disappeared, I was turning to go when I
became aware that a young man was standing beside me and smiling into my
face.
"Mally," he said very softly, and he held out his hand.
Something in the voice made me giddy, something in the blue eyes made me
tremble. I looked at him but did not speak.
"Don't you know me, Mally?" he said.
I felt as if a rosy veil were falling over my face and neck. A flood of
joy was sweeping through me. At last I knew who it was.
It was Martin Conrad, grown to be a man, a tall, powerful, manly man,
but with the same face still--an elusive ghost of the boy's face I used
to look up to and love.
A few minutes later we were out on the piazza in front of the church,
and with a nervous rush of joyous words he was telling me what had
brought him to Rome.
Having just "scraped through" his examinations, and taken his
degree--couldn't have done so if the examiners had not been "jolly good"
to him--he had heard that Lieut. . . .--was going down to the great ice
barrier that bounds the South Pole, to investigate the sources of winds
and tides, so he had offered himself as doctor to the expedition and
been accepted.
Sailing from the Thames ten days ago they had put into Naples that
morning for coal, and taking advantage of the opportunity he had run up
to Rome, remembering that I was at school here, but never expecting to
see me, and coming upon me by the merest accident in the
world--something having said to him, "Let's go in here and look at this
queer old church."
He had to leave to-morrow at two, though, having to sail the same night,
but of course it would be luck to go farther south than Charcot and make
another attack on the Antarctic night.
I could see that life was full of faith and hope and all good things for
him, and remembering some episodes of the past I said:
"So you are going 'asploring' in earnest at last?"
"At last," he answered, and we looked into each other's eyes and laughed
as we stood together on the church steps, with little tender waves of
feeling from our childhood sweeping to our feet.
"And you?" he said. "You look just the same. I knew you instantly. Yet
you are changed too. So grown and so . . . so wonderfully. . . ."
I knew what he meant to say, and being too much of a child to pretend
not to know, and too much of a woman (notwithstanding my nun-like
impulses) not to find joy in it, I said I was glad.
"You've left the Convent, I see. When did that happen?"
I told him three weeks ago--that my father had come for me and we were
going back to Ellan.
"And then? What are you going to do then?" he asked.
For a moment I felt ashamed to answer, but at last I told him that I was
going home to be married.
"Married? When? To whom?"