"Good heavens! What an iniquity! In England too! But never mind! There
are other countries where this relic of the barbaric ages doesn't exist.
We'll go there. We must get you a divorce somehow."
My time had come. I could keep back the truth no longer.
"But Martin," I said, "divorce is impossible for me--quite impossible."
And then I told him that I had been to see the Bishop also, and he had
said what I had known before, though in the pain of my temptation I had
forgotten it, that the Catholic Church did not countenance divorce
under any circumstances, because God made marriages and therefore no man
could dissolve them.
Martin listened intently, and in his eagerness to catch every word he
raised himself to a kneeling position by my side, so that he was looking
into my face.
"But Mary, my dear Mary," he said, "you don't mean to say you will allow
such considerations to influence you?"
"I am a Catholic--what else can I do?" I said.
"But think--my dear, dear girl, think how unreasonable, how untrue, how
preposterous it all is in a case like yours? God made your marriage?
Yours? God married you to that notorious profligate? Can you believe
it?"
His eyes were flaming. I dared not look at them.
"Then think again. They say there's no divorce in the Catholic Church,
do they? But what are they talking about? Morally speaking you are a
divorced woman already. Anybody with an ounce of brains can see that.
When you were married to this man he made a contract with you, and he
has broken the terms of it, hasn't he? Then where's the contract now? It
doesn't any longer exist. Your husband has destroyed it."
"But isn't marriage different?" I asked.
And then I tried to tell him what the Bishop had said of the contract of
marriage being unlike any other contract because God Himself had become
a party to it.
"What?" he cried. "God become a party to a marriage like yours? My dear
girl, only think! Think of what your marriage has been--the pride and
vanity and self-seeking that conceived it, the compulsion that was put
upon you to carry it through, and then the shame and the suffering and
the wickedness and the sin of it! Was God a party to the making of a
marriage like that?"
In his agitation he rose, walked two or three paces in front and came
back to me.
"Then think what it means if your marriage may not be dissolved. It
means that you must go on living with this man whose life is so
degrading. Year in, year out, as long as your life lasts you must let
him humiliate and corrupt you with his company, his companions and his
example, until you are dragged down, down, down to the filth he lives in
himself, and your very soul is contaminated. Is that what the Church
asks of you?"
I answered no, and tried to tell him what the Bishop had told me about
separation, but he interrupted me with a shout.
"Separation? Did he say that? If the Church has no right to divorce you
what right has it to separate you? Oh, I see what it will say--hope of
reconciliation. But if you were separated from your husband would you
ever go back to him? Never in this world. Then what would your
separation be? Only divorce under another name."
I was utterly shaken. Perhaps I wanted to believe what Martin was
saying; perhaps I did not know enough to answer him, but I could not
help it if I thought Martin's clear mind was making dust and ashes of
everything that Father Dan and the Bishop had said to me.
"Then what can I do?" I asked.
I thought his face quivered at that question. He got up again, and stood
before me for a moment without speaking. Then he said, with an obvious
effort--
"If your Church will not allow you to divorce your husband, and if you
and I cannot marry without that, then . . ."
"Yes?"
"I didn't mean to propose it . . . God knows I didn't, but when a woman
. . . when a woman has been forced into a loveless marriage, and it is
crushing the very soul out of her, and the iron law of her Church will
not permit her to escape from it, what crime does she commit if
she . . ."
"Well?" I asked, though I saw what he was going to say.
"Mary," he said, breathing, hard and fast, "you must come to me."