"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."