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?"