I told the Reverend Mother that, since the days when I had wished to be
a nun, a great change had come over me. I had become a woman, with all a
woman's passions--the hunger and thirst for love, human love, the love
of the good man who loved me with all his soul and strength. Therefore I
could never be a willing and contented Sister. I should only break the
peace and harmony of their house. And though she were to put me down in
the lowest cell of her convent, my love would follow me there; it would
interrupt my offices, it would clamour through my prayers, and I should
always be unhappy--miserably unhappy.
"Not so unhappy there as you will be if you remain in the world and
carry out your intention," said the Reverend Mother. "Oh believe me, my
child, I know you better than you know yourself. If you marry again, you
will never be able to forget that you have broken your vow. Other women
may forget it--frivolous women--women living in society and devoting
their lives to selfish pleasures. Such women may divorce their husbands,
or be divorced by them, and then marry again, without remembering that
they are living in a state of sin, whatever the civil law may say--open
and wicked and shameless sin. But you will remember it, and it will make
you more unhappy than you have ever been in your life before."
"Worse than that," she continued, after a moment, "it will make your
husband unhappy also. He will see your remorse, and share it, because he
will know he has been the cause. If he is a good man the mere sight of
your grief will torture him. The better man he is the more will he
suffer. If you were a runaway nun he would wish to take you back to your
convent, for though it might tear his heart out to part with you, he
would want to restore your soul. But being a wife who has broken her
marriage vows he will never be able to do anything. An immense and awful
shadow will stand between you and darken every hour of your lives that
is left."
When the Reverend Mother had done I sat motionless and speechless, with
an aching and suffocating heart, staring down on the garden over which
the night was falling.
After a while she patted my cold hand and got up to go, saying she would
call early in the morning to bid me good-bye. Her visit to Ireland would
not last longer than three weeks, and after that she might come back for
me, if I felt on reflection (she was sure I should) that I ought to
return with her to Rome.
I did not reply. Perhaps it was partly because I was physically weak
that my darling's warning was so nearly overcome. But the moment the
door closed on the Reverend Mother a conviction of the truth of what she
had said rushed upon me like the waves of an overflowing sea.
Yet how cruel! After all our waiting, all our longing, all our gorgeous
day-dreams of future happiness! When I was going to be a bride, a happy
bride, with my lost and stolen girlhood coming back to me!
For the second time a dark and frowning mountain had risen between
Martin and me. Formerly it had been my marriage--now it was my God.
But if God forbade my marriage with Martin what was I to do? What was
left in life for me? Was there anything left?
I was sitting with both hands over my face, asking myself these
questions and struggling with a rising tempest of tears, when I heard
baby crying in the room below, and Christian Ann hushing and comforting
her.
"What's doing on the _boght_, I wonder?"
A few minutes later they came upstairs, Isabel on her grandmother's arm,
in her nightdress, ready for bed.
"If it isn't the wind I don't know in the world what's doing on the
_millish_," said the old lady.
And then baby smiled through the big round beads that stood in her
sea-blue eyes and held out her arms to me.
Oh God! Oh God! Was not _this_ my answer?