A night for love it was. The great sun at setting had looked with
steadfast eye at the convent standing lonely on its wide landscape, and
had then thrown his final glance across the world towards the east; and
the moon had quickly risen and hung about it the long silvery twilight
of her heavenly watchfulness. The summer, too, which had been moving
southward, now came slowly back, borne on warm airs that fanned the
convent walls and sighed to its chaste lattices with the poetry of
dead flowers and vanished songsters. But sighed in vain. With many a
prayer, with many a cross on pure brow and shoulder and breast, with
many a pious kiss of crucifix, the convent slept. Only some little
novice, lying like a flushed figure of Sleep on a couch of snow, may
have stirred to draw one sigh, as those zephyrs, toying with her warm
hair, broke some earthly dream of too much tenderness. Or they may
merely have cooled the feverish feet of a withered nun, who clasped her
dry hands in ecstasy, as on her cavernous eyes there dawned a vision
of the glories and rewards of Paradise. But no, not all slept. At an
open window on the eastern side of the convent stood the sleepless one,
looking out into the largeness of the night like one who is lost in the
largeness of her sorrow.
Across the lawn, a little distance off, stood the church of the
convent. The moonlight rested on it like a smile of peace, the elms
blessed it with tireless arms, and from the zenith of the sky down
to the horizon there rested on out-stretched wings, rank above rank
and pinion brushing pinion, a host of white, angelic cloud-shapes, as
though guarding the sacred portal.
But she looked at it with timid yearning. Greater and greater had
become the need to pour into some ear a confession and a prayer for
pardon. Her peace was gone. She had been concealing her heart from the
Mother Superior. She had sinned against her vows. She had impiously
offended the Divine Mother. And to-day, after answering his letter in
order that she might defend her religion, she had acknowledged to her
heart that she loved him. But they would never meet again. To-morrow
she would make a full confession of what had taken place. Beyond that
miserable ordeal she dared not gaze into her own future.
Lost in the fears and sorrows of such thoughts, long she stood looking
out into the night, stricken with a sense of alienation from human
sympathy. She felt that she stood henceforth estranged from the entire
convent--Mother Superior, novice, and nun--as an object of reproach,
and of suffering into which no one of them could enter.
Sorer yet grew her need, and a little way across the lawn stood the
church, peaceful in the moonlight. Ah, the divine pity! If only
she might steal first alone to the shrine of her whom most she had
offended, and to an ear gracious to sorrow make confession of her
frailty. At length, overcome with this desire and gliding noiselessly
out of the room, she passed down the moonlit hall, on each side of
which the nuns were sleeping. She descended the stair-way, took from
the wall the key of the church, and then softly opening the door,
stepped out into the night. For a moment she paused, icy and faint with
physical fear; then, passing like a swift shadow across the silvered
lawn, she went round to the side entrance of the church, unlocked the
door, and, entering quickly, locked herself inside. There she stood for
some time with hands pressed tightly to her fluttering heart, until
bodily agitation died away before the recollection of her mission; and
there came upon her that calmness with which the soul enacts great
tragedies. Then slowly, very slowly, hidden now, and now visible where
the moonlight entered the long, gothic windows, she passed across the
chancel towards the shrine of one whom ancestral faith had taught her
to believe divine; and before the image of a Jewish woman--who herself
in full humanity loved and married a carpenter nearly two thousand
years ago, living beside him as blameless wife and becoming blameless
mother to his children--this poor child, whose nature was unstained as
snow on the mountain-peaks, poured out her prayer to be forgiven the
sin of her love.
To the woman of the world, the approaches of whose nature are defended
by the intricacies of willfulness and the barriers of deliberate
reserve; to the woman of the world, who curbs and conceals that
feeling to which she intends to yield herself in the end, it may seem
incredible that there should have rooted itself so easily in the
breast of one of her sex this flower of a fatal passion. But it should
be remembered how unbefriended that bosom had been by any outpost of
feminine self-consciousness; how exposed it was through very belief
in its unearthly consecration; how like some unwatched vase that
had long been collecting the sweet dews and rains of heaven, it had
been silently filling with those unbidden intimations that are shed
from above as the best gifts of womanhood. Moreover, her life was
unspeakably isolate. In the monotony of its routine a trifling event
became an epoch; a fresh impression stirred within the mind material
for a chapter of history. Lifted far above commonplace psychology of
the passions, however, was the planting and the growth of an emotion in
a heart like hers.
Her prayer began. It began with the scene of her first meeting with
him in the fields, for from that moment she fixed the origin of her
unfaithfulness. Of the entire hidden life of poetic reverie and
unsatisfied desires which she had been living before, her innocent
soul took no account. Therefore, beginning with that afternoon, she
passed in review the history of her thoughts and feelings. The moon
outside, flooding the heavens with its beams, was not so intense a
lamp as memory, now turned upon the recesses of her mind. Nothing
escaped detection. His words, the scenes with him in the garden, in
the field--his voice, looks, gestures--his anxiety and sympathy--his
passionate letter--all were now vividly recalled, that they might be
forgotten; and their influence confessed, that it might forever be
renounced. Her conscience stood beside her love as though it were some
great fast-growing deadly plant in her heart, with deep-twisted roots
and strangling tendrils, each of which to the smallest fibre must be
uptorn so that not a germ should be left.
But who can describe the prayer of such a soul! It is easy to ask to be
rid of ignoble passions. They come upon us as momentary temptations and
are abhorrent to our better selves; but of all tragedies enacted within
the theatre of the human mind what one is so pitiable as that in which
a pure being prays to be forgiven the one feeling of nature that is
the revelation of beauty, the secret of perfection, the solace of the
world, and the condition of immortality?
The passing of such a tragedy scars the nature of the penitent like the
passing of an age across a mountain rock. If there had lingered thus
long on Sister Dolorosa's nature any upland of childhood snows, these
vanished in that hour; if any vernal belt of maidenhood, it felt the
hot breath of that experience of the world and of the human destiny
which quickly ages whatever it does not destroy. So that while she
prayed there seemed to rise from within her and take flight forever
that spotless image of herself as she once had been, and in its place
to stand the form of a woman, older, altered, and set apart by sorrow.
At length her prayer ended and she rose. It had not brought her the
peace that prayer brings to women; for the confession of her love
before the very altar--the mere coming into audience with the Eternal
to renounce it--had set upon it the seal of irrevocable truth. It is
when the victim is led to the altar of sacrifice that it turns its
piteous eyes upon the sacrificing hand and utters its poor dumb cry for
life; and it was when Sister Dolorosa bared the breast of her humanity
that it might be stabbed by the hand of her religion, that she, too,
though attempting to bless the stroke, felt the last pangs of that deep
thrust.
With such a wound she turned from the altar, walked with bowed head
once more across the church, unlocked the door, stepped forth and
locked it. The night had grown more tender. The host of seraphic
cloud-forms had fled across the sky; and as she turned her eyes
upward to the heavens, there looked down upon her from their serene,
untroubled heights only the stars, that never falter or digress
from their forewritten courses. The thought came to her that never
henceforth should she look up to them without being reminded of how
her own will had wandered from its orbit. The moon rained its steady
beams upon the symbol of the sacred heart on her bosom, until it seemed
to throb again with the agony of the crucifixion. Never again should
she see it without the remembrance that _her_ sin also had pierced it
afresh.
With what loneliness that sin had surrounded her! As she had issued
from the damp, chill atmosphere of the church, the warm airs of the
south quickened within her long-sleeping memories; and with the
yearning of stricken childhood she thought of her mother, to whom she
had turned of yore for sympathy; but that mother's bosom was now a
mound of dust. She looked across the lawn towards the convent where the
Mother Superior and the nuns were sleeping. To-morrow she would stand
among them a greater alien than any stranger. No; she was alone; among
the millions of human beings on the earth of God there was not one on
whose heart she could have rested her own. Not one save him--him--whose
love had broken down all barriers that it might reach and infold her.
And him she had repelled. A joy, new and indescribable, leaped within
her that for him and not for another she suffered and was bound in this
tragedy of her fall.
Slowly she took her way along the side of the church towards the front
entrance, from which a paved walk led to the convent building. She
reached the corner, she turned, and then she paused as one might pause
who had come upon the beloved dead, returned to life.
For he was sitting on the steps of the church, leaning against one of
the pillars, his face lifted upward so that the moonlight fell upon
it. She had no time to turn back before he saw her. With a low cry
of surprise and joy he sprang up and followed along the side of the
church; for she had begun to retrace her steps to the door, to lock
herself inside. When he came up beside her, she paused. Both were
trembling; but when he saw the look of suffering on her face, acting
upon the impulse which had always impelled him to stand between her and
unhappiness, he now took both of her hands.
"Pauline!"
He spoke with all the pleading love, all the depth of nature, that was
in him.
She had attempted to withdraw her hands; but at the sound of that
once-familiar name, she suddenly bowed her head as the wave of memories
and emotions passed over her; then he quickly put his arms around her,
drew her to him, and bent down and kissed her.