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 outstretched 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 stairway, 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 wilfulness 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 for ever 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 for ever 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 fore-written 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.