Complete works of hall c.., p.501
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 501
“I danced every dance, I remember, most of them with my middle-aged lover, and I suppose no one seemed so gay and happy and heedless. At three o’clock in the morning I returned home in my father’s carriage. At six I had entered a convent.
“Nobody in the outer world ever knew what had become of me, and neither did I know what happened at home after I left it. The rule of the convent was very strict. Sometimes, after morning prayers, the Superior would say, ‘The mother of one of you is dead — pray for her soul,’ and that was all we ever heard of the world outside.
“But nature is a mighty thing, my child, and after five years I became restless and unhappy. I began to have misgivings about my vocation, but the Mother, who was wise and human, saw what was going on in my heart. ‘You are thinking about your father,’ she said, ‘that he is growing old, and needing a daughter to take care of him. Go out, and nurse him, and then come back to your cell and pray.’
“I went, but when I reached my father’s house a great shock awaited me. A strange man was in the porter’s lodge, and our beautiful palace was let out in apartments. My father was dead — three years dead and buried. After my disappearance he had shut himself up in his shame and grief, for, little as I had suspected it and hard and cruel as I had thought him, he had really and truly loved me. During his last days his mind had failed him and he had given away all his fortune — scattered it, no one knew how, as something that was quite useless — and then he died, alone and broken-hearted.”
That was the end of the Reverend Mother’s narrative. She did not try to explain or justify or condemn her own or her sister’s conduct, neither did she attempt to apply the moral of her story to my own circumstances. She left me to do that for myself.
I had been spell-bound while she spoke, creeping closer and closer to her until my head was on her breast.
For some time longer we sat like this in the soft Italian night, while the fire-flies came out in clouds among the unseen flowers of the garden and the dark air seemed to be alive with sparks of light.
When the time came to go to bed the Reverend Mother took me to my room, and after some cheerful words she left me. But hardly had I lain down, shaken to the heart’s core by what I had heard, and telling myself that the obedience of a daughter to her father, whatever he might demand of her, was an everlasting and irreversible duty, imposed by no human law-giver, and that marriage was a necessity, which was forced upon most women by a mysterious and unyielding law of God, when the door opened and the Reverend Mother, with a lamp in her hand, came in again.
“Mary,” she said, “I forgot to tell you that I am leaving the Sacred Heart. The Sisters of my old convent have asked me to go back as Superior. I have obtained permission to do so and am going shortly, so that in any case we should have been parted soon. It is the Convent of. . . .”
Here she gave me the name of a private society of cloistered nuns in the heart of Rome.
“I hope you will write to me as often as possible, and come to see me whenever you can. . . . And if it should ever occur that . . . but no, I will not think of that. Marriage is a sacred tie, too, and under proper conditions God blesses and hallows it.”
With that she left me in the darkness. The church bell was ringing, the monks of the Passionist monastery were getting up for their midnight offices.
TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER
A week later I was living with my father in the Hotel Europa on the edge of the Piazza di Spagna.
He was kinder to me than he had ever been before, but he did not tell me what the plans were which he had formed for my future, and I was left to discover them for myself.
Our apartment was constantly visited by ecclesiastics — Monsignori, Archbishops, even one of the Cardinals of the Propaganda, brought there by Bishop Walsh (the Bishop of our own diocese), and I could not help but hear portions of their conversation.
“It will be difficult, extremely difficult,” the Cardinal would say. “Such marriages are not encouraged by the Church, which holds that they are usually attended by the worst consequences to both wife and husband. Still — under the exceptional circumstances — that the bridegroom’s family was Catholic before it was Protestant — it is possible, just possible. . . .”
“Cardinal,” my father would answer, while his strong face was darkening, “excuse me, sir, but I’m kind of curious to get the hang of this business. Either it can be done or it can’t. If it can, we’ll just sail in and do it. But if it can’t, I believe I’ll go home quick and spend my money another way.”
Then there would be earnest assurances that in the end all would be right, only Rome moved slowly, and it would be necessary to have patience and wait.
My father waited three weeks, and meantime he occupied himself in seeing the sights of the old city.
But the mighty remains which are the luminous light-houses of the past — the Forum with the broken columns of its dead centuries; the Coliseum with its gigantic ruins, like the desolate crater of a moon; the Campagna with its hollow, crumbling tombs and shattered aqueducts, — only vexed and irritated him.
“Guess if I had my way,” he said, “I would just clean out this old stone-yard of monuments to dead men, and make it more fit for living ones.”
At length the Bishop came to say that the necessary business had been completed, and that to mark its satisfactory settlement the Pope had signified his willingness to receive in private audience both my father and myself.
This threw me into a state of the greatest nervousness, for I had begun to realise that my father’s business concerned myself, so that when, early the following morning (clad according to instructions, my father in evening dress and I in a long black mantilla), we set out for the Vatican, I was in a condition of intense excitement.
What happened after we got out of the carriage at the bronze gate near St. Peter’s I can only describe from a vague and feverish memory. I remember going up a great staircase, past soldiers in many-coloured coats, into a vast corridor, where there were other soldiers in other costumes. I remember going on and on, through salon after salon, each larger and more luxurious than the last, and occupied by guards still more gorgeously dressed than the guards we had left behind. I remember coming at length to a door at which a Chamberlain, wearing a sword, knelt and knocked softly, and upon its being opened announced our names. And then I remember that after all this grandeur as of a medieval court I found myself in a plain room like a library with a simple white figure before me, and . . . I was in the presence of the Holy Father himself.
Can I ever forget that moment?
I had always been taught in the Convent to think of the Pope with a reverence only second to that which was due to the Saints, so at first I thought I should faint, and how I reached the Holy Father’s feet I do not know. I only know that he was very sweet and kind to me, holding out the delicate white hand on which he wore the fisherman’s emerald ring, and smoothing my head after I had kissed it.
When I recovered myself sufficiently to look up I saw that he was an old man, with a very pale and saintly face; and when he spoke it was in such a soft and fatherly voice that I loved and worshipped him.
“So this is the little lady,” he said, “who is to be the instrument in the hands of Providence in bringing back an erring family into the folds of Mother Church.”
Somebody answered him, and then he spoke to me about marriage, saying it was a holy state, instituted by the Almighty under a natural law and sanctioned by our divine Redeemer into the dignity of a Sacrament, so that those who entered it might live together in peace and love.
“It is a spiritual and sacred union, my child,” he said, “a type of the holy mystery of Christ’s relation to His Church.”
Then he told me I was to make the best possible preparation for marriage in order to obtain the abundant graces of God, and to approach the altar only after penance and communion.
“And when you leave the church, my daughter,” he said, “do not profane the day of your marriage by any sinful thought or act, but remember to bear yourself as if Jesus Christ Himself were with you, as He was at the marriage-feast in Cana of Galilee.”
Then he warned me that when I entered into the solemn contract of holy matrimony I was to do so in the full consciousness that it could not be broken but by death.
“Whom God has joined together let no man put asunder — remember that, too, my daughter.”
Finally he said something about children — that a Catholic marrying a person of another religion must not enter into any agreement whereby any of her children should be brought up in any other than the Catholic faith.
After that, and something said to my father which I cannot recall, he gave me his blessing, in words so beautiful and a voice so sweet that it fell on me like the soft breeze that comes out of the rising sun on a summer morning.
“May the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob be with you, my daughter. May your marriage be a yoke of love and peace, and may you see your children’s children to the third and fourth generation.”
Then he raised me to my feet, and at a touch from the Chamberlain, I backed out of the room.
When the door had closed on me I drew a deep breath, feeling as if I had come out of the Holy of Holies, and when I reached the Piazza of St. Peter’s and came again upon the sight and sound of common things — the cabs and electric cars — it was the same as if I had suddenly descended from heaven to earth.
After my audience with the Pope, following on the Reverend Mother’s story, all my objections to marriage had gone, and I wished to tell my father so, but an opportunity did not arise until late the same night and then it was he who was the first to speak.
Being in good spirits, after a dinner to the ecclesiastics, he said, as soon as his guests had gone — speaking in the tone of one who believed he was doing a great thing for me —
“Mary, matters are not quite settled yet, but you might as well know right here what we’re trying to fix up for you.”
Then he told me.
I was to marry the young Lord Raa!
I was stunned. It was just as if the power of thought had been smitten out of me.
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
That night, and during the greater part of the following day, I felt, without quite knowing why, as if I were living under the dark cloud of a gathering thunderstorm. All my fear of the world, and my desire to escape from it, had fallen upon me afresh. Hence it was not altogether by the blind leading of fate that half an hour before Ave Maria I entered the church of the Convent which the Reverend Mother had given me the name of.
The church was empty when I pushed past the leather hanging that covered the door, but the sacristan was lighting the candles for Benediction, so I went up to the bronze screen, the Cancello, that divides the public part from the part occupied by the Sisters, and knelt on the nearest step.
After a while the church-bell rang overhead, and then (the congregation having gathered in the meantime) the nuns came in by way of a corridor which seemed to issue out of the darkness from under a figure of the Virgin and Child.
They were all in white, snow-white from head to foot, with a glimmer of blue scapular beneath their outer garment, and they wore long thick veils which entirely concealed their features when they entered but were raised when they reached their seats and faced the altar.
Familiar as I was with similar scenes this one moved me as I had never before been moved — the silent white figures, with hands clasped on their breasts, coming in one by one with noiseless and unhurried footsteps, like a line of wraiths from another world.
But a still deeper emotion was to come to me.
As the last of the nuns entered, the Superior as I knew she would be, I recognised her instantly. It was my own Reverend Mother herself; and when, after kneeling to the altar, she came down to her seat nearest to the screen, immediately in front of the place where I knelt, I knew by the tremor of the clasped hands which held the rosary, that she had seen and recognised me.
I trembled and my heart thumped against my breast.
Then the priest entered and the Litany began. It was sung throughout. Almost the whole of the service was sung. Never had Benediction seemed so beautiful, so pathetic, so appealing, so irresistible.
By the time the Tantum ergo had been reached and the sweet female voices, over the soft swell of the organ, were rising to the vaulted roof in sorrowful reparation for the sins of all sinners in the world who did not pray for themselves, the religious life was calling to me as it had never called before.
“Come away from the world,” it seemed to say. “Obedience to your heavenly Father cancels all duty to your earthly one. Leave everything you fear behind you, and find peace and light and love.”
The service was over, the nuns had dropped their veils and gone out as slowly and noiselessly as they had come in (the last of them with her head down): the sacristan with his long rod was extinguishing the candles on the altar; the church was growing dark and a lay-sister in black was rattling a bunch of keys at the door behind me before I moved from my place beside the rails.
Then I awoke as from a dream, and looking longingly back at the dark corridor down which the nuns had disappeared, I was turning to go when I became aware that a young man was standing beside me and smiling into my face.
“Mally,” he said very softly, and he held out his hand.
Something in the voice made me giddy, something in the blue eyes made me tremble. I looked at him but did not speak.
“Don’t you know me, Mally?” he said.
I felt as if a rosy veil were falling over my face and neck. A flood of joy was sweeping through me. At last I knew who it was.
It was Martin Conrad, grown to be a man, a tall, powerful, manly man, but with the same face still — an elusive ghost of the boy’s face I used to look up to and love.
A few minutes later we were out on the piazza in front of the church, and with a nervous rush of joyous words he was telling me what had brought him to Rome.
Having just “scraped through” his examinations, and taken his degree — couldn’t have done so if the examiners had not been “jolly good” to him — he had heard that Lieut. . . . — was going down to the great ice barrier that bounds the South Pole, to investigate the sources of winds and tides, so he had offered himself as doctor to the expedition and been accepted.
Sailing from the Thames ten days ago they had put into Naples that morning for coal, and taking advantage of the opportunity he had run up to Rome, remembering that I was at school here, but never expecting to see me, and coming upon me by the merest accident in the world — something having said to him, “Let’s go in here and look at this queer old church.”
He had to leave to-morrow at two, though, having to sail the same night, but of course it would be luck to go farther south than Charcot and make another attack on the Antarctic night.
I could see that life was full of faith and hope and all good things for him, and remembering some episodes of the past I said:
“So you are going ‘asploring’ in earnest at last?”
“At last,” he answered, and we looked into each other’s eyes and laughed as we stood together on the church steps, with little tender waves of feeling from our childhood sweeping to our feet.
“And you?” he said. “You look just the same. I knew you instantly. Yet you are changed too. So grown and so . . . so wonderfully. . . .”
I knew what he meant to say, and being too much of a child to pretend not to know, and too much of a woman (notwithstanding my nun-like impulses) not to find joy in it, I said I was glad.
“You’ve left the Convent, I see. When did that happen?”
I told him three weeks ago — that my father had come for me and we were going back to Ellan.
“And then? What are you going to do then?” he asked.
For a moment I felt ashamed to answer, but at last I told him that I was going home to be married.
“Married? When? To whom?”
I said I did not know when, but it was to be to the young Lord Raa.
“Raa? Did you say Raa? That . . . Good G —— But surely you know. . . .”
He did not finish what he was going to say, so I told him I did not know anything, not having seen Lord Raa since I came to school, and everything having been arranged for me by my father.
“Not seen him since . . . everything arranged by your father?”
“Yes.”
Then he asked me abruptly where I was staying, and when I told him he said he would walk back with me to the hotel.
His manner had suddenly changed, and several times as we walked together up the Tritoni and along the Du Marcelli he began to say something and then stopped.
“Surely your father knows. . . .”
“If he does, I cannot possibly understand. . . .”
I did not pay as much attention to his broken exclamations as I should have done but for the surprise and confusion of coming so suddenly upon him again; and when, as we reached the hotel, he said:
“I wonder if your father will allow me to speak. . . .”
“I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” I said, and then, in my great impatience, I ran upstairs ahead of him and burst into my father’s room, crying:
“Father, whom do you think I have brought to see you — look!”
To my concern and discomfiture my father’s reception of Martin was very cool, and at first he did not even seem to know him.
“You don’t remember me, sir?” said Martin.
“I’m afraid I can’t just place you,” said my father.
After I had made them known to each other they sat talking about the South Pole expedition, but it was a chill and cheerless interview, and after a few minutes Martin rose to go.
“I find it kind of hard to figure you fellows out,” said my father. “No money that I know of has ever been made in the Unknown, as you call it, and if you discover both Poles I don’t just see how they’re to be worth a two-cent stamp to you. But you know best, so good-bye and good luck to you!”
