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The Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 1. My Girlhood - Chapter 22 |
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_ FIRST PART. MY GIRLHOOD 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!" I went out to the lift with Martin, who asked if he could take me for a walk in the morning. I answered yes, and inquired what hour he would call for me. "Twelve o'clock," he replied, and I said that would suit me exactly. The Bishop came to dine with us that night, and after dinner, when I had gone to the window to look out over the city for the three lights on the Loggia of the Vatican, he and my father talked together for a long time in a low tone. They were still talking when I left them to go to bed. _ |
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