To watch the love-light of motherhood irradiate the features of your wife as her new-born babe is placed within her arms; to watch the shadow of death creep over the tiny form of the little one you adore; in short, to suffer, to know, to weep, to laugh, as others suffer and know, and weep and laugh—that, and that only, is to love.
It was a deep-seated satisfaction to him that love had come to him as he had always prayed for it,—a beautiful, spiritual, uplifting experience. Love, he had always contended, was a holy thing. Had not Jesus used the simile of the bride and the bridegroom to express the love of the religious for her God, of the priest for his Church? Nevertheless, over all the writings of the Fathers and the Saints a false and unhealthful asceticism had spread a morbid view of sexual love. Their pages were soiled by a horror of passion which in itself was a surrender to it. The very violence of their dread, the very vehemence of their agonies, spoke not only of a lack of self-control, but of a pruriency of imagination which would not have been present in a normal man. Gone utterly was the frank cleanness of the Scriptures:—
"For he created all things that they might have being, and the generative powers of the world are healthsome, and there is no poison of destruction in them."
And in its place came a distorted self-consciousness that was carried to absurd extremes. It caused one saint to cover his hands with rags before he would consent to carry his own mother across a bridge—a highly edifying incident which was related with much spiritual gusto by the saint's biographer.
The tortures of St. Anthony, the revelations of St. Augustine, the temptations of St. Benedict, were all to Robert Annys incomprehensible. He had never known his pulse to bound one beat the quicker at the sight of a woman. Women there had been who, stirred by his great beauty, had striven with such poor art as they possessed to awaken desire within him, but he had always put them aside calmly and passed on in the work of the Lord.
On his return he lost no time in seeking out Matilda. This time he needed no one to interpret the joy that surged up into her face as she looked on him. He smiled tenderly on her as she told him of her doings during his absence, how she had nursed a girl through a terrible fever, how she had read the Gospel to many eager souls, how she had taught an old man his letters, how she had progressed with her grandmother's lessons. Then when she paused, and asked shyly, "Did thy pupil well?" he came close to her and took her hand.
"Well? Why, I could not have done half so well myself. Ah, I need thee, I need thee always. What sayst thou? Canst take me, a poor priest with no better lot to offer thee than that which my master hath enjoined upon me?"
"I shall love thee the better for it," she whispered.
"It will be no easy life. I will cherish thee dearly, yet never can I set thy desires above the call of duty," he said with a certain austereness, as if, even then, he was replying to the charges of the Hierarchy.
"I wish to help thee, not to hinder thee," was her instant reply. And in her face were a faith and an enthusiasm that would never waver.