A Modern Madonna

by Caroline Abbot Stanley

The sick girl threw her a quick glance of gratitude. It is a thing most passing strange that when a woman finds herself betrayed, disgraced, branded with shame and thrust out into that utter darkness from which she knows there can never be recall—even then she holds inviolate the name of him who has brought her low.

"I think if I had had a mother to tell me things it might have been different, but I had lived most of my life with my father, a proud, cold man who loved me, perhaps, but did not let me know it, though he robbed himself of the very necessaries of life that he might educate me. I was to be a teacher. That was his ambition and mine. There was no confidence between us. I could not get close to him as a child does to its mother.... I met this man when I was off at school. He was so different from the country boys I had known. He had a way of looking in my eyes and saying things that took my simple, silly heart by storm. I do not offer it in excuse, but madam—I loved him as I had never loved my God! I trusted him as though he were my God. And when he told me that he loved me and wanted me to be his wife, I believed him. He could not marry me openly just now, he said, but if I would go with him to Washington we would be married secretly that very day. I was an honest girl, though a very foolish one, and I insisted on that.... I trusted him to my undoing. There was a form of marriage. A young man came to our room and murmured something as we stood before him. He did not look like a minister, but I was so dazed and frightened at what I had done that I hardly thought of it then.... Madam, we were never married. My husband, for so I believed him, told me so one day in a fit of anger—told me brutally."

Margaret gripped the iron rail of the bed.

"That day I took the last cent of money I had and went back to my father's house. It had been a bitter grief to him that I had brought his gray hairs to shame. He shut his door upon me. Oh, madam!... I begged my way then back to Washington and the man who had betrayed me, and begged him to take me in. What else could I do?... I lived with him in open sin until he came to me one day and told me that it was all over. He was to be married the next day. He had delayed telling me because he hated to have a scene, but he had decided now to settle down and live a correct life.

"'And I!' I cried, standing up before him, 'what am I to do—I and your child—while you are leading a "correct" life?' He shrugged his shoulders. He would give me money. That was all he could do. Certainly it was as much as I could expect. He had not asked me to come back to him.

"Oh, madam, I was wild!—was wild! I had nowhere to go to hide my shame. My father's house was closed to me—my mother dead. In all the world I had no friend. It was my fault, my grievous fault. I know that well, and then I have been told it often since,—if I had been a modest girl and staid at home and turned away from all his tales of love and all his promises, this never would have come to me, they've said.... Oh, I have told myself that many times with bitterest tears!... But, lady, even though she knows it is her fault, her sin, that has brought her to this plight—still, still, 'tis hard for a poor girl to feel her pains upon her and know she has no friends!"

Margaret took the woman's thin, trembling hand between her two strong ones and held it close.

"It is hard," she said with infinite gentleness, "hard and very pitiful. The world is full of hard things for women."

The sick girl looked up with a startled expression. "Surely, sin with its sorrows has not touched you?"

"My poor girl, the sorrows that come from sin do not stop with the sinning. But go on with your story," said Margaret.