“Oh, Mother of Consolation!... Help of the Afflicted... ora pro nobis!”
Often when dawn, that scarlet witch, with golden fingers came tapping on the canvas windows I would still be kneeling there, stiff-limbed, my shoulders chilled to stone above my gown. And after a little while I would open my door and go out into the sweet wild morning. Strange that sometimes it almost seemed as if the pagan witch had more healing in her golden hands than the Mother of Sorrows herself; for standing there gazing at her rising from the mists of the hills like a goddess from the incense on her altars, I would feel at last the frozen tears thawing in my heart and surging to my weary-lidded eyes.
There were other hours when battles of a different kind were to be faced, not with myself but Maurice. Thrusting himself violently into my hut he would revoke all promises and trample compacts under foot, making demands of me that seemed to fill and darken the room with shame: transforming me into a pillar of ice that could utter no word but one—a word that fell like a little cold icicle into space, re-forming again upon my benumbed lips to fall and fall again. “No—no—no—no—no—no.”
There was such a night that ended at dawn with an unspeakable struggle—scorching kisses on my bare shoulders, and a blow across his lips that left blood upon my clenched fist.
Ah! those were dark days! Desperate, soul-deforming nights!
There was another night when after bitter taunts had been hurled like poisoned arrows round the room, he tore the bed-clothes and pillows from my bed and the gowns and hangings from the walls and flung them in heaps and tatters into the rain-sodden yard. When the boys came in the morning to their work they picked everything up, cleaned and dried them as best they could, and with calm, inscrutable faces replaced them in my room.
After such incidents came intervals of days and weeks in which we never opened lips to each other. I moved about his house like a ghost, passing from hut to hut, arranging his meals, ordering his household, but speaking him no word, or if I did getting none in return. When we rode together, because it had become a set habit to mount our horses at a certain hour every afternoon, we never addressed each other except in the presence of other people who might chance to join us in our ride.
One day when we sat at table and I crossed myself for grace, as I had always been accustomed to do, he found a new jibe to throw at me.