“This world,” said Clarice, through her set teeth. “This hard, cold, cruel, miserable, wicked world. Is there only one of two lives before me—either to harden into stone and crush other hearts, or to be crushed by the others that have got hard before me? Oh, Mother, Mother! is there nothing in the world for a woman but that?—God, let me die before I come to either!”
“Deary, deary, deary me!” seemed to be all that Dame La Theyn felt herself capable of saying.
“A few weeks ago,” Clarice went on, “before—this, there was a higher and better view of life given to me. One that would make one’s crushed heart grow softer, and not harder; that was upward and not downward; that led to Heaven and God, not to Hell and Satan. There is no hope for me in this life but the hope of Heaven. For pity’s sake let me keep that! If every other human creature is going down—you seem to think so—let me go higher, not lower. Because my life has been spoiled for me, shall I deliberately poison my own soul? May God forbid it me! If I am to spend my life with demons, let my spirit live with God.”
The feelings of Dame La Theyn, on hearing this speech from Clarice, were not capable of expression in words.
In her eyes, as in those of all Romanists, there were two lives which a man or woman could lead—the religious and the secular. To lead a religious life meant, as a matter of course, to go into the cloister. Matrimony and piety were simply incompatible. Clarice was a married woman: ergo, she could not possibly be religious. Dame La Theyn’s mind, to use one of her favourite expressions, was all of a jumble with these extraordinary ideas of which her daughter had unaccountably got hold. “What on earth is the child driving at? is she mad?” thought her mother.
“What dost thou mean, child?” inquired the extremely puzzled Dame. “Thou canst not go into the cloister—thou art wed. Dear heart, but I never reckoned thou hadst any vocation! Thou shouldst have told thy lady.”
“I do not want the cloister,” said Clarice. “I want to do God’s will. I want to belong to God.”
“Why, that is the same thing!” responded the still perplexed woman.
“The Lord Earl is not a monk,” replied Clarice. “And I am sure he belongs to God, for he knows Him better than any priest that I ever saw.”
“Child, child! Did I not tell thee, afore ever thou earnest into this house, that thy Lord was a man full of queer fancies, and all manner of strange things? Don’t thee go and get notions into thine head, for mercy’s sake! Thou must live either in the world or the cloister. Who ever heard of a wedded woman devote to religion? Thou canst not have both—’tis nonsense. Is that one of thy Lord’s queer notions? Sure, these friars never taught thee so?”