‘Why not?’
‘Because no one ever told me about it,’ Maria replied, feeling that she must find an answer. The boy looked at her gravely, but not incredulously, and asked nothing more.
CHAPTER V
The sun was sinking when Maria descended the long flight of steps from the door of the Capuchin church to the level of the street, and under the grey veil she wore her cheeks were wet with undried tears. But she held her head up proudly, and her small feet stepped firmly and lightly on the stones.
She was not in a state of grace by any means, and the tears had not been shed in repentance for her sins. She hardly ever cried, and when she did it was generally from anger and bitter disappointment. The moisture that had risen in her eyes that morning when Castiglione had offered to go away for her sake had not overflowed; but now, when she had left the confessional without the expected absolution, and had seen the hard-faced old monk in brown come out of his box and stalk stiffly away to the sacristy as if he had done something very virtuous, she had sat down in a chair in a corner of the empty church and the burning drops had streamed over her cheeks like fire till they reached the small handkerchief she held to her mouth under her veil; and she had bitten hard at the hem, and it was salt with her tears.
She had been misunderstood, she had been misjudged, she had been rebuked. She had been told that she was a very great sinner; that so long as she was willing to love a man who was not her husband, and who had been her lover, God would not forgive her; that absolution came from God and not from priests, and that it was out of any priest’s power to pronounce it while she was in her present state of mind; that she might come again when she was sure that she wished never to think of that evil man; that if she felt that she owed him reparation for having been unjust to him she should write to him to say so, asking him to destroy the letter, and bidding him never to come near her again; and that to see him again, even once, since she still loved him, would be not only a deadly risk but actually a mortal sin. After this she had been sternly told to go away, to pray for grace, and to be particularly careful to observe days of abstinence and fasting, as the devil was everywhere and never slept.
Now the monk who had heard her confession was a good man and meant well, and believed that he was speaking for the good of her soul. He knew well enough from the penitent’s language and manner of speaking about her life that she was a lady of Rome, and perhaps one of the great ones who sometimes came to him because they did not like to go to their regular confessors. But this, in his estimation, was the best of reasons why Maria should be treated with the same severity as the poorest and most ignorant woman of the people. If she had come to him with a religious doubt or a scruple concerning dogma he would have treated her very differently, for he was something of a theologian and had a monk’s love of controversy. But she came to him simply as a woman, with a perfectly evident mortal sin on her conscience, and what he considered a perfectly evident desire to compromise things by pretending that her lover could be her friend. In such matters he was a ruthless democrat, as many confessors are. She might be a great lady, she might have been royal, for all he cared; what was just to one woman’s soul and conscience was just to another woman’s, all the world over, and where the deadly sins were concerned there was not to be any distinction between the poor and the rich, the educated and the ignorant. On the contrary, educated people should get less mercy, because they ought to know better than their inferiors, and because they had been brought up in surroundings where the baser sins of humanity are supposed to be less common; and finally and generally, because we are told that the salvation of the rich is to be regarded as a much more difficult matter than that of the poor. It was certainly not the business of a Capuchin monk to reverse matters and make it easier.
But the delicately nurtured, sorely tried woman who had come to unburden her conscience of a sin she had only fully understood within the last few days, felt as if the well-meaning monk had thrust out his bony hand from the shadow of the confessional and had deliberately slapped her cheek.