“Oh, his soul!” exclaimed Tom, and his tone sounded like an anathema. “I call it going pretty far to make a nice girl marry a man to save his soul!”
“We ought to be willing to die to save a soul,” Nan reminded him.
“I’m perfectly willing that lots of people should die to save a soul, but I ain’t willing one girl should marry to save one, not when the girl is Cis,” said Tom stalking off in disgust the stronger that he had been badly shaken in nerves.
Up in her room Cis knelt before the window, staring out into the top of a spruce tree outside Nan’s little house. It was a long time before she could think coherently. The horror of the suicide so nearly accomplished; the almost equal horror of the woman’s degradation; the unmistakable stamp upon her of vice, upon her who was Rodney’s wife, yet who was not in any true sense his wife, nor could be the wife of any honest man, filled Cicely with shuddering confusion. It was as if she had a vision of what it meant when one said: “A lost soul.” Pity for Rodney overwhelmed her, yet, unjustly or justly, Cis felt as though he were stained by the vileness of this bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. “And they two shall be as one flesh.” The words echoed within her mind, empty of connected thoughts, tense with fragments of thoughts which at once confused and tortured her poignantly.
After a time Cis began to realize fully what had befallen her. She had parted from Rod because this woman lived. She had chanced upon her at barely the right time to secure her continuing to live; she had saved her from suicide, kept her alive to shackle Rodney, according to the law which had bound them together, but had given her another chance for Eternal Life. Now she lay within the spotless physical and spiritual purity of the House of the Good Shepherd. It was Cicely Adair, who had been so sore beset with temptation to marry this woman’s husband, who had been allowed to lead her inside the Good Shepherd’s field where she might, if she would, become that sheep which He bore upon His shoulders into safety.
Cicely’s bright head bowed on the window sill; her breath came short; her cheeks grew wet with tears such as she had never before shed, as the realization came to her that this was her superabounding reward. Because she had renounced Rodney for God’s sake, He was making her as the little crook which He laid around the neck of Rodney’s errant wife, compelling her to turn and return.
Cis rose up at last when Nan, unable to leave her to herself longer, came softly knocking at her door, and, with a loving kiss, laid the baby in Cicely’s arms, offering her thus the best clue that she knew to the mysteries of life, the sweetest panacea for its ills. And as she did so, Nan, with a sudden sinking of heart, was sure that Cis would marry Rodney; that his wife would die and she would marry him, because she had known what it was to worship at the shrine of this baby.
Cis had little to say to Nan of the tremendous experience of that day; what was there to say? It was far too great for comment, and of the possible import of it, its strange connection with her recent past, Cis had no desire to talk to Nan. She did go with it to Jeanette Lucas, whose understanding was perfect, but to her Cis found herself unequal to say much. She wrote to Father Morley, and received from him a long letter that formulated and expressed for Cis all that she had been trying to correlate in herself. However, it was in her daily visits to the House of the Good Shepherd that Cis received the best fruit of these experiences.
Every day Cis made time to go to see Myrtle Moore, and every day she sat for a while with the white robed nun whom they called Sister Bonaventure, properly so called her, Cis thought, for her coming was always good for her.
She was wise with a wisdom that must have been the direct reception of that gift from the Holy Ghost, for she “had entered religion,” she told Cis, at twenty-two.