Cecily saw Rod’s handsome, laughing face in her memory as it had looked when he had said this, and she heard his jolly, infectious laugh! Oh, how she wanted him, wanted him! The longing for him swept over her like physical sickness, and she shuddered, turning cold. She had left him miserable; she had deserted him. Deserted him in the home he was making for her; she was wrecking his home a second time as that other woman had wrecked his first home. She, Cis, was respectable in the eyes of the world, and that other was not, but was she any better than the outcast?
Cicely raised her ring to her lips and kissed over and over again its glowing ruby. “The color of her love, of the warm blood of her great heart,” Rod had told her the ruby was. And she had been cold-hearted toward him, had failed him when he trusted her. He might have deceived her, have married her and not told her till afterward. How splendid he was to be truthful, honorable toward her! Should she punish him for his virtues? Even a child is told that if it tells the truth it shall not be punished, but how cruelly, how wickedly she was punishing Rod, Rory O’Moore!
She would go to him and beg his forgiveness; he would forgive her, remembering that she, too, had suffered, that his secret had shocked her beyond the power to think at first; Rod was always big, and kind.
She would marry him. Even though a magistrate married her and by so doing expelled her from Catholic communion she would marry him. Excommunicated! It did sound fearful! But words did not matter! She would not strike Rodney in the face, drive him from her with a blow upon his heart!
Cicely’s eyes, fixed upon the altar, unseeing, their gaze turned inward, suddenly saw. Her gaze turned outward, and she saw the small golden door upon which her set eyes had been resting, saw it, and saw the crucifix above it, a tall, vivid crucifix over the tabernacle door, under the tabernacle dome. And suddenly Cicely began to tremble violently and her icy hands clutched at the back of the pew before her.
Who, then, would she strike in the Face? Upon Whose Sacred Heart would she deal the blow which drove Him from her?
Never again should she see that golden door open and her Lord come forth to her. Never again would a priest turn to her and bid her “Behold the Lamb of God.” Seldom, ah, seldom did she let the words be addressed to her now, but—never again? Excommunicated?
She was a poor Catholic, cold, indifferent, ignorant, but she was a Catholic. She had held to her Faith, after a fashion, and she had known that she could never substitute another faith for it. For Rodney’s sake she would leave it, go to him, go from God! She would heal Rodney’s wounds, but she would join the rabble in the Garden, and betray her Lord! She would not kiss Him, as Judas had kissed Him, but she would kiss in bridal kiss the man whose acceptance meant her Lord’s rejection.
Rodney, or her Lord? One or the other; never both. She had not thought just what it meant, this decision which she had reached upon a flood of human longing and love. She wanted Rodney. She craved for him as the body craves for food, the parched throat for water; she agonized remembering his present pain, that she had inflicted it in return for his honorable dealing with her.
But now—she saw the Tabernacle. With her soul she saw it, and she felt by prescience the desolation of the closing of its door, sealed by her own action. To be an outcast, excommunicated!