"When you married your husband, dear lady, you were bound to him not by your own act alone, but by a mysterious power from which neither of you can ever free yourself. The power that united you was God, and whom God has joined together no man may put asunder."
I felt my head drooping. The Bishop was saying what I had always been taught, though in the torment of my trouble and the fierce fire of my temptation I had forgotten it.
"The civil law might divorce you," continued the Bishop. "I don't know—I can say nothing about that. But it would have no right to do so because the law can have no right to undo what God Himself has done."
Oh, it was cruel! I felt as if the future of my life were darkening before me—as if the iron bars of a prison were closing upon me, and fetters were being fixed on every limb.
"But even if the civil law could and would divorce you," said the Bishop, "think of the injury you would be inflicting on the Church. Yours was what is called a mixed marriage, and the Church does not favour such marriages, but it consented in this case, and why? Because it hoped to bring back an erring family in a second generation to the fold of the faith. Yet what would you be doing? Without waiting for a second generation you would he defeating its purpose."
A cold chill seemed to creep to my heart at these words. Was it the lost opportunity the Bishop was thinking of, instead of the suffering woman with her bruised and bleeding soul?
I rose to go. The Bishop rose with me, and began to counsel forgiveness.
"Even if you have suffered injury, dear lady," he said—"I don't say you haven't—isn't it possible to forgive? Remember, forgiveness is a divine virtue, enjoined on us all, and especially on a woman towards the man she has married. Only think! How many women have to practise it—every day, all the world over!"
"Ah, well!" I said, and walked to the door.
The Bishop walked with me, urging me, as a good daughter of the Church, to live at peace with my husband, whatever his faults, and when my children came (as please God they would) to "instil into them the true faith with all a mother's art, a mother's tenderness," so that the object of my marriage might be fulfilled, and a good Catholic become the heir to Castle Raa.