For a long time I sat without speaking again, only listening with a fluttering heart to what the Reverend Mother was saying—that it was one of the objects of the religious life to offer refuge to the tortured soul that could not trust itself to resist temptation; and that taking my vows as a nun to God would be the only way (known to and acknowledged by the Church) of cancelling my vows as a wife to my husband.
"You will be a bride still, my child, but a bride of Christ. And isn't that better—far better? You used to wish to be a nun, you know, and if your father had not come for you on that most unhappy errand you might have been one of ourselves already. Think of it, my child. The Mothers of our convent will be glad to welcome you, if you can come as a willing and contented Sister. And how can I leave you here, at the peril of your soul, my daughter?"
I was deeply moved, but I made one more effort.
I told the Reverend Mother that, since the days when I had wished to be a nun, a great change had come over me. I had become a woman, with all a woman's passions—the hunger and thirst for love, human love, the love of the good man who loved me with all his soul and strength. Therefore I could never be a willing and contented Sister. I should only break the peace and harmony of their house. And though she were to put me down in the lowest cell of her convent, my love would follow me there; it would interrupt my offices, it would clamour through my prayers, and I should always be unhappy—miserably unhappy.
"Not so unhappy there as you will be if you remain in the world and carry out your intention," said the Reverend Mother. "Oh believe me, my child, I know you better than you know yourself. If you marry again, you will never be able to forget that you have broken your vow. Other women may forget it—frivolous women—women living in society and devoting their lives to selfish pleasures. Such women may divorce their husbands, or be divorced by them, and then marry again, without remembering that they are living in a state of sin, whatever the civil law may say—open and wicked and shameless sin. But you will remember it, and it will make you more unhappy than you have ever been in your life before."
"Worse than that," she continued, after a moment, "it will make your husband unhappy also. He will see your remorse, and share it, because he will know he has been the cause. If he is a good man the mere sight of your grief will torture him. The better man he is the more will he suffer. If you were a runaway nun he would wish to take you back to your convent, for though it might tear his heart out to part with you, he would want to restore your soul. But being a wife who has broken her marriage vows he will never be able to do anything. An immense and awful shadow will stand between you and darken every hour of your lives that is left."
When the Reverend Mother had done I sat motionless and speechless, with an aching and suffocating heart, staring down on the garden over which the night was falling.
After a while she patted my cold hand and got up to go, saying she would call early in the morning to bid me good-bye. Her visit to Ireland would not last longer than three weeks, and after that she might come back for me, if I felt on reflection (she was sure I should) that I ought to return with her to Rome.
I did not reply. Perhaps it was partly because I was physically weak that my darling's warning was so nearly overcome. But the moment the door closed on the Reverend Mother a conviction of the truth of what she had said rushed upon me like the waves of an overflowing sea.
Yet how cruel! After all our waiting, all our longing, all our gorgeous day-dreams of future happiness! When I was going to be a bride, a happy bride, with my lost and stolen girlhood coming back to me!