While one woman prayed, the other thought. She had often dwelt upon this subject of women's lives being wrecked from love of friend, husband, or child, and the sight of Mrs. Gerald had been to her a constant illustration of such a wreck. These thoughts had troubled her, for she was not one to judge hastily, and she did not know whether to pity or to blame so ruinous a devotion. Now again the question floated up, and with it the wish to decide once for all before [pg 259] life should thrust the problem on her, when she would be too confused to think rightly. She was like one who stands safe yet wistful on shore, looking off over troubled waters, and Mrs. Gerald and Annette seemed to her tossing far out on the waves. She even seemed to herself to have approached the brink so near that the salt tide had touched her feet, and to have drawn back only just in time.
Gradually, as her fair fingers wove the glowing web, a faint cloud came over her face, and, if it had been possible for her to frown, that deeper shadow between the brows might have been called a frown. Her thoughts were growing stern.
“Were we made upright, we women, only to bend like reeds to every wind?” she asked herself. “Can we not be gentle without being slavish, and kind and tender without pouring our hearts out like water? Cannot we reserve something to ourselves, even while giving all and even more than our friends deserve? Cannot we hold our peace and happiness so firmly in our own hands that no one shall have the power to destroy them?”
Each question as it came met with a prompt answer, and resolution followed swiftly: “Never will I suffer myself to be so enslaved by any affection as to lose my individuality and be merged and lost in another, or be made wretched by another, or to have my sense of justice and right confused by the desire to make excuses for one I love. Never will I suffer the name which I have kept stainless to be associated with the disgrace of another, and never will I leave the orderly and honorable ways of life, where I have walked so far, to follow any one into the by-ways, for any pretext. Each one is to save his own soul, and to help others only to a certain extent. I will keep my place!”
That resolute and almost haughty face seemed scarcely to be Honora Pembroke's; and she felt so surely that her expression would check and startle her companion that when she saw Mrs. Gerald drop the rosary from her fingers, and turn to speak to her, she quickly changed her position so as to hide her face a moment.
Mrs. Gerald's voice had changed while she prayed, and seemed weighted with a calm seriousness from her heavenly communion; and her first words jarred strangely with her young friend's thought.
“How uncalculating the saints were!” she said. “Our Lady was the only one, I think, who escaped personal contumely, and that was not because she risked nothing, but because God would not suffer contempt nor slander to touch her. He spared her no pang, save that of disgrace; yet she would have accepted that without a complaint. How tender he was of her! He gave her a nominal spouse to shield her motherhood; it was through her Son that her heart was pierced, and the grief of a mother is always sacred; and he gave her always loving and devoted women, who clustered about and made her little court. She was never alone. But she is an exception. The others were despised and maltreated, and they seemed to be perpetually throwing themselves away. I do not doubt that those saints who never suffered martyrdom nor persecution were still, in their day, laughed and mocked at by some more than they were honored by others. They never stopped to count the cost.”
Miss Pembroke felt at the first [pg 260] instant as though Mrs. Gerald must have read her thoughts, and her reply came like a retort. “It is true they did not count the costs,” she said; “but it was God whom they loved.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Gerald replied gently, “that was what I meant.”
She was too closely wrapped in contentment to perceive the coldness with which her companion spoke. It seemed to her that all her cares had floated away, and left only rest and sweetness behind. She no longer feared anything. There comes to every one some happy season in life, she thought; and hers had come.