Her eyes, beaming with religious enthusiasm and tenderest human affection, searched frankly the pale face before her, and her hand was laid lightly on Miss Pembroke's arm. No reserve nor timidity could stand before her. They melted like snowflakes beneath the heavenly summer of her glances. Honora told freely and simply what had distressed her.
How sweet is the friendship of one true woman for another!—sweeter than love, for it is untroubled, and has something of the calmness of heaven; deeper than love, for it is the sympathy of true natures which reflect each the entire being of the other; less selfish than love, for it asks no merging of another into itself; nobler than love, for it allows its object to have other sources of happiness than those it can furnish; more enduring than love, for it is a life, and not a flame.
“But can you not see, my dear,” the nun said presently, “that it would have been better if you had not had any friendly intercourse with him, even though this terrible thing had never happened? The injunction not to be unequally yoked with one another refers, I [pg 073] think, to all ties as well as to marriage. The gulf is too wide between the Christian and the Jew to be bridged over for familiar friendship. It is too wide for anything but prayers to cross. Once admit any intercourse with unbelievers, and you peril your faith; and, besides, you cannot set a barrier firmly anywhere when the first one is down. I have heard it said that this Jew loved you, and even fancied it possible that you would marry him.”
“People ought not to say such things!” exclaimed Miss Pembroke, blushing deeply.
“People ought not to have the chance to say such things, my dear girl,” replied the nun. “It was offering you an insult when he offered you his hand.”
“O dear Sister! is not that too severe?” expostulated Honora. “Setting aside what has happened since, should I not recollect, when a man makes me such an offer, what his intention is, and how the subject looks to him? And cannot I refuse him, and see that it is impossible for me to do otherwise, yet feel kindly toward him, and wish him well, and believe that he has meant to show me both affection and respect?”
“Honora,” said the Sister, “if any man had struck your mother, then turned to offer you his hand, would you not have recoiled from him in disgust and indignation?”
“Surely I would!”
“And is your God and Saviour less dear and sacred to you than your mother?” the other pursued. “Can you allow your thoughts to dwell with kindness and complacency on one who blasphemes the crucified Redeemer, and calls him an impostor? Because you have not heard this man talk against your faith, you forget what he must think of it. I tell you they mock at him, these Jews, and they call us idolaters. And what could he think of you, when, knowing that you adore Christ as God, he asked you to be the wife of one who would laugh, if he did not rave, when he saw you making the sign of the cross? He must have thought your faith so weak that he could in time make you renounce it. And the reason why he thought so was because he saw you receiving him in a friendly way, as if friendship were possible between you. I speak of what he was. What he is, we have nothing to do with.”
Miss Pembroke's eyes were down-cast. “When you place the subject in that light, I am forced to think myself all in the wrong,” she said. “But most people do not think in that clear, positive way. They act on an inherited motive, and their beliefs are moss grown, as it were.”