Edith found time for everything; duty, as well as pleasure, had each its allotted place in her daily life. Before the rest of the family were awake she was up and off to early Mass. In the winter twilight, when other young ladies were returning from the fashionable promenade, Edith could often be seen with a little basket on her arm, carrying delicacies to the sick, or more substantial food to relieve the necessities of Christ's suffering children. Ernest sometimes accompanied her on these errands of mercy, and it was a new revelation to him to see Edith, so gay, sparkling, and fascinating in society, visiting the humble homes of the poor, cheering and comforting the sick and destitute. Her very presence seemed like a sunbeam in their dreary dwellings. Edith did not think she was performing any heroic virtue by these things. She knew she was only following the injunction of Him who loved the poor so well that he became like one of them. She knew the Catholic poor were the blessed inheritance of the Catholic Church. Many Catholic young ladies, delicately nurtured and fastidiously refined, are daily doing what Edith did.
Ernest was benefited by attending Edith on those missions of love. His warm heart was touched and all the latent sweetness of his nature brought out by the distress which he witnessed, and of which he had never dreamed amidst the luxuries of his own elegant home. There was one case that particularly interested him; unfortunately, there are many such in this age of boasted religious liberty. It was that of a Mrs. White. She was a woman of education and refinement, and had been accustomed to all the comforts of life in her father's house. Early in life she married a poor but worthy young man. He was a clerk, and labored for his wife and children with an industry that knew no flagging. By constantly bending over his desk he literally worked himself into consumption. After lingering a few months, during which all his little savings were spent, he died, leaving his family in utter destitution. During his sickness he had been visited by several Catholic ladies, who attended to his wants with so sweet a charity that his heart was touched, and he longed to know more of a religion which taught such blessed humanity. As the Author of all truth has declared that he who seeks shall find, so Mr. White found the truth which he sought, and died a most beautiful and edifying death. His wife soon afterwards became a Catholic, converted by the example of the good ladies who had so kindly ministered to her dying husband. In the extremity of her distress Mrs. White appealed to her father, who had refused to have any intercourse with her since her marriage. What do you think was the answer of this father to a daughter whose only offence was that she had left father and mother to cleave to her husband? We blush for the humanity that could send to a grief-stricken and desolate daughter so brutal a message as this:
“Now your chosen husband is dead, I will receive you back, provided you give up, at once and for ever, the Catholic religion, which you have recently professed. Otherwise, you may die as you have lived—a pauper and an outcast.”
And so she lived and died a pauper and an outcast; but, so living and so dying, her lot was more enviable than that of her cruel and unnatural father. Her last moments were comforted [pg 807] by the promise of Ernest D'Arcy to provide for her two children. The elder, a bright little fellow of thirteen, he placed in a lawyer's office; the other, a boy nine years old, was admitted into a Catholic orphan asylum.
Thus visiting the sick and relieving the poor, and frequently meeting Catholic priests and Catholic Sisters in pious attendance on death-beds, the conversation of Ernest and Edith naturally took a religious turn. One evening, after returning from one of their charitable visits, they were sitting in the library before the great wood-fire (for Ernest would not allow that abomination, miscalled a modern improvement, a furnace-flue, in his sanctum), as they generally did before tea. Ernest was unusually thoughtful that evening, so much so that Edith observed it and asked him the cause.
“I am thinking about you and myself—about all your goodness to me,” he said; “about what I was before I knew you, and what I may be by your noble example. Edith, the daily beauty of your life makes mine ugly. My father was a Catholic, and I am—nothing. The cold and fashionable religion of my mother neither satisfied my mind nor interested my heart. I became a free-thinker, an infidel, but never a scoffer at religion. I did not believe, because I did not know what to believe.”
“We must read together Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity—that magnificent tribute to the truth and beauty of the Christian religion,” Edith replied. “You know the story of his conversion: in his extreme youth he yielded to the gay scepticism which at the time controlled French society, and he, a son of the Crusaders, became a disciple of Voltaire, and wrote in the interest of infidelity. The death of Chateaubriand's mother, whose last moments had been saddened by his scepticism, and whose last words were a prayer for his conversion, recalled him to a sense of that religion in which he had been educated. ‘I became a Christian,’ Chateaubriand wrote. ‘My conviction came from the heart. I wept and I believed.’ He resolved to devote to religion the eloquent pen which had been used against her. The result was his immortal work the Genius of Christianity. The beautiful style, the vast information, the glowing descriptions of art, scenery, poetry, and music cannot fail to delight and interest you.”
The next day Edith commenced Chateaubriand's great masterpiece. As, day after day, the reading continued, Ernest grew deeply interested. He saw clearly demonstrated the noble and inspiring fact that “the Christian religion, of all the religions that ever existed, is the most favorable to liberty and to the arts and sciences; that the modern world is indebted to it for every improvement: from agriculture to the abstract sciences; from the hospitals for the reception of the unfortunate to the temples reared by the Michael Angelos and embellished by the Raphaels.”
Other books were read, all breathing the same divine spirit, the same exalted Christian charity, the same sweet human sympathy. The warm, tender heart of Ernest D'Arcy was fascinated by the beautiful and noble sentiments expressed in the volumes which were now a part of his daily reading. He compared them with the false philosophy of a Voltaire and the senseless sentimentality of a Rousseau, which taught how to destroy, but not how to save; whose end was the destruction, not the amelioration, of society. These [pg 808] books certainly opened a newer and a sweeter world to the student. But it must not be supposed that the young D'Arcy saw immediately the truth of Catholicity in all its divine beauty. Few, like S. Paul, are miraculously changed from the enemy to the friend of God's church. Few, like Chateaubriand, can say: “I wept and I believed.”
With the opening of spring Edith returned home, and Earnest was again left alone with his books. But how changed seemed everything! The brightness was gone from the library. The pleasure was gone from his studies. He sadly missed her who had been his constant companion for so many months. Fortunately, about this time his eyes improved sufficiently to allow him to read for a short time every day. He continued the reading to which Edith had introduced him. This was some consolation to him, now that he was separated from her. But, alas! it was a consolation not long allowed to him. If that stern old moralist, Dr. Johnson, acknowledged that he found it easier to practise abstinence than temperance in wine, it will not be surprising that so ardent a student as Ernest D'Arcy found it absolutely impossible to practise temperance in reading when he read at all. And now he had a greater incentive to work than ever before. He felt that he must make himself worthy of the sweet girl whom he loved. The delicately refined nature of this perfect gentleman would not allow him to make a formal declaration of love to Edith while she was a guest in his mother's house, but that unerring, never-failing instinct which belongs to woman enabled her to see plainly that he was deeply, fondly interested in her. Nor was Edith insensible to the many attractive qualities of Ernest D'Arcy; his cultured mind, his noble heart, his high ambition, his exalted sentiments of honor and morality, claimed her enthusiastic admiration, while the romantic character of their constant intercourse pleased her girlish fancy.