“There may be. You are a Protestant, and this scheme of visiting the poor with my daughter must bring you in contact with Catholics of various classes—the poor, the Sisters of Charity, perhaps incidentally with M. le Curé and other priests. Before you embark on these perils I should prefer that your mother’s consent was secured. We English mothers have Old-World prejudices about parental authority, you perceive,” added mamma, smiling; “you will not mind humoring mine in this case.”
Millicent declared her perfect readiness to do so. She looked like one who would gladly humor everybody’s wishes. I was already in love with her. The charm which attracted me that night amidst the gay crowd had not fled “like the talisman’s glittering glory” on a nearer approach. I was at a loss to see where the point of mutual attraction lay between her and Sybil; but Sybil was one of those creatures who spirited away your sympathies before you had time to challenge the thief or lay a protecting hand upon your treasure. She was a siren, who drew you to her cave and did not devour you. Millicent was a complete contrast to her in appearance as well as in character; her eyes were deep blue, and her hair, which was very dark, whitened her fair complexion to the transparency of alabaster, and gave a stronger individuality to her delicate features than blond hair, which seemed their natural birthright, could have lent them. She was very tall, and her small, beautifully-formed hands and feet put the seal on the character of singular refinement which pervaded her whole exterior.
My mother was greatly taken with her. “You have committed yourself more seriously in this case, it strikes me,” she remarked when Millicent had taken leave.
“They are settled in Paris permanently,” I replied; “I asked her that at once. I should not have embarked on an intimacy with her, if they had been only birds of passage.”
Mrs. Gray made no difficulty about Millicent’s joining me in my visits to the poor; she observed, indeed—very naturally, I thought—that “Mrs. Wallace ran just the same risk in allowing her daughter to associate with Millicent.” Millicent returned next morning quite jubilant with this message, and we set out on our first walk together. We agreed that we were not to improve this or any future opportunity to convert each other. Was I quite sincere when I entered on this agreement? Looking back on it, I think I can honestly say I was. I meant that I would not discuss religion or say anything to prejudice Millicent against her own; that I would rigidly avoid controversy; and in all this I kept my word. But I did not disguise from myself that I had a great longing to see her a Catholic, and that I should do my best in another way to bring about this result. For this purpose I had her name put down at Notre Dame des Victoires for prayers. I asked several of my friends to pray for the same intention, and I made a point of praying every day for it myself. I took her to see Sœur Lucie, a Sister of Charity I was very fond of, and I interested her in the same object. I counted a good deal, too, on the impression which the faith of the poor was likely to make on her.
I was just then much occupied with a poor woman named Mme. Martin, who was dying, who had been dying these five years of a very painful malady. I think she was the first person I took Millicent to see. She lived in a room on the sixth floor—that is, in the attic—of a house where her mother was concierge. She had been better educated than the generality of her class, having been brought up as a teacher of singing. This pursuit had subsequently thrown her into the society of persons much above her in position, and the contact had contributed still more to educate and refine her. She had consequently acquired something of the varnish of a lady, and, without being really educated, she had gained that increased capacity for suffering which even imperfect education gives. Her illness had thrown her back into her original position and surroundings, and these were perfect misery to her. She could not bear the society of the servants—her constant one now, owing to that horrible French system of stowing away the servants of every flat in the same house into pigeon-holes under the roof, old and young, men and women, innocent, honest girls and vicious old veterans in dishonesty, all crammed higgledy-piggledy in a proximity full of dangers to both soul and body. This population of the pigeon-holes was insupportable to Mme. Martin; she had nothing in common with them nor they with her. They pitied her—for the French are always kind-hearted—but they resented her evident superiority, and often showed their pity in a way that hurt more than it soothed. She writhed under the compassion of these coarse, vulgar-minded men and women, whose conversation turned chiefly on the domestic concerns of their masters, how they cheated them, the tricks they practised on them.
They came to see, after a while, that she did not care for their society, and they ceased to inflict it on her, and Mme. Martin came gradually to be as isolated as if she had been living in a desert. She was glad of it in one way. We most of us prefer solitude to unsympathetic company; we had rather be left alone than intruded on by those loud voices and heavy steps that jar so painfully on the nervous atmosphere of a sick-room; but there were times when her loneliness weighed terribly on her, when she longed for any hand that would but raise her paralyzed limbs from a posture that had grown agonizing from prolonged immobility, that would give her the drink that was just beyond the reach of her arm. Her mother could come to her but very seldom; she dared not absent herself during the busy portion of the day from her lodge downstairs. Sœur Lucie was very kind, and came as often as she could; it was she who had taken me to her and begged me to look after her. I was the better able to do so that Mme. Martin lived only five minutes’ walk from our house. I don’t think I ever came in contact with a sufferer who edified me more than this poor woman. It was not that she was so wonderfully pious, or heroic, or resigned; she was all three by turns, but none constantly. Perhaps it was this very fluctuation that made one realize so vividly the supernaturalness of the struggle she was carrying on. You saw the power of the sacraments, the action of grace working on her soul, almost as visibly as that of medicine on the body. She was a woman of very strong passions, acute sensibilities, and ardent imagination; you can fancy what it was to such a nature to be immured in a room about twelve feet long by eight, with a roof slanting to the floor at one side, and a window in the slant, incapable of moving in her bed without help, dependent on charity for even that bed and for the bread she ate. For the first years of her illness this misery was so unendurable, she told me, that she thought it would have driven her mad, and the terror of this prospect was the most unbearable thing of all. She had not the consolations of religion then. Her artist life, with its alluring perils, its wild companions, its passionate aspirations, had led her away from the realities of the faith and gathered a mist before her eyes. But she fell ill, and then the mist began to clear away. The Sisters of Charity found her out, and the old sacred memories of childhood were awakened; her First Communion, with its sweet, pure joys, its lovely, solemn pageant, the bright companionship of kindred hearts starting with the fervent promise to the divine Guest whose first coming was the grand event, the supreme crisis of their little lives, the goal to which, thus far, their lives had tended—all this came back like a well-remembered dream at the sight of the gray habit and the white cornette. It was the old, old story: the prodigal had wandered into a strange country, and had grown homesick and turned back, and the Father had met him half way on the road. She had not fed upon the husks of swine, poor Mme. Martin; only “forgotten to eat her bread,” and hunger had driven her home. She spoke to me of her conversion in terms of such deep humility and compunction that I might have fancied her the most appalling sinner who had ever lived, if Sœur Lucie had not told me the exact history of it.
But it was not all sunshine and smooth waters even after this blessed welcome home. There were dreadful battles to be fought yet. She fought bravely, but not always with a smiling face and a glad heart. Oh! no. There were days, of such terrific anguish, such utter, black despair, that it used to seem to me sometimes that her faith must fail this time, that nothing short of a miracle could save her now. And nothing else did. What greater miracle is there than the triumph of God’s grace over our corrupt and fallen nature, the victory of sacraments over the devil that holds our soul? It was a greater wonder to me every time I witnessed it in Mme. Martin. This presence of an evil spirit in her—a real though invisible presence of tremendous, almost omnipotent power—was so palpable that I used to feel something like the kind of terror one would feel near a person possessed. I always felt perfectly helpless while the crisis lasted, and would sit there and listen dumbly while she uttered her bitter, fierce words, not raving in loud, wild accents, but with a sort of hard, suppressed anger, a deep-down rebellion against the cruel, all-powerful will that was torturing her. There was no use arguing or preaching, or trying to make her see the sinfulness and the stupidity of it all; one could do nothing but bear with it, praying silently to God to come to her, and lay his finger on the wounded soul, and speak with his voice, and bid the winds be still.
One thing struck me with peculiar significance: no matter how fiercely rebellious she was towards God, she could always turn with a softened glance towards his Blessed Mother. There was an old print of the Mater Dolorosa on the wall over her bed, and it was the strangest thing to see the poor sufferer lift her dark, vindictive eyes to it with a tender, compassionate, entreating glance, while words of almost savage petulance against the Son were still hot on her lips. Once I remember her bursting into tears as she turned towards it in one of these sudden appeals. The fiend was exorcised for that day. I sat beside her till she had cried herself to sleep like a tired, naughty child.
These terrible days were invariably followed by periods of compunction, humble self-reproach, and love so fervent and consoling that it used to seem to me they could never pass away, that the darkness could never return, that this time the rescue was complete and irrevocable. The humility with which she would beg my pardon for the scandal she had given me, the way she would upbraid herself for her base ingratitude to our Blessed Lord, were more touching than I can describe. She would look up fondly towards the Mater Dolorosa with such an expression of tenderness on her haggard, sunken face, and say, as if apostrophizing it: “Ah! I knew she would gain the victory. I knew she would not desert me! Pauvre mère! Elle a tant souffert!”