LII
An elderly servant in plain clothes had admitted her. The man’s face bore traces of watching and anxiety. And at the stair-foot waited the matronly woman who bore the quaint name of Husnuggle, and the first glance at her quivering lips and reddened, swollen eyelids told the daughter that all was not well in the sick-room.
The shadow of Death brooded over the great canopied bed in the luxurious chamber, where a face that was the pallid wraith of Ada’s own lay low amidst the lace-trimmed pillows; its pinched and wasted beauty framed in the dainty little muslin cap that covered the still luxuriant and glossy hair.
A nurse from the Hospice rose up from her seat near the bed-foot, made her report in a few low-toned sentences, and was dismissed to take her needed rest, as a tiny china clock upon the mantelshelf struck one. And as her daughter bent above the sick woman and kissed the fair, unwrinkled forehead between the bands of gray-brown, the sunken eyes opened widely, and the weak voice said:
“You have come back!... Is it very late?... The time has seemed long!...”
“Dear mother, I should never have left you had you not wished it so. Have you been lonely in the midst of all the pain?”
“I have been thinking!...” said the toneless voice.
“Of me, dear mother?”
“Chiefly of you, my own.”
She wished to be raised a little on her pillows, and the daughter’s skilled hands tenderly performed this office, and put nourishment between the pale lips. You saw Ada, moving to and fro in her filmy, trailing laces and flashing jewels, between the glimmer of the silver night-lamp and the oblong patches of gray dawn that showed between the window-curtains, like some fair ministering spirit of pity and love.... And the feeble voice resumed after an interval:
“It is you who will be lonely, child, when I am gone. Then you may think more favorably of—of the course that others follow, and welcome those natural ties, my Ada, that make the happiness of life.”
Ada answered, putting up a hand to hide her tears:
“When you are with God I shall be lonely, dearest, but not sorrowful, knowing you in His safe keeping. As for marriage, urge it upon me no more, my mother! For something tells me that these natural ties you speak of, sweet and pleasant as they are, are not destined for me.”
“Why not? You would make a noble wife and mother, Ada. You are young, and cultivated, and beautiful, and have so many other gifts and graces, that, were you possessed of no worldly advantages, my child, you might still expect to make what Society calls an advantageous match....”
“Mother—my mother!—let us forget the world and Society!... To-night I have heard both applaud a God-defying crime as a stroke of exquisite diplomacy, and exalt a murderer as the saviour of his country, and their plaudits ring in my ears yet.... And I have seen the change—the base, corroding, ugly change!—they can wreak upon a nature that was—how short a time ago!—brave, and chivalrous, and simple; and a character that was honorable, upright, and sincere. I have a quarrel with Society and the world, mother; let them go by! And speak to me of marriage no more, in the little time we yet may have on earth together. For without love—such love as God has created, and blessed, and sanctioned between men and women—such love as you and my father knew!—I will never take on me the name of wife, or be the mother of any man’s children. Do not be vexed, dear mother!” she begged, in sweet, entreating tones.
“My daughter,” the dying woman said, “I am only grieved for you.... For I have fancied—if, indeed, it was fancy?—that your heart was not quite free; that your imagination had been touched, your thoughts attracted, Ada, by someone of different religion, language, and nationality, met and known abroad. Someone, the recollection of whom—forgive me if I am wrong, dearest!—has made you indifferent to the good qualities of Englishmen of your own rank and social standing, cold to their merits and blind to their attractions——”
“Mother, are you not talking too much? Will you not try to sleep?”
“My dear, I have but little time left for talk, and in avery few hours my sleep will know no earthly waking. Answer my question now!”
Ada Merling laid down the thin, frail hand that she had clasped, rose up, and went to the window, moved the blind, adjusted the curtain, went a step or two about the room, and having, possibly, controlled some emotion that had threatened to master her, resumed her seat beside the pillow and took the feeble hand again, saying:
“Mother, there can be no concealment between us!... I have allowed myself to think too constantly of a man whom I met not quite three years ago; and who appeared to be, morally and mentally, as he undoubtedly is physically, as superior to the common run of men as Hector must have seemed, compared with the other sons of Priam; or the young David, set amongst the warrior-chiefs of Saul; or Kossuth, placed side by side with the man who rules in France to-day.” She added rather hurriedly, as the mother would have spoken: “Remember that I only said ‘appeared.’ For I was doomed to know the pain of disillusion, and witness the breaking of the idol I had made for myself.... I shall be better for the lesson, painful though it has been! And so, let us speak of this no more! Even to you it has been difficult to confess my absurdity. Now, will you not try to rest?”
“Presently ... presently! Tell me more!—I should have known of this sooner! If any misunderstanding has arisen between you and one who loves you—and who could fail to love you?—it might have been cleared away by the exercise of a little tact—a measure of discrimination. But you, Ada—youto be despised and slighted! You, to give your love to one who makes no return!... The thought is incredible ... it bewilders and astounds me. Perhaps I err through excess of pride in you, but I cannot take this in!”
“Listen to me, dear, and you will understand more clearly....”
The face of the speaker was set to the desperate effort. Unseen by the dim eyes of the listener, the pang of self-revelation contracted and wrung it; the anguish of the confession blanched it to a deadly white.
“This is not a question of being appreciated or not appreciated, valued or undervalued. Your daughter, of whom you are so proud, threw away her heart unasked;and on the strength of a single meeting, built up the flimsy fabric of her house of dreams. To-night I met the man again, and the charm was broken. I saw him, not as I had imagined him to be, but as he is! Not the young Bayard of my belief, but thebeau chevalierof Paris salons; not as the man of unstained honor and high ideals, but as the attaché of the Elysée, the servant of its unprincipled master—the open lover of Madame de Roux.”
She hid her face, but her shoulders shook with weeping, and little streams of bright tears trickled between the slender white jeweled fingers, and were lost amidst the snowy laces of her dress.
“Again, I say that I cannot conceive it!” the mother faltered. “The man was hardly known to you?...”
“I had heard him glowingly described and fondly praised by one who loved him....”
“He is a foreigner?... A Frenchman?... A Roman Catholic?...”
“He is a Bavarian Swiss by birth; French by naturalization and education, and a Catholic, without doubt.”
“And had he asked you, you would have left us all to follow him?”
“Mother, you did the like at my father’s call!”
“Our parents approved!”
“If they had not, would you have abandoned him?”
“I cannot reply; it is for you to answer me.... Would you, had this man loved and sought you in marriage, have changed your religion and embraced his?”
“Mother, you ask a question I need not answer. He did not love me ... he never sought me.... Were our paths, that lie so far apart, to cross now ... did he ask of me that which I might once have gladly given, I should deny it, knowing him to be unworthy of the gift.”
“Ada, I must have your answer! Would you have deserted the faith of your Protestant forefathers?”
“It may be, mother, that I should have returned to the faith in which their fathers lived and died. Remember, we Merlings were Catholic before the Reformation.”
“Those were dark days for England. A purer light has shown the path to a better world since then.”
“Dear one,” the sweet voice pleaded, “we have never thought alike upon this matter.”
“To my bitter, secret sorrow,” the mother answered,“I have long known that we did not; or say, since you returned from your course of study in the Paris hospitals I have seen it, and guessed at the reason of the change! For you have lived with Roman Catholic nuns in convents, Ada, and have listened to their specious arguments. Snares may have been set—may Heaven pardon me if I judge wrongly!—to lure the English heiress into the nets of Rome.”
“No, no, dear mother! there were no arguments, no efforts. The Sisters treated me with the kindest courtesy, while they seemed to shun, rather than to desire, to discuss the difference of creed. I gathered at the most that I was pitied for having missed a great good, a signal blessing, an unspeakable privilege; that had fallen to their more happy lot. And when I have seen the Sisters’ faces as they came from their early, daily Communion, and when I have seen the little children—the tiniest creatures—fed with the Bread of Life, in which I might not share——”
She broke off. The sick woman said reproachfully:
“Had you not the privileges of your own reformed faith? Could you not have attended the monthly Communion at some French Protestant church, to your spiritual profit and refreshment?”
“Without doubt,” was the reply, “if I had needed nothing more than these.”
“Then.... You bewilder me, Ada! What can you find lacking in the services of your Church?”
She said, slowly and thoughtfully:
“What?... I have thought and reflected much upon this question, and I have decided that the coldness and narrowness that have chilled my soul, and the aching sense of something being wanting, arise from the lack of belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, and in the deliberate, purposeful absence of love, and honor, and worship towards His Mother——”
She was interrupted by an outcry of feeble vehemence.
“You horrify me, Ada. Worship towards a created being!... A sinful vessel of common human clay!”
She rose and said, standing beside the pillow, with the light of dawn upon her hair:
“Mother, there is profanation in the thought that the vessel chosen by its Maker for that tremendous servicecould be anything but immaculately, divinely spotless.... Can pure water be drawn from an impure well? or good fruit, to quote the words of her Divine Son, be gathered from a tree that is evil? How could the Mother from whose flesh was formed the sinless Body of the Redeemer, be capable of sin? My God-given reason tells me it is impossible! And—can I ever forget that the Heart that poured forth its Blood upon the Cross was filled from the veins of Mary, when there is not a single Gospel that does not tell me so?”
There was no answer from the pale lips. She said with energy:
“How can we pay her too much reverence, accord her a devotion too profound, to whom Archangels bend the knee and the Son of God accorded filial obedience? Being perfect Man, He is a perfect Son; the desire of such a Son must be to see His Mother honored. From a child I felt the incomparable beauty, the resistless charm, of that Divine Maternity.... I used to steal away alone to think of It. I used to say to myself, seeing you dressed for some dinner or ball, in all your laces and jewels, ‘My earthly mother is beautiful, but my heavenly Mother is far, far more fair!’ and I loved to imagine myself as a little child at Nazareth who had fallen down and lay crying with pain beside the well from whence she nightly drew her pitcher of fresh water, and whom she gathered in her arms and comforted. If love of the Mother of Jesus were prayer, surely I prayed to her then!”
Still there was no response. She sighed and resumed her seat beside the pillow; and said, stooping and touching with her lips the waxen hand:
“I ought to tell you that I wished and tried, to put many questions to the Sisters. But they had pledged their word to discuss with me no question of religious faith, and they were adamant—not at all to my delight. ‘But I am a heretic,’ I said to Sister Édouard-Antoine. ‘Am I not worth the effort to convince and enlighten?’ She said: ‘My dear, when Our Lord wishes to enlighten and convince you, He will do it from within, not from without!’ Now I have told you all there is to tell—nothing is kept back—no shadow lies between us. Are you not content with me now?”
“I shall know peace,” said the relentless voice from thepillow, “only when I have your promise—a pledge that, once given, I know my Ada will keep. Say to me: ‘Mother, I will never become a Romanist, or marry any man who holds the Catholic faith!’ That pledge once given will be kept by you, I know...!”
In her very feebleness lay the strength that was not to be gainsaid or resisted. Her daughter’s tears fell as she whispered in the dying ear:
“Dear little mother, when you have crossed the deep, swift river that separates Time from Eternity, and the Veil has fallen behind you, you will be so wise, so wise!... Not one of the kings, and priests, and prophets who lived of old, will have been so wise as you. Think, dearest and gentlest!—if, by the light that shines upon you then, you were to see that the ancient Faith is the true Faith and the Mother Church the One Church ... would you not grieve to know your Ada shut off from peace—deprived of the true and only Bread of Life—fettered and shackled, body and soul, by an irrevocable vow?... Would you not—”
Her voice broke and faltered. But the pale head upon the pillow made the negative sign, and she went on:
“Will not you—who have submitted yourself so meekly to the will of Almighty God in accepting this cup of death that He now offers you—leave the issue of affairs—in faith that He will do all for the best—to Him? and forbear to exact this promise, which my heart tells me will bring me sorrow and pain!”
In vain her pleading. The tongue that was already stiffening uttered one inexorable word.
“No!”
“Oh, then I promise, mother!” she cried through bursting tears. “And may God forgive me if I promise wrongly, seeing how much I love you, dearest dear!”
Ah me! the dying!—how pitiless they are! What heavy fetters their feebleness can rivet on our limbs, what galling yokes their parting wishes have power to lay upon our aching necks! How they stretch us on the rack with their strengthless hands; ruthlessly seize the levers, turn the jolting wheel; and wring from us, with tears of blood, and groanings of the flesh and of the spirit, the pledge wemost shrink to give! and pass content, knowing we dare not break the promise given to one upon whom the grave is about to close.
“Promise me, my son,” I heard the worn-out drudge of a London insurance office say to his boy of twelve years, grasping the small warm hand in his, that was gaunt and cold, and damp with the sweat of death—“promise me that when I lie beside your mother in the cemetery you will never fail to visit our grave each Sunday; and lay upon it of the flowers that are in season, the freshest and best, as you have seen and helped me to do ever since she died! Promise me that weeds shall never grow above her resting-place; that dust and soil shall never smirch the stone we placed above her; and see that the fee to the man who mows the grass be regularly paid. Do not fail me in this, my little son!”
Little son, with wide blue eyes fixed in awe and terror upon the whitening stare of impending dissolution, sobbed out the asked-for promise, and the bankrupt died content.
He knew that on the day following the shabby funeral that was to swallow up the last remaining five-pound note of his miserable savings, his penniless child was to be taken by his sole living relative—a struggling tradesman resident in a remote London suburb—to help the uncle in his business as a tobacconist and newsvendor, clean the shop windows, carry out the papers, perform odd offices in the household, and generally fulfill the duties of an unpaid errand-boy, yet he died content!
No realization of the crushing weight of responsibility laid on those thin, childish shoulders; no thought of the desperate, fruitless effort to be made, Sunday after Sunday, to keep the extorted pledge, marred the moribund’s happy complacency in the undertaking given. Almost with his final breath he whispered something about the flowers in season, and the tidy gravestone, and the weeds that were never to be allowed to grow....
“Promise me, swear to me!” pants the departing wife to the man who has been faithful to his marriage-vow, but has realized every day since the glamour of the honeymoon faded, that his union with this woman has been a terrible mistake. “Let me go hence contented in the knowledge that you will never marry again, dear! I could not bearto think of you happy in the arms of another woman. Say, now, that it shall never be!”
She is thinking of one special woman as she feebly turns the thumbscrew, and forces her victim to open his jaws to take in the iron choke-pear of the prohibitive vow. He has not the courage or the inhumanity to resist her. Nay! it is impious to refuse to grant the wish of one about to die. So he yields, and she departs; and he goes lonely and unmated for all the days that are his upon earth.
And perhaps it may be the bitter punishment of those who have exacted from us these cruel promises; that, with eyes from which the films of earth have been purged for evermore, they may be fated to see them kept.