_ FIRST PART. MY GIRLHOOD
EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER
After my mother's death there was no place left for me in my father's house.
Betsy Beauty (who was now called Miss Betsy and gave herself more than ever the airs of the daughter of the family) occupied half her days with the governess who had been engaged to teach her, and the other half in driving, dressed in beautiful clothes, to the houses of the gentry round about.
Nessy MacLeod, called the young mistress, had become my father's secretary, and spent most of her time in his private room, a privilege which enlarged her pride without improving her manners.
Martin Conrad I did not see, for in reward for some success at school the doctor had allowed him to spend his Easter holidays in London in order to look at Nansen's ship, the _Fram_, which had just then arrived in the Thames.
Hence it happened that though home made a certain tug at me, with its familiar sights and sounds, and more than once I turned with timid steps towards my father's busy room, intending to say, "Please, father, don't send me back to school," I made no demur when, six or seven days after the funeral, Aunt Bridget began to prepare for my departure.
"There's odds of women," said Tommy the Mate, when I went into the garden to say good bye to him "They're like sheep's broth, is women. If there's a head and a heart in them they're good, and if there isn't you might as well be supping hot water. Our Big Woman is hot water--but she'll die for all."
Within a fortnight I was back at the Convent, and there the Reverend Mother atoned to me for every neglect.
"I knew you would come back to me," she said, and from that hour onward she seemed to be trying to make up to me for the mother I had lost.
I became deeply devoted to her. As a consequence her spirit became my spirit, and, little by little, the religious side of the life of the Convent took complete possession of me.
At first I loved the church and its services because the Reverend Mother loved them, and perhaps also for the sake of the music, the incense, the flowers and the lights on the altar; but after I had taken my communion, the mysteries of our religion took hold of me--the Confessional with its sense of cleansing and the unutterable sweetness of the Mass.
For a long time there was nothing to disturb this religious side of my mind. My father never sent for me, and as often as the holidays came round the Reverend Mother took me with her to her country home at Nemi.
That was a beautiful place--a sweet white cottage, some twenty kilometres from Rome, at the foot of Monte Cavo, in the middle of the remains of a mediaeval village which contained a castle and a monastery, and had a little blue lake lying like an emerald among the green and red of the grass and poppies in the valley below.
In the hot months of summer the place was like a Paradise to me, with its roses growing wild by the wayside; its green lizards running on the rocks; its goats; its sheep; its vineyards; its brown-faced boys in velvet, and its gleesome girls in smart red petticoats and gorgeous outside stays; its shrines and its blazing sunsets, which seemed to girdle the heavens with quivering bands of purple and gold.
Years went by without my being aware of their going, for after a while I became entirely happy.
I heard frequently from home. Occasionally it was from Betsy Beauty, who had not much to say beyond stories of balls at Government House, where she had danced with the young Lord Raa, and of hunts at which she had ridden with him. More rarely it was from Aunt Bridget, who usually began by complaining of the ever-increasing cost of my convent clothes and ended with accounts of her daughter's last new costume and how well she looked in it.
From Nessy MacLeod and my father I never heard at all, but Father Dan was my constant correspondent and he told me everything.
First of my father himself--that he had carried out many of his great enterprises, his marine works, electric railways, drinking and dancing palaces, which had brought tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of thousands of pounds to Ellan, though the good Father doubted the advantage of such innovations and lamented the decline of piety which had followed on the lust for wealth.
Next of Aunt Bridget--that she was bringing up her daughter in the ways of worldly vanity and cherishing a serpent in her bosom (meaning Nessy MacLeod) who would poison her heart some day.
Next, of Tommy the Mate--that he sent his "best respec's" to the "lil-missy" but thought she was well out of the way of the Big Woman who "was getting that highty-tighty" that "you couldn't say Tom to a cat before her but she was agate of you to make it Thomas."
Then of Martin Conrad--that he was at college "studying for a doctor," but his heart was still at the North Pole and he was "like a sea-gull in the nest of a wood pigeon," always longing to be out on the wild waves.
Finally of the young Lord Raa--that the devil's dues must be in the man, for after being "sent down" from Oxford he had wasted his substance in riotous living in London and his guardian had been heard to say he must marry a rich wife soon or his estates would go to the hammer.
Such was the substance of the news that reached me over a period of six years. Yet welcome as were Father Dan's letters the life they described seemed less and less important to me as time went on, for the outer world was slipping away from me altogether and I was becoming more and more immersed in my spiritual exercises.
I spent much of my time reading religious books--the life of Saint Teresa, the meditations of Saint Francis of Sales, and, above all, the letters and prayers of our Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, whose love of the Sacred Heart was like a flaming torch to my excited spirit.
The soul of Rome, too, seemed to enter into my soul--not the new Rome, for of that I knew nothing, but the old Rome, the holy city, that could speak to me in the silence of the night within the walls of my convent-school, with its bells of the Dominican and Franciscan monasteries on either side, its stories of miracles performed on the sick and dying by the various shrines of the Madonna, its accounts of the vast multitudes of the faithful who came from all ends of the earth to the ceremonials at St. Peter's, and, above all, its sense of the immediate presence of the Pope, half a mile away, the Vicar and mouthpiece of God Himself.
The end of it all was that I wished to become a nun. I said nothing of my desire to anybody, not even to the Reverend Mother, but day by day my resolution grew.
Perhaps it was natural that the orphaned and homeless girl should plunge with all this passion into the aurora of a new spiritual life; but when I think how my nature was made for love, human love, the love of husband and children, I cannot but wonder with a thrill of the heart whether my mother in heaven, who, while she was on earth, had fought so hard with my father for the body of her child, was now fighting with him for her soul.
I was just eighteen years of age when my desire to become a nun reached its highest point, and then received its final overthrow.
Mildred Bankes, who had returned to Rome, and was living as a novice with the Little Sisters of the Poor, was about to make her vows, and the Reverend Mother took me to see the ceremony.
Never shall I forget the effect of it. The sweet summer morning, tingling with snow-white sunshine, the little white chapel in the garden of the Convent, covered with flowers, the altar with its lighted tapers, the friends from without clad in gay costumes as for a festival, the bishop in his bright vestments, and then, Mildred herself, dressed as a bride in a beautiful white gown with a long white veil and attended by other novices as bridesmaids.
It was just like a marriage to look upon, except for the absence of a visible bridegroom, the invisible one being Christ. And the taking of the vows was like a marriage service too--only more solemn and sacred and touching--the bride receiving the ring on her finger, and promising to serve and worship her celestial lover from that day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as life should last and through the eternity that was to follow it.
I cried all through the ceremony for sheer joy of its loveliness; and when it was over and we went into the refectory, and Mildred told me she was returning to England to work among the fallen girls of London, I vowed in my heart, though I hardly understood what she was going to do, that I would follow her example.
It was something of a jar to go back into the streets, so full of noise and bustle; and all the way home with the Reverend Mother I was forming the resolution of telling her that very night that I meant to be a nun, for, stirred to the depths of my soul by what I had seen and remembering what my poor mother had wished for me, I determined that no other life would I live under any circumstances.
Then came the shock.
As we drew up at our door a postman was delivering letters. One of them was for the Reverend Mother and I saw in a moment that it was in my father's handwriting. She read it in silence, and in silence she handed it to me. It ran:
"Madam,
"I have come to Rome to take back my daughter. I believe her education will now be finished, and I reckon the time has arrived to prepare her for the change in life that is before her.
"The Bishop of our diocese has come with me, and we propose to pay our respects to you at ten o'clock prompt to-morrow morning.
"Yours, Madam,
"DANIEL O'NEILL." _