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Consequences

<h3>XXI</h3> <h3>Father Farrell</h3> For what seemed a long while afterwards—a period which, indeed, covered three or four weeks—Alex learnt to be intensely and humbly grateful for the convent law that would not allow any form of personalities in intercourse. She was utterly unable to cease from crying, and in spite of her shame and almost her terror, the tears continued to stream down her face in the chapel, in the refectory, even at the hour of recreation. Nobody asked her any questions. One or two of the nuns looked at her compassionately, or made some kindly, little, friendly remark; a lay-sister now and then offered her an unexpected piece of help in her work, and the Infirmarian occasionally sent her a cup of bouillon for dinner, but it was nobody's business to offer inquiries, and had any one done so, the rule would have compelled Sister Alexandra to reply by a generality and to change the conversation without delay. Only the Superior was entitled to probe deeper, and at first the Frenchwoman who was temporarily succeeding Mother Gertrude was too much occupied by her new cares to see much of her community individually. Alex was relieved when the Christmas holidays began, and she had no longer to fear the notice of the sharp-eyed children, but in the reduction of work surrounding the festive season, it became impossible that her breakdown should continue to pass unnoticed. She did not herself know what was the matter, and could scarcely have given a cause for those incessant tears, except that she was unutterably weary and miserable, and that they had passed far beyond her own control. The idea that that continuous weeping could have any connection with a physical nervous breakdown never occurred to her. It was with surprise, and very little thought of cause and effect, that she one night noticed her own extraordinary loss of flesh. She had never been anything but thin and slightly built, but now she quite suddenly perceived that her arms and legs in the last two months had taken on an astounding and literal resemblance to long sticks of white wood. All the way up from wrist to armpit, her left hand, with thumb and middle finger joined, could span the circumference of her right arm. It seemed incredible. Her mind went back ten years, and she thought of Lady Isabel, and how much she had lamented her daughter's youthful angularity. "If she could have seen this!" thought Alex. "But, of course, it only mattered for evening dress—she wouldn't have thought it mattered for a nun." Instantly she began to cry again, although her head throbbed and her eyes burned and smarted. There was no need now to wonder if she looked tired. Accidentally one day, her hand to her face, she had felt the sort of deeply-hollowed pit that now lay underneath each eye, worn into a groove. She had ceased to wonder whether life would ever offer anything but this mechanical round of blurred pain and misery, these incessant tears, when the Superior sent for her. "What is the matter with you, Sister? They tell me you are always in tears. Are you ill?" Alex shook her head dumbly. "Sister, control yourself. You will be ill if you cry like that. Don't kneel, sit down." The Superior's tone was very kind, and the note of sympathy shook Alex afresh. "Tell me what it is. Don't be afraid." "I want to leave the convent—I want to be released from my vows." She had never meant to say it—she had never known that such a thought was in her mind, but the moment that the words were uttered, the first sense of relief that she had felt surged within her. It was the remembrance of that rush of relief that enabled her, sobbing, to repeat the shameful recantation, in the face of the Superior's grave, pitiful urgings and assurance that she did not know what she was saying. After that—an appalling crisis that left her utterly exhausted and with no vestige of belief left in her own ultimate salvation—everything was changed. She was treated as an invalid, and sent to lie down instead of joining the community at the hour of recreation, the Superior herself devoted almost an hour to her every day, and nearly all her work was taken away, so that she could walk alone round the big verger and the enclosed garden, and read the carefully-selected Lives and Treatises that the Superior chose for her. Gradually some sort of poise returned to her. She could control her tears, and drink the soups and tisanes that were specially prepared and put before her, and as the year advanced, she could feel the first hint of Spring stirring in her exhaustion. She was devoid alike of apprehension and of hope. No solution appeared to her conceivable, save possibly that of her own death, and she knew that none would be attempted until the return of the Superior-General from South America. As this delayed, she became more and more convinced, in despite of all reason, of the immutable eternity of the present state of affairs. It shocked her when one day the Superior said to her: "You are to go to the Superior of the Jesuits' College in the parlour this afternoon. Do you remember, he preached the sermon for your Profession, and I think he has been here once or twice in the last year or two? He is a very wise and clever and holy man, and ought to help you. Besides, he is of your own nationality." Alex remembered the tall, good-looking Irishman very well. He had once or twice visited the convent, and had always told amusing stories at recreation, and preached vigorous, inspiring sermons in the chapel, with more than a spice of originality to colour them. The children adored him. Alex wondered. Perhaps Father Farrell, the clever and educated priest, would really see in some new aspect the problem that left her baffled and sick of soul and body. She went into the parlour that afternoon trembling with mingled dread, and the first faint stirrings of hope that understanding and release from herself and her wickedness might yet be in store for her. Father Farrell, big and broad-shouldered, with iron-grey, wavy hair and a strong, handsome face, turned from the window as she entered the room. "Come in, Sister, come in. Sit down, won't you? They tell me ye've not been well—ye don't look it, ye don't look it!" His voice, too, was big and bluff and hearty, full of decision, the voice of a man accustomed to the command of men. He pushed a chair forward and motioned her, with a quick, imperious gesture that yet held kindness, to sit down. He himself stood, towering over her, by the window. "Well, now, what's all the trouble, Sister?" There was the suspicion of a brogue in his cultivated tones. Alex made a tremendous effort. She told herself that he could not help her unless she told him the truth. She said, as she had said to the French Superior: "I am very unhappy—I want to be released from my vows as a nun." The priest gave her one very quick, penetrating look, and his thick eyebrows went up into his hair for an instant, but he did not speak. "I don't think I have ever had any—any real vocation," said Alex, whitening from the effort of an admission that she knew he must regard as degrading. "And how long have ye thought ye had no real vocation?" There was the slightest possible discernible tinge of kindly derision in the inquiry. It gave the final touch to her disconcertment. "I don't know." She felt the folly of her reply even before the priest's laugh, tinged with a sort of vexed contempt, rang through the room. "Now, me dear child, this is perfect nonsense, let me tell ye. Did ye ever hear the like of such folly? No real vocation, and here ye've been a professed religious for—how long is it?" "Nearly four years since I was finally professed, but—" "There's no but about it, Sister. A vow made to Our Blessed Lord, I'd have ye know, is not like an old glove, to be thrown away when ye think ye're tired of it. No, no, Sister, that'll not be the way of it. Ye'll get over this, me dear child, with a little faith and perseverance. It's just a temptation, that ye've perhaps been giving way to, owing to fatigue and ill health. Ye feel it's all too hard for ye, is that it?" "No," said Alex frantically, "that's not it. It's nothing like that. It's that I can't bear this way of living any longer. I want a home, and to be allowed to care for people, and to have friends again—I can't live by myself." She knew that she had voiced the truth as she knew it, and covered her face with her hands in dread lest it might fail to reach his perceptions. She heard a change in Father Farrell's voice when next he spoke. "Ye'd better tell me the whole tale, Sister. Who is it ye want to go back to in the world?" She looked up, bewildered. "Any one—home. Where I can just be myself again—" "And how much home have ye got left, after being a nun ten years? Is your mother alive?" "No." "Your father?" "No," faltered Alex. "They died after ye left home, I daresay?" "Yes." "Then, in the name of goodness, who do ye expect is going to make a home for ye? Have ye sisters and brothers?" "Yes." Alex hesitated, seeing at last whither his inquiries were tending. "Yes, and I'm thinking they're married and with homes of their own by this time," said the priest shrewdly. "Let me tell ye, ten years sees a good many changes in the world, and it isn't much of a welcome ye'd get by breaking your holy vows and making a great scandal in the Church, and then planting yourself on relations who've lost touch with ye, more or less, and have homes of their own, and a husband or wife, as the case may be, and perhaps little children to care for. A maiden aunt isn't so very much thought of, in the best of circumstances, let me tell ye. "Now isn't there reason in what I'm saying, Sister?" Sick conviction shot through her. "Yes, Father." "Well, then, ye'll just give up that foolish notion, now." He looked at her white, desperate face, and began to take long strides up and down the room. "Have ye confidence in your Superior? Do ye get on with her?" he asked suddenly. "Our present Superior has only been here a little while—the one before that—" "I know, I know," he interrupted impatiently. "It's the Superior-General I mean, of course—everything must come to her in the long run, naturally. Have you full confidence in her, now?" Alex felt as incapable of a negative reply as of an affirmative one. She knew that she did not understand the term "full confidence" as he did, and she temporized weakly. "But our Mother-General is away in South America—she keeps delaying, and that's one reason why nothing has been settled about me. She hasn't even left America yet." "I'm well aware of that. Don't waste time playing with me that way, Sister, ye'll get no further. Ye know very well what I mean. Now, tell me now, will it do for ye if I arrange for your transfer to another house—maybe to the one in London, or somewhere in your own country?" The instinct of the imprisoned creature that sees another form of the same trap offered it under the guise of freedom, made her revolt. "No," she cried. "No! I want to get right away—I want to stop being a nun." The priest suddenly hit the table with his clenched fist, making it rock, and making his auditor start painfully. "That's what you'll never do, not if ye got release from the holy vows ten times over. Once a nun always a nun, Sister, although ye may be false and faithless and go back into the very midst of the world ye've renounced. But ye'll find no comfort there, no blessing, and God'll remember it against ye, Sister. A soul that spurns His choicest graces need expect no mercy, either here or hereafter. I tell ye straight, Sister, that ye'll be deliberately jeopardizing your immortal soul, if ye give in to this wicked folly. Ye've to choose between God and the Devil—between a little while of suffering here, maybe, and then Eternity in which to enjoy the reward of the faithful, or a hideous mockery of freedom here, followed by Hell and its torments for ever and ever. Which is it to be?" Alex was terrified, but it was the priest's anger that terrified her, not the threats that he uttered. At the back of her mind, lay the dim conviction that no Hell could surpass in intensity of bitterness that which her spirit was traversing on earth. Father Farrell looked at her frightened, distorted face, and his voice sank into persuasiveness. "This'll pass, me dear child. Many a poor soul before ye has known what it is to falter by the wayside. But courage, Sister, ye can conquer this weakness with God's help. You're in no trouble about your faith, now are ye?" Had Alex been able to formulate her thoughts clearly, she might have told him that it had long since become a matter of supreme unimportance to her whether or no she still possessed that which he termed her faith. As a fact, the beliefs which could alone have made the convent life endurable to her, had never struck more than the most shallow of roots into her consciousness. Perhaps the only belief which had any real hold upon her was the one that she had gradually formed upon her experience of the living—that God was a Superior Being who must be propitiated by the sacrifice of all that one held dear, lest He strike it from one. She looked dimly at Father Farrell, and shook her head, because she was afraid of his anger if she owned to the utter insecurity of her hold upon any religious convictions. "That's right, that's right," he said hastily. "I felt sure ye were a good child at bottom. Now would ye like to make a good general Confession, and I'll give ye absolution, and ye can start again?" Some hint of inflexibility in the last words roused Alex to a final, frantic bid for liberty. "It's no use—it won't do for me to begin again. I can't stay on. If I can't get released from my vows I'll—I'll run away." Then there was a long silence. When the priest spoke again, however, his voice held more of meditative speculation than of the anger which she feared. "Supposing I could arrange it for ye—I don't say I could, mind, but it might be done, if good reasons were shown—what would ye say to another religious order altogether? It may be that this life is unsuited to ye—there have been such cases. I know a holy Carmelite nun who was in quite another order for nearly fifteen years, before she found out where the Lord really wanted her. Are ye one of those, maybe?" "No," spoke Alex, almost sullenly. The conflict was wearing her out, and she was conscious only of a blind, unreasoning instinct that if she once gave ground, she would find herself for ever bound to the life which had become unendurable to her. "What d'ye mean, No?" "I want to go away. I want to be released from my vows." The formula had become almost mechanical now. The Jesuit for the first time dropped the brusqueness of manner habitual to him. Pacing the length of the big parlour with measured, even strides, his hands clasped behind his shabby cassock, he let his deep, naturally rhetorical voice boom out in full, rolling periods through the room. "Why did ye come to me at all, Sister? It wasn't for advice, and it wasn't for help. I've offered both, and ye'll take neither. Having put your hand to the plough, you've looked back. Ye say that sooner than remain faithful ye'll run away—ye'll make a scandal and a disgrace for the Community that's sheltered ye, and bring shame and sorrow to the good Mothers here. What did ye expect me to answer to that? If your whole will is turned to evil, it was a farce and a mockery to come to me—I can do nothing. "But one thing I'll tell ye, Sister. If ye do this thing—if it goes up to Rome, and the vows ye took in full consciousness and free will on the day ye were professed, are dissolved—so far as they ever can be, that is, and let me tell ye that it's neither a quick nor an easy business—if it comes to that, Sister, there'll be no going back. No cringing round to the convent afterwards, when ye find there's no place and no welcome for ye in the world, asking to be taken back. They'll not have ye, Sister, and they'll be right. If ye go, it's for ever." It seemed to Alex that he was purposely seeking to frighten her—that he wanted to add fresh miseries and apprehensions to those already piled upon her, and a faint resentment flicked at her in questioning acceptance of such an assumption. The shadow of spirit thus restored to her, just enabled her to endure the seemingly endless exposition hurled at her in the priest's powerful voice. When it was all over, she crawled out of the room like a creature that had been beaten. Stunned, she only knew that yet another fellow-creature had entered the league of those who were angered against her. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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