The two women looked at each other, the one with a hard stare of brazen effrontery, the other with an expression of terror and disgust.

"Ay!" went on the elder with a voice which, breaking through its usual false ring, was full of malice and bitterness. "Ay! you cream-faced beauty, you are shocked are you? Of course you are right. One should not kill except for the good of the Society, other private killing is objectionable. I know all that. But wait until you have gone through what I have, and see what you will be then...." Changing back to her old light tone she continued, "Ah, Mary! it was the same old story with me as with the rest. A warm temperament"--and she laughed as she made this cool confession--"a warm temperament, a man, and a baby, that's all--and a little tragedy mixed up with it that won't be worth your while to hear about now."

Mary had never liked this woman, she now began to conceive an intense dislike for her. Susan would never have converted her to the cause, though she was the very person to win over girls naturally flighty and wicked. But Mary concealed her dislike as much as possible, for she was interested in drawing out this strange being, so wicked, so like a female Mephistopheles, so different in every way to her own ideal, her mistress, Catherine King.

"Did you have such a thing as a conscience when you were a little girl, Sister Susan?" she inquired.

"I don't know--not much of a one anyhow. I never had the fight you had; and yet your conscience still raises his head now and then. You are full of pities, and scruples, and trashy sentiment. I'll tell you what it is.

Mary; I know what you want; I know what will soon make you happier, what will altogether knock on the head that nasty, teasing conscience of yours. Would you like to know what it is?"

"I wish you _would_ tell me the cure; but time is the only one. It is not conscience though, it is cowardice."

"Indeed! I should not have taken you for a coward," Susan observed.

"But I am. It can be nothing else than cowardice. I know it is my duty--I know it is for the good of the world that I should do certain things. Of course I will do those things when I am ordered to do so.

But, oh! how I shall shirk that horrible duty! How I shall suffer! I sometimes think I shall go mad when the time comes."

"Nonsense. I've heard young medical students talk like that. Yet see how soon they get hardened into chopping and probing away into our quivering anatomies. No! You go and try my patent cure for conscience--never known to fail, cures pain at the heart, prevents softening--testimonials from Mrs. Jezebel, several empresses of Rome, and many of the n.o.bility and gentry. Try it, Mary!"

"Well, what is it?" asked the girl, laughing in spite of her melancholy frame of mind.

"_A regular bad man_," replied the other fiercely--"that's my prescription, my dear. You've got a pretty face enough, so the drug can be easily 'presented,' as the doctors say. It's not a difficult medicine to procure. It is not even unpleasant to the taste at first--on the contrary; but it rather upsets you when it's working its effect and purging the morbid secretion conscience out of you. Go and get one, one of your haw-haw club dandies; get him to fall in love with you, as they will for a time. It's easy to make him do that--work on his vanity, that's all. Flatter him--you'll catch any man like that. Talk about woman's vanity--it's nothing to a man's. Then you must fall in love with him--you may find that difficult, but it is necessary, else the medicine won't work. Now after a period more or less long--after babies, coolness, insult, desertion--after your hero proves but a mean, heartless cad after all--after all this, the devil of a bit of conscience you'll find left in you, I'll guarantee."

Mary looked at Susan, wondering at this strange nature, feeling a great antipathy, yet not unmixed with pity, for the vain, wicked, hardened creature by her side.

At last she said,

"I often wonder what you were like when you were a child, Susan."

Susan seemed buried in thought, and did not reply for a few minutes.

"You want to know how my antecedents developed the charming being, Susan Riley? I don't suppose my nature was what some people would call a good one to begin with; but, child--for you are a child to me--you have suffered nothing to what I have. Your life at Brixton was an unhappy one, there ends your suffering; my life as a child, too, was no merry one. But it was what happened afterwards. It was _a man_ that completed my education and finished my conscience. Ah, what a bringing up was mine! I, full of animal life, high-spirited, was kept down by my parents as few children have been. They, both father and mother, were religious monomaniacs, cruel, selfish, hard Puritans of the severest school. And what fools they were too! Just think of it! My father thought that any person who did not exactly believe in his own narrow views, must be altogether a child of sin--capable of any possible crime. So my brother, who would not play the hypocrite enough, was so mistrusted by my father, that when my cousin, a pretty girl, came to our house to tea, as she often did, he was not permitted to escort her home afterwards. No! a man-servant, a sneaking hypocrite, was sent with her instead--that man seduced my sister, and, I believe, my cousin also. My brother was driven to the dogs, of course, by the judicious treatment of his parents. I will tell you what happened to him some day. Ha! there's an education to drive religion out of you. How I hated the very name of it! How I hated my father and mother, and all the sneaking, sickly crew that surrounded them! Anyhow, my dear parents died broken-hearted at their children's behaviour; that was one consolation for us anyhow."

Neither spoke for some time, then Mary asked, "Do you think, Susan, that after I have once removed a child I shall be different, will this feeling of horror go away then? Oh! it is awful, Susan. I believe even you would pity me if you knew. My life is now like one long night-mare.

In the day-time I wish that it was night-time again, that I might be asleep; and in the night it is no better and I wish it was day again; and I always wish that I was dead. I would kill myself were it not for my dear mistress. Are many of the sisters like this? Shall I go mad do you think, Susan?"

Susan replied, "It is the first step that costs, as we used to translate some sentence in the French exercise book when I was at school. I can't give you the original, I've forgotten my French, and piano, and other accomplishments now; but it means that when you have killed your first baby you will feel better: that is the experience of all Nihilists. All have the horrors, more or less, at first. They think that as soon as they have done the deed some frightful bogie, some maddening remorse worse than anything imaginable before, will jump up and seize them. It is the dread of this bogie that does all the mischief. Now, as soon as they have done the deed, they are so agreeably surprised to find that this dreaded bogie does _not_ come, that a delightful reaction sets in.

You should see how mad some of them get with joy. As soon as you have killed your first baby, or boy, or man, your horrors will go. You will experience immediate relief. It's like having a tooth out."

"I see what you mean. It sounds natural enough, too," said Mary, musingly.

"Of course; and at last you'll become a jovial body like me, and you'll come to like your duties and take a relish in blood for its own sake."

Mary shuddered perceptibly, and said, "I shall never come to that I hope--that is, I fear."

"Don't be afraid of speaking out, my dear! I'm not thin-skinned--besides, I take pride in being cruel. I can hate. It would be well for you if you could. You will always suffer somewhat. You will have to keep a picture of your duty always before you, between you and the sight of the blood. You will have to work yourself up to blind enthusiasm every time you have work to do. I wouldn't wonder if you have to take to opium. It is not a bad temporary conscience-duller. But look how much more convenient my state of mind is. I don't require winding up. I have no scruples. I enjoy my work."

"And I loathe it," exclaimed the girl. "It is all a matter of temperament I suppose, Susan."

"I suppose it is," Susan continued. "Do you know, I have observed that most voluptuous women are cruel as well. It is a curious fact, Mary. I sometimes think that my nature is chiefly made up of these two n.o.ble qualities. My man used to call me Faustina. Now you are all made up of cold duties, and so you will suffer. Hot pa.s.sions are better for the Nihilists."

Mary with difficulty concealed her feelings of disgust, and spoke again.

"And yet I have known what hate is, how I hated my father and step-mother! How cruel I felt I could have been! But now that I am away from their persecution the hate seems to be all going. I even sometimes find myself thinking of my father with pity, wishing I could see him; yet he was always cruel to me."

"That sort of hate's no good. You are as fickle in your hates as I am in my loves. Yours was an _artificial_ hate, such as a saint could acquire if ill-treated as you were. But mine is a good, genuine, _natural_ hate, Mary, and I'm proud of it."

"Ah! I wish I could be brave, and fearless, and thoughtless like you, Susan."

"Do you?" cried Susan. "Perhaps I, too, have a skeleton hidden away in a cupboard, somewhere, my girl. You always see me jolly. Yes! if it were not for one horrid thing"--she spoke slowly and shivered--"I should be perfectly happy."

"What is that?" asked Mary, wondering what possible secret sorrow could be a constant bugbear to this frivolous being.

"The fear of old age, Mary," was the reply. "The dread of being old, ugly--like withered Sister Jane, for instance. Oh! how I fear that loathsome thing."

The woman's face actually blanched as she spoke these words, and her accents betrayed an emotion that surprised Mary. Yes! this indeed was the one phantom that ever pursued this b.u.t.terfly creature. This terror that possessed her was ever present to her, as happens sometimes to such natures. To be no longer beautiful, to be no longer sighed after by men, was to her imagination terrible as is the thought of h.e.l.l to some.

"Let us sit down on this seat and rest a little, Susan," suggested Mary.

"Very well; but it's getting late, and my time will soon be up. Ah! I wish I was like you, Mary, living at home with that amiable old Catherine King, instead of being boxed up with a lot of foolish women in that hospital, with strict discipline about being out at nights and so on. I must say I like my liberty: but luckily this won't be for long."

"I never could make out how they allowed the rules to be broken through in my case," Mary said. "There was another nurse who wanted to live with her mother. But she was told they would not have her in the hospital unless she lived there altogether, as the rest do."

"The King has great influence in all directions. She must be very fond of you, must the King--your aunt as she calls herself now. Ah! I wish she would adopt me and take me out of this hateful place. I would make her a most dutiful niece."

"Yet, most of the nurses seem to be well contented with their home,"

urged Mary.

"Oh! it's nice enough for those women--innocent creatures--they have never known the delights of sin and liberty. I'm not like them--like Miss Anerly for instance. She's fun, isn't she? They have put her to sleep in the same room as I do. She is always at me about saying my prayers. She kneels down for half an hour at least, before getting into bed, and when she gets up, she has a sort of way of looking at me with a superior see-how-much-better-I-am-than-you air, that is sickening. I often feel tempted to bring out some remarks that will make her open her weak, little, grey eyes; but of course that won't do. What do you think; she insists on reading a chapter in the Bible to me every morning before I get up."

Mary replied with a deep sadness in her voice. "Ah! it is well for us to laugh, that know so much, but how happy are these people with their Bible! They cannot know our suffering. They find such comfort in their superst.i.tion. They say in the Bible that the tree of knowledge is the tree of evil; we have proved it so."

"Some wise man once said, Wherever truth is, there too is Golgotha," put in Susan.

"That is very true," continued Mary. "Wherever truth is, there too is Golgotha. I feel that. Now that I know so much, now that I know that all this religion that keeps society together is a fable, I feel as if I was no longer as other people, as if I was some other sort of being, standing quite apart from my fellow-creatures, with such different instincts and ideas that we can never understand each other again, that there can never more be pleasant sympathies between us."

Susan again laughed her disagreeable laugh. "Dear me! Why, you are a sort of Miltonic Satan, Mary; but it's too late to rant on in this ignorance-is-bliss style, now, my girl."

"But don't you feel it yourself sometimes, Susan?" asked the girl in wonder. "Don't you feel dreadful, when you pa.s.s by all these crowds of happy people, and think that if they only knew what you were they would loathe you, and tear you to pieces? It is horrible to me to be separated from all the world by such a barrier as that of our _Aim_.

Never to approach them, never to know their little joys, and hopes, and affections. They seem only foolish to our eyes, but how detestable would we appear in theirs if they only knew."

Susan turned and looked contemptuously into the girl's face. "Why, Mary, you are talking treason. You'll be going back to your dear Bible next."

"Go back to the Bible--no, never! It would be better if I could ...

perhaps. Ah, Susan, I sometimes think that mankind will never get on without religion, that _truth_ will bring worse tyrannies and horrors than _superst.i.tion_ ever did. A fearful outlook--man must have a religion or die; and yet there is no religion to be had."

"Oh, Mary, you are a little fool! When will you be wise and cunning like me? You talk of the horror of being different from other people; I delight in it. It amuses me to look at the happy simpletons, and know that I have secrets that would make their cheeks blanch to hear. You have not got the proper temper for a Nihilist."

Mary thought in silence for a few minutes, then said, "Susan, I have often wondered what motives led you to join the society. You are a zealous member, I know; but yet I can scarcely believe that it was a good motive, that it was a true love of humanity, an unselfish desire to benefit the world, like our Chief's, that induced you to become a conspirator in the first instance."