Half an hour afterwards, when I went into the sitting-room, I found my father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, waiting for me. He looked down at me with an indulgent and significant smile, which brought the colour rushing back to my face, put me to sit by his side, touched my arm with one of his large white clammy hands, stroked his long brown beard with the other, and then in the half-reproving tone which a Sunday-school teacher might have used to a wayward child, he began to tell me what the consequences would be if I persisted in my present conduct.

They would be serious. The law was very clear on marital rights. If a wife refused to live with her husband, except on a plea of cruelty or something equally plausible, he could apply to the court and compel her to do so; and if she declined, if she removed herself from his abode, or having removed, refused to return, the Court might punish her--it might even imprison her.

"So you see, the man is the top dog in a case like this, my dear, and he can compel the woman to obey him."

"Do you mean," I said, "that he can use force to compel her?"

"Reasonable force, yes. I think that's so. And quite right, too, when you come to think of it. The woman has entered into a serious contract, and it is the duty of the law to see that she fulfills the conditions of it."

I remembered how little I had known of the conditions of the contract I had entered into, but I was too heart-sick and ashamed to say anything about that.

"Aw yes, that's so," said the advocate, "force, reasonable force! You may say it puts a woman in a worse position as a wife than she would be if she were a mistress. That's true, but it's the law, and once a woman has married a man, the only escape from this condition of submission is imprisonment."

"Then I would rather that--a thousand times rather," I said, for I was hot with anger and indignation.

Again the advocate smiled indulgently, patted my arm, and answered me as if I were a child.

"Tut, tut, my dear, tut, tut! You've made a marriage that is founded on suitability of position, property and education, and everything will come right by and by. Don't act on a fit of pique or spleen, and so destroy your happiness, and that of everybody about you. Think of your father. Remember what he has done to make this marriage. I may tell you that he has paid forty thousand pounds to discharge your husband's debts and undertaken responsibility for an allowance of six thousand a year beside. Do you want him to lose all that money?"

I was so sick with disgust at hearing this that I could not speak, and the advocate, who, in his different way, was as dead to my real feelings as my husband had been, went on to say:

"Come, be reasonable. You may have suffered some slight, some indignity.

No doubt you have. Your husband is proud and he has peculiarities of temper which we have all to make allowances for. But even if you could establish a charge of cruelty against him and so secure a separation--which you can't--what good would that do you? None at all--worse than none! The financial arrangements would remain the same.

Your father would be a frightful loser. And what would you be? A married widow! The worst condition in the world for a woman--especially if she is young and attractive, and subject to temptations. Ask anybody who knows--anybody."

I felt as if I would suffocate with shame.

"Come now," said the advocate in his superior way, taking my hand as if he were going to lead me like a child to my husband, "let us put an end to this little trouble. His lordship is downstairs and he has consented--kindly and generously consented--to wait an hour for your answer. But he must leave the island by the afternoon steamer, and if... ."

"Then tell him he must leave it without me," I said, as well as I could for the anger that was choking me.

The advocate looked steadily into my face. I think he understood the situation at last.

"You mean that--really and truly mean it?" he asked.

"I do," I answered, and unable to say or hear any more without breaking out on him altogether I left the room.

THIRTY-NINTH CHAPTER

Down to this moment I had put on a brave front though my very heart had been trembling; but now I felt that all the weight of law, custom, parental authority and even religion was bearing me down, down, down, and unless help came I must submit in the long run.

I was back in the small bedroom, with my hot forehead against the cold glass of the window, looking out yet seeing nothing, when somebody knocked at the door, softly almost timidly. It was Father Dan, and the sight of his dear face, broken up with emotion, was the same to me as the last plank of a foundering ship to a sailor drowning at sea.

My heart was so full that, though I knew I ought not, I threw my arms about his neck and burst into a flood of tears. The good old priest did not put me away. He smoothed my drooping head and patted my shoulders and in his sweet and simple way he tried to comfort me.

"Don't cry! Don't worry! It will be all right in the end, my child."

There was something almost grotesque in his appearance. Under his soft clerical outdoor hat he was wearing his faded old cassock, as if he had come away hurriedly at a sudden call. I could see what had happened--my family had sent him to reprove me and remonstrate with me.

He sat on a chair by my bed and I knelt on the floor at his feet, just as my mother used to do when I was a child and she was making her confession. Perhaps he thought of that at the same moment as myself, for the golden light of my mother's memory lay always about him. For some moments we did not speak. I think we were both weeping.

At length I tried to tell him what had happened--hiding nothing, softening nothing, speaking the simple and naked truth. I found it impossible to do so. My odd-sounding voice was not like my own, and even my words seemed to be somebody else's. But Father Dan understood everything.

"I know! I know!" he said, and then, to my great relief, interrupting my halting explanations, he gave his own interpretation of my husband's letter.

There was a higher love and there was a lower love and both were necessary to God's plans and purposes. But the higher love must come first, or else the lower one would seem to be cruel and gross and against nature.

Nature was kind to a young girl. Left to itself it awakened her sex very gently. First with love, which came to her like a whisper in a dream, like the touch of an angel on her sleeping eyelids, so that when she awoke to the laws of life the mysteries of sex did not startle or appal her.

But sex in me had been awakened rudely and ruthlessly. Married without love I had been suddenly confronted by the lower passion. What wonder that I had found it brutal and barbarous?

"That's it, my child! That's it! I know! I know!"

Then he began to blame himself for everything, saying it was all his fault and that he should have held out longer. When he saw how things stood between me and my husband he should have said to my father, to the Bishop, and to the lawyers, notwithstanding all their bargainings: "This marriage must not go on. It will lead to disaster. It begins to end badly."

"But now it is all over, my child, and there's no help for it."

I think the real strength of my resistance to Aunt Bridget's coarse ridicule and the advocate's callous remonstrance must have been the memory of my husband's threat when he talked about the possible annulment of our marriage. The thought of that came back to me now, and half afraid, half ashamed, with a fluttering of the heart, I tried to mention it.

"Is there no way out?" I asked.

"What way can there be?" said Father Dan. "God knows I know what pressure was put upon you; but you are married, you have made your vows, you have given your promises. That's all the world sees or cares about, and in the eyes of the law and the Church you are responsible for all that has happened."

With my head still buried in Father Dan's cassock I got it out at last.

"But annulment! Isn't that possible--under the circumstances?" I asked.

The good old priest seemed to be too confused to speak for a moment.

Then he explained that what I hoped for was quite out of the question.

"I don't say that in the history of the Church marriages have not been annulled on equally uncertain grounds, but in this case the civil law would require proof--something to justify nullity. Failing that there would have to be collusion either on one side or both, and that is not possible--not to you, my child, not to the daughter of your mother, that dear saint who suffered so long and was silent."

More than ever now I felt like a ship-broken man with the last plank sinking under him. The cold mysterious dread of my husband was creeping back, and the future of my life with him stood before me with startling vividness. In spite of all my struggling and fighting of the night before I saw myself that very night, the next night, and the next, and every night and day of my life thereafter, a victim of the same sickening terror.

"Must I submit, then?" I said.

Father Dan smoothed my head and told me in his soft voice that submission was the lot of all women. It always had been so in the history of the world, and perhaps it always would be.

"Remember the Epistle we read in church yesterday morning: 'Wives submit yourselves to your husbands.'"

With a choking sensation in my throat I asked if he thought I ought to go away with my husband when he left the island by the afternoon steamer.

"I see no escape from it, my poor child. They sent me to reprove you. I can't do that, but neither can I encourage you to resist. It would be wrong. It would be cruel. It would only lead you into further trouble."