"To give her up?"
"She was not mine to give up."
"But do you mean not to try to--Oh, Phil, doesn"t it ever come to you that all this monkish business is a mistake? We were a couple of foolish boys that didn"t know what we were about when we went into it; and"--
Ashe turned and looked at him with eyes full of reproach, and of almost despairing determination.
"Is that the way you help me?" he asked.
Maurice drew a long, deep breath, and set his strong jaw with a resolve not to abandon so easily the endeavor to bring his friend out of his trouble. It hardly occurred to him for the moment that it was his own cause that he was defending.
"Phil," he persisted, "isn"t it possible that after all we may be wrong in making ourselves wiser than the church by taking vows that are not required?"
"Do you suppose that the devil has forgotten to say that to me over and over again?" was the response.
"Meaning that I am the old gentleman?" Maurice retorted, trying to be lightsome.
"Oh, don"t joke. I can"t stand it. I"ve been through so much, and this is so terrible a thing to bear anyway."
Wynne seized his rosary with one hand, and struck it across the other so hard that the corner of the crucifix wounded his finger.
"Phil, old fellow," he said gravely, "I never felt less like joking. It cuts me to the quick to see you suffer; and I know how hard you will take this. I know what it is, for I"m going through the same thing myself, and I"ve about made up my mind that we are wrong. I begin to think that celibacy is only a device that the early church somehow got into when it was necessary to hold complete authority over the priest, or when men thought that it was. It belongs to the Middle Ages; not to the nineteenth century."
"Then you don"t see how marriage would be sure to interfere with a man"s zeal for his work?"
"But it would certainly bring him into closer sympathy with humanity."
Ashe shook his head.
"You don"t seem to realize," he said with a certain doggedness which Wynne had seldom seen in him, "how it must absorb a man, and take possession of his very reason. Why, see me. I know it is a sin to think of her, and yet"--He broke off and choked. "Besides," he resumed presently, "you say yourself that you feel as I do, and that means that you are not looking at the thing fairly. You are trying to make your conscience come round to the side of your desires."
They walked on up the dingy street into which they had come, and for some time nothing more was said. Maurice recognized that it was idle to attempt to reply to the charge of his companion. He had made it to himself and succ.u.mbed to it; but now that another stated it, he instinctively found himself refusing to yield. He repeated to himself that he was not trying to befool his conscience, but merely acting with human sanity.
Presently they came into a dusky court, and crossing it, found themselves at the door of an ill-smelling tenement house. Here Ashe turned suddenly, and faced his friend, his face full of strange excitement.
"Do you suppose," he said, in a voice which, though low, was full of feeling, "that I do not know how absorbing a thing it is to give up life to a woman? Here I am, when she is nothing to me, when I do not mean ever to see her again, going into this place simply because here she was half a minute in my arms, because here for two minutes she looked at me as her preserver. It is sin, and I know it; but it is too strong for me."
"But, Phil," Maurice exclaimed in astonishment, "there is surely no harm in going to see a sick woman."
The other laughed bitterly.
"So I told myself, and so I kept saying over and over till the talk we"ve had forced me to stop lying to myself. I"m not going to see a sick woman. I"m going to stand where she stood that day."
"If you feel that way about it," Maurice said, putting his hand on the other"s arm, "you ought not to go in."
"I will go in."
"But obedience, Phil. Think what you were saying about the lecture."
"n.o.body has forbidden me," Ashe responded defiantly. "I will go in. I had made up my mind before I came. Oh, I shall do penance enough for it; you need not be afraid of that. I shall suffer enough for it."
He started up the stairs, and Maurice followed blindly, full of sympathy and dismay.
XXII
THE BITTER PAST All"s Well that Ends Well, v. 3.
They found the old woman in bed, attended by a slatternly half-grown girl, who was reading by the dying light a torn and dirty ill.u.s.trated paper. There was little furniture in the chamber; merely the frowsy bed, a bare table, a single broken chair besides the one in which the girl was sitting. The floor was bare and dirty; one of the window-panes was broken and stuffed with a bundle of paper. There were a rusty stove, a few dishes on the shelf, a kettle and a tin tea-pot. On the window-sill by the bed were a medicine bottle and a cup.
"How do you do, Mrs. Murphy?" Ashe asked. "Are you any better to-day?"
"No better, thank yer riverince. I"ll never be better again. My back is broke, and the pain in me is like purgatory already."
The slatternly girl laid her paper on her knees, but she neither rose nor spoke. To Maurice she seemed to have an air of contempt.
"I am sorry to hear it, Mrs. Murphy," said Ashe. "I thought that I would drop in and ask after you."
Maurice involuntarily glanced at him, surprised by the indifference of the tone. Enlightened by the pa.s.sionate words which had been spoken below, he could see that Philip was preoccupied, and gave to the sick woman no more than the barest semblance of attention. Ashe mechanically inquired about Mrs. Murphy"s wants, his thin cheeks glowing and his eyes wandering about the room. He was apparently reacting the scene of the fight, and presently he made a step or two backward, so that he stood near the middle of the chamber. Here he took his stand, and seemed to become lost in reverie.
"Might as well set," remarked the girl, looking toward the unoccupied chair.
Maurice made a slight gesture inviting Philip to the seat; but Philip remained where he was. Wynne realized that his companion must be standing where he had supported Mrs. Fenton in his arms; and so touching was the expression of Ashe"s face that he felt his throat contract. He turned away and looked out of the dim window over the chimney-pots and the irregular roofs.
"I"m used to falls," the sick woman said. "I"ve had plenty of "em. I left a good home and them as was good to me, to be beat and starved, and murdered in the end. Women are all like that. If a man asks "em, they"re always ready to cut their own throats. Sorry was the day for me I ever left old Miss Hannah."
Maurice turned toward the bed, his attention suddenly arrested. The name was that by which his aunt had usually been called, and he seemed to perceive in the talk of the woman something familiar. The possibility that this battered old creature might be his nurse came to him with a shock, so broken, so altered, so degraded was she; and as he looked at her he rejected the idea as preposterous.
"But your husband will be punished for his brutality," Ashe remarked absently.
He spoke like a man in a dream, as if his whole intent were fixed upon something so widely apart from the present that he hardly knew what was pa.s.sing about him.
"Who wants him punished?" cried out the sick woman with sudden shrill vehemence. "That"s what you rich folks are always after. Who asked the lady to come here with her purse in her hand to tempt him when he wasn"t himself to know what he was doing? First you get him into a sc.r.a.pe, and then you punish him for it! What for do I want Tim shut up and me left to starve in me bed? If Tim"s a little pleasant when he"s had a drop more"n would be handy for a priest, whose business is it but mine? It"s little comfort he gets, poor man; and he only takes what he can get to keep up his spirits in these poor times, and me sick and can"t do for him."
"That"s what I say too, Mrs. Murphy," the slatternly girl aroused herself to interpose. "Them as never had no hard times in their lives is always ready to jump on a poor man when he"s down."
Maurice began to feel as if he were entangled in a strange and uncanny dream. Philip seemed more and more to retire within himself, and Wynne felt that he must do something to attract attention from his friend"s conduct.
"We haven"t anything to do with punishment, Mrs. Murphy," he said soothingly, coming forward as he spoke. "We came only to see if there is anything we can do to make you more comfortable."
The old woman answered nothing, but she stared at him with wild eyes.
"We may be able to make you more easy," he went on cheerfully, "if we can"t fix things for you just as they were at Aunt Hannah"s."
He used the name half unconsciously as the result of the suggestion of old a.s.sociation and half with an impulse to prove the faint possibility that this might be Norah Dolen. As he spoke Mrs. Murphy raised herself on one elbow, stretching out a lean hand convulsively toward him.