Part 22 (2/2)

”If you'd only seen her among the poor little children the other day, how beautiful and how happy she looked, you might have thought differently,” said Dot.

”Oh, yes, dear; but then you mustn't forget that her point of view is different. She's renounced the world; she's one of those women,” Esther couldn't resist adding, maliciously, ”who've given up hope of man, and so have set all their hopes on G.o.d.”

”Esther, that's unworthy of you--though what if it is as you say, is it so great a failure after all to dedicate one's self to G.o.d rather than to one little individual man?”

”Oh, come,” said Esther, rather wilfully misunderstanding, and suddenly flus.h.i.+ng up, ”Mike is not so little as all that!”

”Why, you goose, how earthly you are! I never thought of dear Mike--though it would have served you right for saying such a mean thing about Sister Agatha.”

”Forgive me. I know it was mean, but I couldn't resist it. And it is true, you'll admit, of some of those pious women, though I withdraw it about Sister Agatha.”

”Of course I couldn't be a sister like Sister Agatha,” said Dot, ”without being a Catholic as well; but I might be a nurse at one of the ordinary hospitals.”

”It would be dreadfully hard work!” said Esther.

”Harder than being a man, do you think?” asked Dot, laughing.

”For goodness' sake, don't turn Catholic!” said Esther, in some alarm.

”_That_ would break father's heart, if you like.”

A horror of Catholicism ran in the very marrow of these young people.

It was one of the few relics of their father's Puritanism surviving in them. Of ”Catholics” they had been accustomed to speak since childhood as of nightmares and Red Indians with b.l.o.o.d.y scalps at their waists; and perhaps that instinctive terror of the subtle heart of Rome is the religious prejudice which we will do well to part with last.

Dot had not, indeed, contemplated an apostacy so unnatural; but beneath these comparatively trivial words there was an ever-growing impulse to fulfil that old longing of her nature to do something, as the Christians would say, ”for G.o.d,” something serious, in return for the solemn and beautiful gift of life. By an accident, she had met Sister Agatha one day in the house of an old Irish servant of theirs, who had been compelled to leave them on account of ill-health, and on whom she had called with a little present of fruit. She had been struck by the sweetness of the Sister's face, as the Sister had been struck by hers.

Sister Agatha had invited Dot to visit her some day at the home for orphan children of which she had charge; and, with some misgiving as to whether it was right thus to visit a Catholic, whether even it was safe, Dot had accepted. So an acquaintance had grown up and ripened into a friends.h.i.+p; and Sister Agatha, while making no attempt to turn the friends.h.i.+p to the account of her church, was a great consolation to the lonely, religious girl.

Dot retained too much rationalism ever to become a Catholic, but the longing to do something grew and grew. At a certain moment, with each new generation of girls, there comes an epidemical desire in maiden bosoms to dedicate their sweet young lives to the service of what Esther called ”horrible dirty people.” At these periods the hospitals are flooded with applications from young girls whom the vernal equinox urges first to be mothers, and, failing motherhood, nurses. Just before she met Henry, Angel had done her best to miss him by frantic endeavours to nurse people whom the hospital doctors decided she was far too slight a thing to lift,--for unless you can lift your patients, not to say throw them about, you fail in the muscular qualifications of a hospital nurse.

Dot, as we have seen, was impelled in this direction from no merely sentimental impulse, unless the religious impulse, which paradoxically makes nuns of disappointed mothers, may so be called. Perhaps, unacknowledged, deep down in her heart, she longed to be the nurse--of one little wonderful child. Had this been granted her, it is probable that the maimed and the halt would have had less attraction for her pitying imagination. As it was, however, she persuaded herself that she loved them. Was it because, at the moment, no one else seemed to need her love?

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

STAGE WAITS, MR. LAFLIN

Esther's impatience was to be appeased, perhaps a little to her regret after all, by an unexpected remission of the time appointed between Mike and his first real engagement. Suddenly one day came an exciting letter from the great actor, saying that he saw his way to giving him a part in his own London company, if he could join him for rehearsal in a week's time.

Here was news! At last a foundation-stone of the new heaven was to be laid! In a week's time Mike would be working at one of the alabaster walls. Perhaps in two years' time, perhaps even in a year, with good fortune, the roof would be on, the door wreathed with garlands, and a modest little heaven ready for occupation.

Now all that remained was to make the momentous break with the old life.

Old Mr. Laflin had been left in peaceful ignorance of the mine which must now be exploded beneath his evening armchair. Mike loved his father, and this had been a dread long and wisely postponed. But now, when the moment for inevitable decision had come, Mike remembered, with a certain shrinking, that responsibility of which Dot had spoken,--the responsibility of being a man. It was his dream to be an actor, to earn his bread with joy. To earn it with less than joy seemed unworthy of man. Yet there was another dream for him, still more, immeasurably more, important--to be Esther's husband. If he stayed where he was, in slow revolutions of a dull business, his father's place and income would become his. If he renounced that certain prospect, he committed himself to a destiny of brilliant chances; and for the first time he realised that among those chances lurked, too, the chance of failure. Esther must decide; and Henry's counsel, too, must be taken. Mike thought he knew what the decision and the counsel would be; and, of course, he was not mistaken.

”Why, Mike, how can you hesitate?” said Esther. ”Fail, if you like, and I shall still love you; but you don't surely think I could go on loving a man who was frightened to try?”

That was a little hard of Esther, for Mike's fear had been for her sake, not his own. However, that and the even more vehement counsel of Henry had the desired bracing effect; and Mike nerved himself to deal the necessary blow at his father's tranquillity.

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