THE ORDEAL LOOMS

That night Louise dreamed--not of the hours of the day she and Janeway had spent wandering over the island--not of the fragrance of the pine woods or the odor of reedy margins in their deep recesses--not of those early moments in which a woman realizes for the first time in her life that she is deeply, passionately loved by an honest man, and allows the yearnings of her heart to open it a little to the devotion of a lover--not of any of these pledges of a happy day after a dreadful night did she dream, but of trying amid agonizing confusion to catch a train that every one was hurrying to reach, and for which she seemed just too late. Janeway, clasping one hand, was urging her with energy up the platform; but Durand, refusing to release her other hand, was stubbornly holding her back.

“Did you finally make it?” asked Janeway, when she told him next morning. Both, by an unspoken but mutual conspiracy, were ready for breakfast ahead of their hosts.

“Oh, I woke up,” said Louise, “so I don’t know.”

“Well, my name isn’t Joseph,” he said, bending confidentially toward her over his coffee-cup, and giving an excellent imitation of Judge Harrison’s softest nasal tone, “but no seer is needed to interpret _that_ dream--it’s taking candy from the baby. The train you were trying to catch was Happiness. The pulling and hauling on my part and Durand’s explains itself. But I suspect a contributing cause to your painful vision was a poor mattress; there was an awful hole in mine. Change rooms and beds with me to-night, and you’ll find yourself falling over a terrible precipice, or headed for the bottom of the sea, with me trying to bail the boat, and Durand furtively opening the sea-cocks and making faces at Neptune.

“There’s a bit more, though, to your dream about trying to catch the Happiness train that everybody was running after. It’s this: You’ve made certain reservations aboard that train, and in a particular car. I shouldn’t have been so particular myself, but that’s aside. If any car would do you, the last would be as good as the first; however, you’ve put it up to me to get you aboard one particular car--where accommodations _are_ somewhat limited. And that’s my job.

“Fortunately,” continued Janeway gravely, “the conductor in charge is well disposed. Naturally he has asked to see your ticket, and we must show it to him before we can know what our chances are for a compartment. So--will you see the Bishop alone, or shall I go with you?”

* * * * *

They saw him together. In the afternoon Oliver took them over to Fond du Lac. Janeway made an appointment through Father Smyth, the Bishop’s secretary, for that evening, and at eight o’clock he called for Louise. They drove together to the Bishop’s residence.

Bishop Marion lived in a roomy, old-fashioned brick house that stood in a grimy street not far from the rolling-mills, and in the block occupied by the procathedral. In an early day the house had been the home of a well-to-do Fond du Lac family. Deserted by them as the town grew to the north, the property had been bought for church purposes, and gradually the whole block had been acquired. The old church used as a procathedral stood at one end of the block and the Bishop’s house at the other. Both were now greatly overshadowed by a huge parochial school which rose between the two, and which, with the exception of a large hospital that he had sponsored, comprised in its scope and expense most of the building operations that Bishop Marion had thus far achieved. When Janeway had reproached him for worshipping in a shabby church and spending his money on a big school building, the Bishop had asked him what he should think of a husbandman-farmer who, if forced to choose, should build a big house in preference to a big barn. “Moreover,” he had added, “I must set an example for my priests.”

Louise had been in the house but once before; that was some years earlier, with Gertrude, to arrange for a hospital benefit. She remembered only its dull, smoky interior and its very bare reception-room.

Twilight softened the steep, shabby roof angles of the house as their car stopped before it. The reception-room seemed to Louise’s quick, nervous glance absolutely unchanged. The woodwork seemingly bore its original paint--not positively black but sombrely dark. Large folding doors, now closed, communicated with the chapel on one side, and a door opened on a rear room, but the height and width and gloom of these doors added to the depressing effect of the dreadfully ornate black-marble mantelpiece that stared at Louise as she sat opposite it.

The pictures were hardly less formal than the few pieces of carved walnut furniture in the room. On one side of the mantel hung a tolerable oil portrait of Benedict XV, and on the other an excellent copy on stone of the Richmond portrait of Cardinal Newman. His sweet dignity seemed, in the shabby gaslight, reassuring even to Louise’s uneasy eyes. She called Janeway’s attention to this picture, for she remembered it on her first visit as the most sympathetic feature of the room.

“I’ve been trying, from the looks of this room, Bishop, to decide whether you’re a very rich man or a very poor one; you might be either,” observed Janeway, after the Bishop had entered from the hall.

Bishop Marion laughed. “If debts would make a man rich, I should have nothing to complain of. Come this way, Mrs. Durand.”

The Bishop led his callers across the hall and ushered them through a large room fitted as a business office into a smaller room opening into it from the rear. This was, in effect, a private office. Louise and Janeway were comfortably seated, and the Bishop, taking the chair at his table, addressed himself without further prelude to Louise.

“Mr. Janeway has outlined to me something of the difficult situation in which you find yourselves, Mrs. Durand. And I assume you understand all he has told me of his wish to marry you?” Louise, not speaking, inclined her head in assent. “And,” added the Bishop, “that he speaks for you both?” She nodded again. Bishop Marion perceived the strain under which she was laboring. “You have become a Catholic,” he continued. “You have professed, no doubt despite great difficulties, the Christian faith of the many centuries. I have had no favorable opportunity to offer you my felicitations on the privilege of having embraced this faith; and my hope that you will persevere in it. Converts do not always realize what happens. It is not so much the neophyte who chooses as it is God who first offers the grace of faith. Once receiving this gift, we may accept it or reject it; but before we can choose, God first must give.

“He has chosen you, my child, into His fold, and your will has corresponded to His great gift. This is why I felicitate you. In all of the divine economy, nothing to our eyes moves more mysteriously than grace; and to you, not to another, it has been given.

“And now, I beg you to remember, you are in your Father’s house; and in the difficulties in which you find yourself because you are there, be not dismayed; for all that a Father can give you He will give. It is not always possible for even the most devoted parent to gratify every wish of his child; but the will and the wish for her greatest good is always in that parent’s heart--how much more so in the heart of God for the child of His creation!

“Now I must ask all about your marriage with Mr. Durand. Did you enter into your marriage with him of your own free will?”

It was still difficult for Louise to speak. She answered simply: “I did.”

Janeway started. “No!” he interposed quietly, but instantly. “Your mother--you told me, it was she who made you marry Durand.”

Louise looked at him. “Unhappily,” she said clearly, “I consented.”

The Bishop listened carefully. “Unless you were under duress,” he said, “no chance lies for us there. You married him in good faith?”

“I did.”

“Had Mr. Durand ever been married before--had he, by any chance, a wife living at the time of your marriage to him?”

“No, Bishop Marion.” Janeway, his eyes on Louise, sat in a brown study. “I have never heard a previous marriage mentioned in the family.” But Janeway held his peace, for on this point he could offer nothing. Bishop Marion was reflecting. “That gate, too,” he said, “is closed.”

“You never heard even a hint of such a thing?” asked Janeway of Louise.

“I am quite sure,” she returned, “that he was never married before.”

“Tell me,” continued the Bishop, “where were you married to Mr. Durand, and by whom?”

“Our wedding was at the Church of the Messiah, in San Francisco; we were married by Doctor Frale.”

“May his bond,” said Janeway between his teeth, “prove as flimsy as his name!”

“You, of course,” said Bishop Marion, still addressing Louise, “never had been married before?”

“No, Bishop Marion.”

“Do you know, Mrs. Durand,” continued the Bishop, “whether Mr. Durand had ever been baptized?”

“He never had been, Bishop Marion.”

“He never had been?” The Bishop leaned forward a little as he echoed her words. “Are you sure of that?” he asked, scrutinizing her closely.

“His mother told me he never had been.”

“How did she happen to tell you that?”

“In this way: His mother was reared a Catholic. She had given up her religion when very young. In her last illness, she told me and told Gertrude, among other things, that Robert and Gertrude had never been baptized, and she regretted it. That’s why Gertrude calls herself a ‘pagan,’” smiled Louise, looking at Janeway as she spoke.

But Bishop Marion did not join in the smile. “Had you, Mrs. Durand,” he asked, “ever been baptized?”

“Not until I was baptized in Geneva last year.”

“Are you very sure of that?” he asked searchingly and almost suddenly. “Never before?”

“Quite sure. I was asked particularly then. My mother was an invalid after my birth. I was taken care of from infancy by my Aunt Maynie--she engaged my nurses and chose my governesses. She was living last year in Vevey, and wrote me about it at the time of my baptism, so I am quite sure. I have her letter. She is now at home in St. Louis.”

Bishop Marion regarded her with serious eyes. “You feel very sure then,” he said, measuring his words, “that you can lay before me satisfactory evidence that neither you nor Mr. Durand had been baptized at the time you married him?”

Louise replied without hesitation. “Oh, I think so, Bishop Marion. There should be no serious difficulty about that, I am sure.”

“And I,” interposed Janeway mildly, “ought to be of some assistance in assembling what you require concerning the facts.”

The Bishop sat a moment wrapped in thought. Janeway only watched him closely. Conscious of the oppressive hush of the moment, Louise looked down at the flimsy handkerchief in her gloved hand, clasped it more tightly, and waited for what should follow.

She could not know precisely what a moment in her life had just been reached; how delicately the chances for her present happiness were now being weighed in the scales of twenty centuries by the tired man before her; she was only conscious of a feeling that she loved Janeway deeply, a hope that she might yet be the means of his happiness. Only a woman is capable of such a hope.

“You lay a peculiar complication before me; not a new one--a very old one,” said the Bishop, still thoughtful. “You wish to know, my child, whether you are free to marry again. And you ask this as a Christian woman--one that has embraced the Catholic faith with intent to follow its teachings?”

“Yes, Bishop Marion.”

“Are you prepared to abide by what it shall decide?”

Louise moved in her chair. “How can I do otherwise?”

“Mr. Janeway has pleaded with you to give up that faith if it should raise a barrier between you; and you have refused to do so?”

His bluntness frightened her, yet something in his voice gave reassurance. She looked gravely at Janeway. “He understands,” was all she said.

“And you, Mr. Janeway, ask whether this woman is free in her faith to marry you?”

“Just that,” said Janeway coldly.

“Are you a Christian?”

“I am not.”

“You told me once,” observed the Bishop, surprised, “that you had been baptized?”

“Quite true, Bishop, I have been; but I make no pretensions.”

“And are you willing, Mr. Janeway, in your turn, to abide by what my findings in Mrs. Durand’s case may be?”

“I am not!”

The instant smoothness of Janeway’s refusal disconcerted for a moment even the Bishop. But he was quickly equal to a rejoinder. “Does that mean,” he asked, turning his collected faculties on Janeway, “that if I find no relief for her, you will continue to press upon her your suit; continue to urge her to deny her faith to grant it? Surely, this is not fair. You are an eminent lawyer. You have a perfect comprehension of what law means. Yet you appeal to a court, and in the same breath say frankly you will not abide by its decision--even when you must know,” he added, in reproach, “that the court is only too anxious to find for you, if it can be found, the relief you seek.”

Janeway met the statement with entire poise. “Bishop Marion,” he said gravely, “you have no need to ask in what esteem I hold you, but this is a question that bites into my very life. Your faith you would maintain with your last breath, defend at your life’s cost. Know, then, what this question means that you have put so lightly to me. This woman is my faith; she is my religion. I remember nothing of how she came into my life; I only know that at the price of it I would cheerfully seek her happiness.”

“Would you seek her happiness,” asked the Bishop in like tone, “before your own?”

Janeway showed emphasis. “My happiness could only be hers!” he exclaimed. “But somehow, somewhere,” he added intensely, “there is relief for us. And if you decide against us I will go for our relief to Rome itself.”

A faint smile on the Bishop’s face seemed sympathetic, but he pressed his visitor without relenting. “And beyond Rome?” he asked.

Janeway responded without hesitation. “It would rest with God--and Louise!”

As Janeway spoke Louise’s name, Bishop Marion turned his grave eyes on her. “In the circumstances you lay before me,” he said, “we can move only a step at a time. And the first step will seem harsh.” He appeared to speak as if in warning and in appeal to both. “But it is the great step,” he added, “and with _it_ taken, the path, I hope, will be much clearer.” He turned to Louise. “My child, this step is yours to take.”

“What is it to be?”

“You must ask Mr. Durand whether he will consent to live again with you as his wife, in peace, and will promise in good faith not to interfere with you in any way in the practice of your religion.” Janeway started violently. Louise regarded the Bishop with open amazement. Indeed, she could hardly collect herself to echo the Bishop’s words. “Ask him,” she exclaimed, “whether he will consent to live again with _me_, as his wife! Why, we are divorced!”

“True,” returned the Bishop, “but that should, in point of fact, make the trial even safer than if you were not.”

Her horror at the proposal was reflected in her expression. “That,” she said, almost choking, “I could never, never do!”

“I warned you,” repeated the Bishop calmly, “that it would seem harsh.”

Louise appeared desperate. “I could give up my life before I could do that!”

“Such a proposal is intolerable, Bishop Marion,” interposed Janeway energetically. “Intolerable even to think of.”

“Let us all keep our heads,” remarked the Bishop admonishingly.

Louise looked hopeless. “I could not live,” she exclaimed, “for another hour under the same roof with that man!”

Bishop Marion held firm, but appealed for coolness.

“We tread on very thin ice, my children,” he said gently. “Let us weigh carefully our words.”

He saw how Louise was cut to the heart. “Our words!” she exclaimed. “Yes! But their meaning! Who but I can weigh that? You two, the kindest of men, are yet men. I, God help me, am a woman--I alone can weigh their meaning!”

“I am not asking you to live with Mr. Durand,” said the Bishop guardedly. “I bid you only to ask him whether, under certain rigorous conditions to be imposed, he will consent to live with you.”

It was a moment before the tortured woman could speak. When she did speak, it was under better control of her feelings, but with no less horror of the Bishop’s request.

“I need no discrimination,” she said more collectedly, “to make me realize what such a step means. Ask me anything, Bishop Marion, but that; ask me to drag myself on my knees in shame before him; ask me to forget that I have a heart; ask me never again to look into the face of any man. Don’t force me to go again to him!”

“Calm yourself, dear Mrs. Durand,” said the Bishop. “No one--I least of all--will force you to do anything.”

Janeway thundered his feeling into words. “No one,” he exclaimed, “shall force you, Louise.”

“Then let us think of it no more,” she said instantly.

“My dear child,” interposed the Bishop, “this interpellation must be made. It is not optional; it is necessary. I have no authority to dispense you from it. And without it, you leave me powerless in any way to help you.”

“Then I say,” declared Janeway and speaking to Louise, “if you can’t bear that message to him, I can. I,” he said ominously, “will talk to Durand.”

Louise grasped eagerly at the straw. She appealed to the Bishop. “Could he act _for_ me?”

The older man, thinking, looked at Janeway. “The bearer of that message,” he said in measured tones, “will have need of very great self-control. The least rashness might lead to the death of the very hopes you seek by the step to kindle.”

“What do you mean, Bishop?” asked Louise.

“You know how acutely revengeful Mr. Durand is. He feels more bitterly toward you,” the Bishop looked at Janeway, “than toward any man living--unless,” he added with a faint smile, “it be toward me. Suppose Mr. Durand should gain, through Mr. Janeway’s coming from you,” he went on, speaking to Louise, “an inkling of your mutual hopes--and--from a motive of revenge--agree to all that is demanded by you?”

“We should be ruined!” exclaimed Louise, looking toward Janeway.

“But such a motive,” burst out Janeway, indignantly, “would invalidate his consent!”

“Yet how can we catch and label any man’s motive? We should be left in doubt. I myself would interpellate him for you; but anything I might say would arouse feelings quite as violent on his part toward all of us. I should, in all likelihood, be accused of conniving--and, to act, I must have his unclouded decision. May I tell you how I feel?” The Bishop, looking first at Louise, then at Janeway, addressed himself to both. “I feel that if we can secure an honest expression from Mr. Durand, you, Mrs. Durand, have nothing whatever to fear from interpellating him. I see what suffering the idea has caused you,” he said in kindly manner, to Louise, “but I really believe you are torturing yourself unnecessarily. Mr. Durand’s characteristics are such, his habits of life are so flagrantly open and notorious, that a Christian wife--any decent wife--would be an incubus on him.”

“Then,” demanded Janeway impatiently, “why, if these facts are patent to the public, to the court itself, require this hard interpellation to be made? Why not dispense with it and grant this injured woman relief out of hand?” he asked with vehemence.

“I should have more trouble in explaining to another than to an experienced legal mind that this step has long since been found by the Church necessary to protect the rights of all the parties at interest--the pagan spouse, the Christian spouse, and the third party who would enter into marriage with the latter. I need hardly tell you that when, for reasons founded on an experience in human affairs extending over many centuries, a law has been enacted precisely to avoid misunderstandings and deceits, its provisions are not lightly to be waived. This is not to say they may not be waived; if such an interpellation, for example, were impossible, an Apostolic dispensation from it could be obtained. All I want you to realize is that my power is a delegated, not a plenary one; that we must move first to establish, then to protect the rights of this innocent woman, and that this must be done under the seasoned laws of the Church to which she has appealed. I will leave nothing undone to shelter her within its mercies--the Church will never reject the child that has sought its sanctuary.

“Not,” he added clearly, “that it can always give to every one that pleads all he may plead for; but that it will give, to the uttermost farthing, all it may lawfully bestow on those who seek, as this injured woman has sought, its protection. Yet that certain forms of law must, in every code, be gone through with, I need hardly remind you, Mr. Janeway. The form that confronts us is one: Mrs. Durand must make this interpellation I have described; or we--you, I should say--must go to Rome and submit to the inevitable delays that follow an appeal to a supreme tribunal. Is it wise? Is it necessary? Is it not better, for your mutual relief, to comply with this requirement of the only law that I myself can administer?”

Seriously as the Bishop had spoken, Janeway had followed and had already digested every word of the speaker’s thought; when the Bishop finished he made only a further suggestion: “How about Gertrude?” he asked tentatively of Louise. “She might put these questions to Durand.”

Louise reflected. It was evident that she, too, had considered and was weighing every phase of the situation. “Gertrude’s relations with her brother are already strained to the snapping point over me,” she replied at length. “I can’t ask it of her. No,” she said hesitatingly, but as if reaching a hard decision, “there is no one to do this terrible thing for me. I alone--I, myself--must act. But when--where to see and speak to him?”

“If ’twere done, ’twere well ’twere done quickly,” observed Janeway, with immediate grimness. “The suspense is deadly. If she must interpellate this man as the first step toward freedom, let it be done at the earliest possible moment. All I ask is, not that I be present at their interview, but that I be in whatever place it is arranged.”

“He is in New York now,” said Louise, looking from one to the other of the two men. Bishop Marion and Janeway went into discussion concerning time and place. It was the Bishop’s suggestion that was finally adopted.

“I think,” said he, “that all can be conveniently and appropriately arranged here, in this house. Mr. Simms knows that the Arbitration Committee meets here next Monday evening to receive the signatures of the company and the men to the new agreement. Mr. Durand must be here in person to sign for the company. The men demand it, and Judge Harrison and Simms have agreed he shall be here. The house is large; you can have ample privacy. Isn’t that the best? Indeed, I urge it for reasons of my own--reasons I cannot explain now, but which you would approve could I discuss them, and which, I hope, you will one day fully understand. Shall we say, then, next Monday night, here; and that you both come to my private entrance door in Lake Street at seven-thirty o’clock?”

Even Janeway was taken a little aback at the businesslike promptness with which the Bishop wished the ordeal and the crisis--which meant so much in the two lives before him--faced. He looked toward Louise as if to ask whether she felt equal to what was being arranged. The expression of her face, as she looked down at the hand-bag she was toying with in her lap, reflected her distress. “Louise?” Janeway called her name tenderly. “I’m afraid,” he added, as she looked at him, “you can’t do it.”

All the reserve of courage in her being was manifest in her expression and in her words. “I must do it.” She rose as she spoke. Janeway and the Bishop rose with her. “I will go down into this valley. I will go alone before this--Moloch!” Her eyes, as they moved from one to the other of the men before her, were in themselves a moving appeal. “Only, pray for me, both of you,” she said steadily, “that I do not go in vain.”