"Don't you wish to go back home with your father?"
"No, sir," I answered.
"And why not, please?"
"Because my father's home is no home to me—because my aunt has always been unkind to me, and because my father has never cared for me or protected me, and because … "
"Well, what else?"
"Because … because I wish to become a nun."
There was silence for a moment, and then my father broke into bitter laughter.
"So that's it, is it? I thought as much. You want to go into partnership with the Mother in the nun business, eh?"
"My mother wished me to become a nun, and I wish it myself, sir."
"Your mother was a baby—that's what she was."
"My mother was an angel, sir," I said, bridling up, "and when she was dying she hoped I should become a nun, and I can never become anything else under any circumstance."
"Bah!" said my father, with a contemptuous lift of the hand, and then turning to the Reverend Mother he said:
"Hark here, ma'am. There's an easy way and a hard way in most everything. I take the easy way first, and if it won't work I take the hard way next, and then it's stiff pulling for the people who pull against me. I came to Rome to take my daughter home. I don't feel called upon to explain why I want to take her home, or what I'm going to do with her when I get her there. I believe I've got the rights of a father to do what I mean to do, and that it will be an ugly business for anybody who aids and abets my daughter in resisting her father's will. So I'll leave her here a week longer, and when I come back, I'll expect her to be ready and waiting and willing—ready and waiting and willing, mind you—to go along with me."
After saying this my father faced about and with his heavy flat step went out of the room, whereupon the Bishop bowed to the Reverend Mother and followed him.
My heart was by this time in fierce rebellion—all that the pacifying life of the convent-school had done for me in ten years being suddenly swept away—and I cried:
"I won't do it! I won't do it!"
But I had seen that the Reverend Mother's face had suddenly become very white while my father spoke to her at the end and now she said, in a timid, almost frightened tone:
"Mary, we'll go out to Nemi to-day. I have something to say to you."
TWENTIETH CHAPTER
In the late afternoon of the same day we were sitting together for the last time on the terrace of the Reverend Mother's villa.
It was a peaceful evening, a sweet and holy time. Not a leaf was stirring, not a breath of wind was in the air; but the voice of a young boy, singing a love-song, came up from somewhere among the rocky ledges of the vineyards below, and while the bell of the monastic church behind us was ringing the Ave Maria, the far-off bell of the convent church at Gonzano was answering from the other side of the lake—like angels calling to each other from long distances in the sky.
"Mary," said the Reverend Mother, "I want to tell you a story. It is the story of my own life—mine and my sister's and my father's."
I was sitting by her side and she was holding my hand in her lap, and patting it, as she had done during the interview of the morning.
"They say the reason so few women become nuns is that a woman is too attached to her home to enter the holy life until she has suffered shipwreck in the world. That may be so with most women. It was not so with me.
"My father was what is called a self-made man. But his fortune did not content him. He wanted to found a family. If he had had a son this might have been easy. Having only two daughters, he saw no way but that of marrying one of us into the Italian nobility.
"My sister was the first to disappoint him. She fell in love with a young Roman musician. The first time the young man asked for my sister he was contemptuously refused; the second time he was insulted; the third time he was flung out of the house. His nature was headstrong and passionate, and so was my father's. If either had been different the result might not have been the same. Yet who knows? Who can say?"
The Reverend Mother paused for a moment. The boy's voice in the vineyard was going on.
"To remove my sister from the scene of temptation my father took her from Rome to our villa in the hills above Albano. But the young musician followed her. Since my father would not permit him to marry her he was determined that she should fly with him, and when she hesitated to do so he threatened her. If she did not meet him at a certain hour on a certain night my father would be dead in the morning."
The Reverend Mother paused again. The boy's voice had ceased; the daylight was dying out.
"My sister could not bring herself to sacrifice either her father or her lover. Hence she saw only one way left—to sacrifice herself."
"Herself?"
The Reverend Mother patted my hand. "Isn't that what women in tragic circumstances are always doing?" she said.
"By some excuse—I don't know what—she persuaded our father to change rooms with her that night—he going upstairs to her bedroom in the tower, and she to his on the ground floor at the back, opening on to the garden and the pine forest that goes up the hill.
"What happened after that nobody ever knew exactly. In the middle of the night the servants heard two pistol shots, and next morning my sister was found dead—shot to the heart through an open window as she lay in my father's bed.
"The authorities tried in vain to trace the criminal. Only one person had any idea of his identity. That was my father, and in his fierce anger he asked himself what he ought to do in order to punish the man who had killed his daughter.
"Then a strange thing happened. On the day before the funeral the young musician walked into my father's room. His face was white and wasted, and his eyes were red and swollen. He had come to ask if he might be allowed to be one of those to carry the coffin. My father consented. 'I'll leave him alone,' he thought. 'The man is punished enough.'
"All the people of Albano came to the funeral and there was not a dry eye as the cortège passed from our chapel to the grave. Everybody knew the story of my sister's hopeless love, but only two in the world knew the secret of her tragic death—her young lover, who was sobbing aloud as he staggered along with her body on his shoulder, and her old father, who was walking bareheaded and in silence, behind him."
My heart was beating audibly and the Reverend Mother stroked my hand to compose me—perhaps to compose herself also. It was now quite dark, the stars were coming out, and the bells of the two monasteries on opposite sides of the lake were ringing the first hour of night.
"That's my sister's story, Mary," said the Reverend Mother after a while, "and the moral of my own is the same, though the incidents are different.
"I was now my father's only child and all his remaining hopes centred in me. So he set himself to find a husband for me before the time came when I should form an attachment for myself. His choice fell on a middle-aged Roman noble of distinguished but impoverished family.
"'He has a great name; you will have a great fortune—what more do you want?' said my father.
"We were back in Rome by this time, and there—at school or elsewhere—I had formed the conviction that a girl must passionately love the man she marries, and I did not love the Roman noble. I had also been led to believe that a girl should be the first and only passion of the man who marries her, and, young as I was, I knew that my middle-aged lover had had other domestic relations.
"Consequently I demurred, but my father threatened