The Garden of Allah | Page 7

twenty-six, who called himself a
Protestant, but who was really quite happy without any faith. He fell
madly in love with her and, in order to marry her, became a Catholic,
and even a very devout one, aiding his wife's Church by every means in
his power, giving large sums to Catholic charities, and working, with
almost fiery zeal, for the spread of Catholicism in England.
Unfortunately, his new faith was founded only on love for a human
being, and when Lady Rens, who was intensely passionate and
impulsive, suddenly threw all her principles to the winds, and ran away
with a Hungarian musician, who had made a furor one season in

London by his magnificent violin-playing, her husband, stricken in his
soul, and also wounded almost to the death in his pride, abandoned
abruptly the religion of the woman who had converted and betrayed
him.
Domini was nineteen, and had recently been presented at Court when
the scandal of her mother's escapade shook the town, and changed her
father in a day from one of the happiest to one of the most cynical,
embittered and despairing of men. She, who had been brought up by
both her parents as a Catholic, who had from her earliest years been
earnestly educated in the beauties of religion, was now exposed to the
almost frantic persuasions of a father who, hating all that he had
formerly loved, abandoning all that, influenced by his faithless wife, he
had formerly clung to, wished to carry his daughter with him into his
new and most miserable way of life. But Domini, who, with much of
her mother's dark beauty, had inherited much of her quick vehemence
and passion, was also gifted with brains, and with a certain largeness of
temperament and clearness of insight which Lady Rens lacked. Even
when she was still quivering under the shock and shame of her mother's
guilt and her own solitude, Domini was unable to share her father's
intensely egoistic view of the religion of the culprit. She could not be
persuaded that the faith in which she had been brought up was proved
to be a sham because one of its professors, whom she had above all
others loved and trusted, had broken away from its teachings and defied
her own belief. She would not secede with her father; but remained in
the Church of the mother she was never to see again, and this in spite of
extraordinary and dogged efforts on the part of Lord Rens to pervert
her to his own Atheism. His mind had been so warped by the agony of
his heart that he had come to feel as if by tearing his only child from
the religion he had been led to by the greatest sinner he had known, he
would be, in some degree at least, purifying his life tarnished by his
wife's conduct, raising again a little way the pride she had trampled in
the dust.
Her uncle, Father Arlworth, helped Domini by his support and counsel
in this critical period of her life, and Lord Rens in time ceased from the
endeavour to carry his child with him as companion in his tragic

journey from love and belief to hatred and denial. He turned to the
violent occupations of despair, and the last years of his life were
hideous enough, as the world knew and Domini sometimes suspected.
But though Domini had resisted him she was not unmoved or wholly
uninfluenced by her mother's desertion and its effect upon her father.
She remained a Catholic, but she gradually ceased from being a devout
one. Although she had seemed to stand firm she had in truth been
shaken, if not in her belief, in a more precious thing--her love. She
complied with the ordinances, but felt little of the inner beauty of her
faith. The effort she had made in withstanding her father's assault upon
it had exhausted her. Though she had had the strength to triumph, at the
moment, a partial and secret collapse was the price she had afterwards
to pay. Father Arlworth, who had a subtle understanding of human
nature, noticed that Domini was changed and slightly hardened by the
tragedy she had known, and was not surprised or shocked. Nor did he
attempt to force her character back into its former way of beauty. He
knew that to do so would be dangerous, that Domini's nature required
peace in which to become absolutely normal once again after the shock
it had sustained.
When Domini was twenty-one he died, and her safest guide, the one
who understood her best, went from her. The years passed. She lived
with her embittered father; and drifted into the unthinking worldliness
of the life of her order. Her home was far from ideal.