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Her father, Lord Rens, had recently died, leaving Domini, who was his only child, a large fortune. His life had been a curious and a tragic one. Lady Rens, Domini's mother, had been a great beauty of the gipsy type, the daughter of a Hungarian mother and of Sir Henry Arlworth, one of the most prominent and ardent English Catholics of his day.
In his last years they had been very far apart, and his death relieved her from the perpetual contemplation of a tragedy. Lord Rens had grown to regard his daughter almost with enmity in his enmity against her mother's religion, which was hers. She had come to think of him rather with pity than with love. Yet his death was a shock to her.
While she was very young she met Lord Rens, a Lifeguardsman of twenty-six, who called himself a Protestant, but who was really quite happy without any faith.
A son of his became a priest, and a famous preacher and writer on religious subjects. Another child, a daughter, took the veil. Lady Rens, who was not clever, although she was at one time almost universally considered to have the face of a muse, shared in the family ardour for the Church, but was far too fond of the world to leave it.
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.
So she put it from her, and strove to fill her life with all those lesser things which men and women grasp, as the Chinese grasp the opium pipe, those things which lull our comprehension of realities to sleep. When Lord Rens died, still blaspheming, and without any of the consolations of religion, Domini felt the imperious need of change. She did not grieve actively for the dead man.
Her mother, Lady Rens, a member of one of England's oldest Catholic families, but half Hungarian on the mother's side, had run away when Domini was nineteen with a Hungarian musician, leaving her only child with her despairing and abandoned husband. Lord Rens had become a Catholic out of love for his wife.
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.
Lord Rens had always been a slave, the slave of love, most of all when he was filled with hatred, and Domini, influenced by his example, instinctively connected love with a chain. Only the love a human being has for God seemed to her sometimes the finest freedom; the movement of the soul upward into the infinite obedient to the call of the great Liberator.
The bell of the church near by chimed softly, and the familiar sound fell strangely upon Domini's ears out here in Africa, reminding her of many sorrows. Her religion was linked with terrible memories, with cruel struggles, with hateful scenes of violence. Lord Rens had been a man of passionate temperament.
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