"I will not go!" cried Dino. "I have no one in the world but you. Ah, my father, will you never forgive me?"
"It is not my forgiveness you need," said the Prior, shortly. "But come, the hour is late. We will give you shelter for the night, at least."
"Let me go to the chapel first," pleaded Dino, in a voice which had suddenly grown faint. "I dared not enter it this morning, but now let me pray there for a little while. I must ask forgiveness there."
"Pray there if you choose," said the Prior; "and pray for the penitence which you have yet to learn. When that is won, then talk of forgiveness."
He coldly withdrew the hand that Dino tried to kiss; he left the room without uttering one word of comfort or encouragement. It was good for his pupil, he thought, to be driven well-nigh to despair.
Dino, left to himself, remained for a few minutes in the posture in which the Prior had left him; then rose and made his way, slowly and feebly, to the little monastery chapel, where a solitary lamp swung before the altar, and a flood of moonlight fell through the coloured panes of the clerestory windows. Dino stood passive in that flood of moonlight, almost forgetting why he had come. His brain was dizzy, his heart was sick. His mind was distracted with the thought of a guilt which he did not feel to be his own, of sin for which his conscience did not smite him. For, with a strange commingling of clear-sightedness and submission to authority, he still believed that he had done perfectly right in giving up his claim to the Scotch estate, and yet, with all his heart, desired to feel that he had done wrong. And when the words with which Father Cristoforo had reproached him came back to his mind, his burden seemed greater than he could bear. With a moan of pain he sank down close beside the altar-steps. And there, through the midnight hours, he lay alone and wrestled with himself.
It was no use. Everything fell from him in that hour except that faith and that love which had been the controlling powers of his life. He had loved Brian as a brother; and he had done well: he had loved Elizabeth—though he had not known that the dreaming fancies which had lately centred round her deserved the name which the Prior had given to them—and he had not done ill; and it was right that he should give to them, what might, perhaps, avail to make their lives a little happier—at any rate all that he had to give. The Prior had said that he was wrong. And would the good God, whom he had always loved and worshipped from the days of his earliest boyhood, would the Good God condemn him, too! He did not think so. He was not sorry for what he had done at all.
No, he did not repent.
But how would it fare with him next day if he told the Prior this, the inmost conviction of his heart? He would be told again that he was not fit to be a monk. And the desire to be a monk—curious as it may seem to us—had grown up with Dino as a beautiful ideal. Was he now to be thrust out into the world—the world where men stole and lied and stabbed each other in the dark, all for the sake of a few acres of land or a handful of gold pieces—and denied the hard, ascetic, yet tranquil and finely-ordered life which he had hoped to lead, when he put on his monkish robe, for the remainder of his days?
Dino was an enthusiast: he might, perhaps, have been disenchanted if he had lived as one of themselves amongst the brethren who seemed to him so enviable; but just now his whole being rose in revolt against a decision which deprived him of all that he had been taught to consider blessed.