"But that was long ago!"
"Humph! 'long ago,' and will not the Church be gladder than ever to take back the poor priest who can hold so many men from the Uprising?"
What was all this? It was madness. He had given himself to the people, he could never recant.
She kissed his hands.
"These fingers will yet hold a Bishop's staff," she said. Her beauty was maddening. He would not think of the future. He gave himself up to the present. The breath from her lips shook him to the very core of his being. He rained kisses on her passionately—on hair, cheeks, eyes, and lips; and for all that there was a certain fierceness in his caresses, she was unafraid and well content to have it so.
Suddenly a jeering laugh rang through the air:—
"Ha, ha, Sir Russet-priest, so this is the way you follow the call of your dear Master, Jesus Christ! 'Wheresoever my Master calls me,' I think you said to me. Ho, ho, odsooks! did the good Lord graciously call me into so fair a place, I doubt not I should go even as willingly." The two sprang apart and saw the evil face of Hugo Stott leering at them. Rose was frankly frightened and turned again and clung to Annys, whose first impulse was such as any man would feel, to strike the impudent fellow to the ground. But an uncomfortable trick had grown upon him of recalling certain bits of the Gospel at all moments of excitement, and the particular lines that now rang through his brain had in them an appositeness that staid his hand:—
"If thou give fully to thy soul the delight of her desire, she will make thee the laughing-stock of thine enemies."
Indeed, it had come. Already he was the laughing-stock of his enemy. He was degraded before the very scum of the earth. He had brought the name of his beloved Lord on the lips of a sneering pardon-seller. He was held up, a self-convicted hypocrite, before the very prince of hypocrites. What could he say for himself? What could he plead? Nothing, save that he was in the grasp of the same terrible power that had brought ruin to hundreds before him. Ah! but stay, he had done wrong, great wrong; he had sinned grievously, yet by some miraculous interposition of the Lord he had been drawn back from the last step that would have cast him into the pit of hell. He had been saved. And by what a hand! Yet, although it had pleased Heaven to send a strange instrument of salvation, nevertheless, he must render due thanks to his deliverer. So, to Stott's utter surprise, instead of felling him to the earth, Annys flung off the girl and extended his hand humbly to him.
"Thanks," he said contritely. "Thou hast snatched me from the jaws of hell."