“I too felt remorse or rather deep repentance for my sins, and an eager desire to grow more like the angel whose soul, as God had willed, was twin to mine. I believe I am reserved for a death no less glorious than his. Celestial fires were lighted in my heart, ardent but pure—different indeed from my love for you! What joys I felt, what heavenly strains I heard, what visions I saw, what glories I dreamed of, what anxieties I endured, what a craving for sorrow on earth that I may be happy in heaven! What a longing to die that I may enjoy, if only a small part of that sacred peace in which my brother revelled. I have prayed and longed till my brother has appeared to me, whether in my dreams or no I know not, radiant with happiness and beauty, calling me to him, and repeating the exhortations and warnings he gave me in the last hour of his life. I never pass a night without hearing his voice in my ears! You, of course, will not believe in this ecstasy, you are fast bound in materialism and can see only with your bodily eyes. Oh! wretched handful of clay! And this is what the world calls a wise man, because he has learnt half a dozen facts which cannot matter to any one. Wretched and miserable man! Still more miserable if you had no one to intercede for you, to beseech God for the mercy you do not deserve.”
“Thank you!” said Leon drily; and as his wife came nearer to him he put out his hand to keep off the contact of that grey dress. There was something in the smell of the coarse woollen stuff that sickened him.
“Your irony will not avail to quell or to shake me,” exclaimed his wife. “I know that your stubbornness will yield at last, a voice in my soul tells me so. God himself tells me so, when I feel myself uplifted by thoughts of him; the blessed patriarch Saint Joseph assures me of it—my friend and intercessor, my most loving, most tender and most pitiful patron,” and she spoke the canting superlatives with honeyed unction. “O Lord!” she went on, raising her eyes and crossing her hands, no longer marked by the refined cleanliness of former times, “save him, snatch him from the pestilent and atheistic set among which he has fallen, raise him up to thy glory and make him abhor these damnable doctrines!” Then she remained absorbed in muttered prayer, presently however she laid one hand on his shoulder, and raising the other with a gesture of threatening admonition, she went on in a low voice:
“The day will come when you will crave my pardon on your knees, when you will entreat me with tears to teach you how to pray; when you will fling yourself, like me, at the foot of dusty altars caring not that your hands should be dirty; when you will dress in sackcloth; live, like me, in perpetual fear of your conscience; feel that a smile, a glance, a frivolous thought is a sin; renounce all the joys of the world and find delight in incessant prayer and unwearied worship, neglecting all outward things, contemning all care of your body in perpetual penance. Ah! yes, you must save your soul; my patron saints cannot do less than grant me this; they will intercede to God for you, and God will forgive you and call you to himself, with me for your guide! What a triumph, what a victory that will be!”
She took her stand in the middle of the room in a dramatic attitude, with her hand raised, her eyes fixed, and her head thrown back, and exclaimed:
“Wretched atheist, I will save you in spite of yourself!”
Leon watched her in silence as she left the room. Long endurance had made him stoical; she had hammered so long and so constantly on his heart that it seemed to have turned to a dead cold anvil. But he let his fist fall on the arm of his chair with such force that the very floor trembled. It was as much as to say: “No more, no more of this!”
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE DEVOURING OGRE—CROUP.