Madam misunderstood him, and pressed a little closer, with a happy echo of his sigh. Her eyes were soft with wine and passion. She had no precedent for doubting her influence on the moment she chose to make her own.
'The reckoning!' she murmured. 'But I am wax in thy hands, pretty saint. Shalt confess me, and take what toll thou wilt of my sins?'
Her hand settled light as a bird on his.
'Sing to me, Bernardino,' she whispered wooingly, 'sith the cloud is gone from our moon, and I am in the will to love.'
He shot one little startled glance her way; then slowly slung round his lute, and, touching the strings pensively, melted into the following reproach:—
'Speak low! What do you ask, false love? Speak low!
Sin cannot speak too low.
The night-wind stealing to thy bosom,
The dead star, dropping like a blossom,
Less voiceless be than thou!
Low, lower yet, false love, if to confess
What guilt, what shameful need?
God, who can hear the budding grass,
And flake kiss flake in the snowy pass,
Your secret else will heed.
Ah! thou art silent, not from love, but fear,
And true love knows no fear.
Creeping, soft-footed, in the dust,
It is not love, but conscious lust,
Which dreads that God shall hear.'
He rose swiftly beside her, while she sat, dumbly biting a lock of her own hair. The frown of outraged passion was in her eyes. What had the fool dared in rejecting her!
To touch the perfumed essence of sin with a rebuke which was like a caress—that, pace his monks, was Bernardo's rendering of the Gospel; and who shall say that, in its girlish tenderness, its earnest emotionalism, it was not the most dangerous method of all? Not every adulterous woman is fit to meet the gentle fate of Christ's. It is not always well to doctor too much kindness with more. Surfeit, surely, is not safely cured, unless by a God, with sugar-plums.
'For shame!' he said quietly; 'for shame! Christ weeps for thee!'
She looked up with a frozen, insolent smile.