He stepped softly towards the shrine. A dozen paces brought him almost within touch of it—and of something else. A woman was crouched against the pedestal of the image, her hands clasped high on the stone, her face buried in the curve of her left arm. In the incessant throb and flash of the lightning through the little windows, he could see the soft heave of her shoulders, the shredded glints of light running up and down her hair as she drew quick breaths like one in terror. Something, in the same moment, convinced him that she was aware of his entrance; that, in the insane relief engendered of company, she was struggling to present as spiritual preoccupation the appearances of extreme fear. If this were so, she fought in vain to save her self-respect. Her collapse, it was evident, had been too abject; to rally from it on the mere prick of pride was an impossibility. Here to her, lost and foundered in hell, had come a first presence of human sympathy.
It was sympathy. In the dusk, in the endless flash and roll, and in the heavy roaring of the rain on the roof, Ned’s spirit, reaching across a reeling abyss, felt that this fellow-creature was in mortal terror. Too diffident, nevertheless, to make a first advance, he compromised with his pity by seizing a chair and dragging it towards him, that the very rough jar of its legs on the boards should be sound assurance to the other of a human neighbourhood. The little instinctive act, fraught with kindliness, touched off the nerve of endurance. As he dropped into the seat he had pulled forward, the prostrate figure, detaching itself from the pedestal, came suddenly writhing and crouching over the few yards of floor that separated them, and, throwing itself at his feet, put up a mad groping hand.
“I am dying of fear!” it whispered.
Ned caught the hand in a succouring grip. He could see only the glimmer of a white face raised to his. He was bending down to give it words of assurance, when to a hellish crash the whole building seemed to leap into liquid fire—to sink, weltering, into a black and humming void. The shock, the noise, had been thickly stunning rather than ear-splitting. Here, in the chapel, they were too close to the cause to suffer the sound perspective that shatters the brain. They might have been the stone, the kernel, from which the force itself had burst on all sides.
By slow degrees Ned’s eyes recovered their focus, until he could make out once more the ghostly blotch of a face looking up into his. Neither of these two, beyond an involuntary jerk of response to the enormous flame and detonation, had stirred from the attitude into which, it would almost appear, they had been stricken. The actual terror of the one, the sympathy of the other, seemed welded by the flash into a single expression of fatality. In the lonely chapel, amidst wrack and storm, to each the spectre of a memory had suddenly materialised, revealing itself amazingly significant.
“I must go,” muttered Ned, all in a moment. He spoke confusedly, trying to withdraw his hand. But the other soft clutch resisted: the other half-deafened ears could yet essay to catch the import of the murmur.
“You won’t leave me—here alone?” she said. “Oh, I shall die of the fear!”
She could waive before him all pretence of her possessing the divine favour or protection. It was her rapture that this man—who had again stepped across the years of darkness into her life—knew her soul; her rapture to woo him by the seduction of her surrender to his nobler understanding. His spirit darkened; yet, knowing her fearfulness of old, he could not in common humanity forsake her till the terror was past.
So they sat on in silence, she flung at his feet, holding his hand, while the flame and fury expended themselves overhead. Once or twice he was conscious that her lips were helping the office of her fingers; and he flushed shamefully in the darkness, yet would not seem to condone her offence—her terrible sacrilege, even, under the circumstances—by so much as noticing it. But he thought of the little flower-packet in his breast; and he cursed his bitter folly that, after such a warning as he had already had, he should have ventured himself wantonly within the charmed influence of this silken-skinned witch.
Suddenly, it might almost be said, the tempest fled by. It passed as rapidly as it had come, travelling westwards on a flooded current of wind. The noise, the glare, ceased; light grew on the dim-washed walls; the dark picture above the altar revealed itself a pious representation of the very subject that had founded the chapel. There the saint stood in effigy for all the world to worship: here she knelt self-confessed at the feet of the one man for whose hot reprobation she yearned, so long as it would kiss in pity where it had struck. Ned glanced down at the lifted face. It may have suggested in its expression some secret, half-unconscious triumph. He tore away his hand—sprang to his feet, as the clouds broke outside and sunshine came into the place.