X.
SECRETS.
Ambrosia’s mother had again received a visit from Bishop Lonzello. This time he had insisted that his daughter confess in order that she might be forgiven and the curse pronounced against her rendered null. It is possible that the bishop himself believed that the curse held power. Certain it is that the woman feared it and had wept almost constantly since that day that it had been pronounced on Ambrosia. Now she fell in with the idea of Ambrosia confessing and securing release from the curse. She brought the matter before her daughter, who demurred. Then she urged it with such insistence, declaring that filial duty required some reparation on her part, that Ambrosia was touched, and, at the same time, being plagued by the importunity of her mother, consented to confess, and even to confess before the foreign friar, in the church against which she was in rebellion. Indeed, she preferred the foreigner to one of the priests who had long resided in the islands and fallen with its ways.
Behold, then, Ambrosia Lonzello at the cathedral before the confessional in which Violeta was seated. She did not know it, but the moment she entered the confessional the door had been locked behind her by an attendant, at the signal from the officiating priest.
Ambrosia knelt at the confessional, troubled in heart. She felt out of place in a church against which she was in rebellion; and, while feeling that she ought to atone for disrespect shown a father, still she knew not what to say. She knelt in prayer, and as she prayed, the priest within the cell gazed upon her with lustful eyes, studying her points as a sportsman might study the creature he meant to kill and devour. As he looked, the appetite for sex, the fiercest passion that sways mankind, took possession of and began to rage within him. Finally he spoke:
“Daughter, have you been guilty of disloyalty to the holy church? Have you consorted with those who are the enemies of the religion and of their country?”
Naturally, the question, so unexpected, disconcerted the girl kneeling before the cell with her eyes so downcast that she did not see the priest within the cell. Various emotions surged within her. Her first impulse was to deny rebellion to true religion and rush from the church. But she concluded that it were best to remain and admit the thing that had caused her mother sorrow. So she confessed:
“I have met the general of the insurrectionists and am his friend. But I am not an enemy of the true religion.”