There were only three poems under that heading last month, she found, and they all referred in some way or other to "the Golden Keys." The first, short and somewhat cryptic, was called "The Three Absolutions."
What were the three absolutions? Two she knew of; a little note said that the third was to be found in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick. She must look it up one day.... Then, suddenly remembering that there was an old Prayer Book somewhere in her workbasket, she stopped and found it, and, turning up the place, suffered considerable amazement....
She looked again at the poem—
"Full of the past, all shuddering thought,
Man waits his hour with upward eye—
The Golden Keys in love are brought
That he may hold by them and die."
In her own Church then she could have Absolution if she were dying. She felt that when she came to die she would like to have it, and remembered that there had been a time when she had thought that, if she were to go on living, she must have it, a time when she had not excused herself, but when, in the first weeks of horror and misery, she had taken all the blame, had been too much overwhelmed with self-accusation and remorse even to taste perfectly her hatred of Madame de Vigerie.
And with the thought the gates opened, and the whole tide of memory burst upon her, full-waved, bearing her out of the safe and quiet English garden to a little church in Paris, holding a warm incense-burdened air, and flooded with a soft dusk in which the winking light before the altar seemed doubly alive and significant, and the irregular concourse of candles by the statue of the Madonna burnt with a speaking radiance. And she was kneeling in a rush-bottomed kneeling-chair, weighed down by her deep mourning, unable to pray, her mind a maze of inarticulate pain, not knowing how or why she had strayed into this place, except that it was peaceful. A few persons scattered about among the disordered chairs got up one by one, moved away, and after a while knelt down again, and there was a murmur of voices. In a moment or two Horatia realised that they were making their confessions, an idea which had once been full of a fascinated horror. Now it suddenly seemed reasonable. That woman, for instance, a widow like herself, coming back from the confessional to her place, what had she been saying, what had she been told to do, what was she feeling like now? Supposing it had been she herself ... for no one could say hard enough things to her, nor could any penance equal the anguish that it would be to put her self-accusation into words, and to acknowledge her wrongdoing. Yet anguish she would have welcomed. Had she been of the faith of these people she could have comfort too.... But that was impossible.
And there came for the hundredth time the vision of Armand going in bitterness and agony down the slope to death, with the ironic little smile on his wryed mouth, the livid circles round the eyes which once had held for her all the light in the world. For she knew now—and the knowledge was only an added pang—that the reawakened feeling of that terrible night was only a transient emotion. She buried her face in her hands, and the heartrending pity of it surged over her, the horror and the tragedy of death, of his death, young and reluctant. Kneeling there, her face hidden, every voice of her soul went out suddenly to plead for him, though she knew not what to plead... "O God, it was my doing! The blame was not his, not his, O God.... He was kind to me, always. Have mercy, have mercy...."
So, after many days, had she prayed—but not for herself.
Horatia came back as one wakens from a painful dream, and, as sometimes in such an awakening, there were tears on her cheeks. She sprang up wildly from her chair. No, it was past, and here was reality, and comfort, and things of the safe, ordinary life—the sound of the gardener's shears, the smell of cut box, a horse trotting along the road, someone opening a window in an upper storey, the voice of Dash in the kitchen garden yelping after a bird. She drew a long breath, and put out a hand to touch something palpable and present, the rough trunk of the acacia-tree.
"Please, ma'am, Reverend 'Ungerford," said the voice of Ellen behind her.