A Monk of Cruta

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

CHAPTER XXI

"ADREA'S DIARY"

"By love stalks hate, his brother and his mate."

I am scarcely calm enough to write! Yet I must write! My heart is full; my very pulses are throbbing with excitement! What is it that has happened? It is all confused in my mind. Let me try and set it down clearly; then perhaps I shall be able to see my way.

Yesterday it seemed to me that my being was all too small for one passion. Now it holds two! The one, perhaps, intensifies the other. That is possible, for they are opposites, and one has grown out of the other. Now I cannot tell which is the stronger, the love or the hate.

I love one man, and I hate another. Perhaps I should say I love one man because I hate another. You, my dumb confidant, may be trusted with names, so I will be clearer still. I love Paul de Vaux, and I hate Father Adrian!

Oh! that he should have dared! that he should have dared to speak so to me! If only Paul had been there, he should have beaten him. If I had had the strength and the means, I would have killed him where he stood, and silenced those thin, cruel lips for ever. I could have stabbed him to the heart, and my hand would never have faltered.

Let me try to recall that scene. It is not difficult. His words are ringing still in my ears, and his white, passionate face seems to follow and mock me wherever I look. I see it out there in the white moonlight, and it rises up from the dark corners of the room. It haunts me, and I hate it! I hate him as a woman hates any one who comes between her and the man she loves!

We were alone, Paul and I; at least, we thought so. I had heard no one enter, nor had he. But suddenly a voice rang out and filled the room; a fierce, cruel voice, so changed and hardened with passion that I scarcely recognised it. But when we sprang up, and peered through the twilight of the chamber we saw him standing close to us,—so close that he might even have heard our whispered words to one another.

There had been some ceremony at the monastery amongst the hills where most of his time here is spent, and he had evidently come straight from there. His flowing black robes were splashed with mud and torn by brambles, and his white face was livid with exhaustion and anger. His dark eyes burned like fire in their hollow depths, and his right hand was raised above his head, as though he had been on the point of striking or denouncing us. I shall not forget his appearance while I live. It will haunt me to my dying day.