“I have, indeed, as will develop on acquaintance. I believe you have already met her known as Grief to Men. Suppose you bow before the queen to be.”
John’s gaze returned to the prayer for forgiveness on Dolores’ face. His leonine head leaned as if to hear the quiver of her lips. The great soul of him saw more than his eyes had seen. He granted the prayer, took the offered hand; bent before the spirit of the woman he had loved until his kiss swept her finger-tips.
“Dolores, I have come to you. On Earth I was too weak in flesh to show the strength of my regard for you. But you should not have distrusted and deserted me. Didn’t you realize, from your own desolation, how hard it was for me to stay away?”
“Afterward I realized,” she murmured. “Too late I knew.”
“I was fighting your enemies, myself chief among them. I had determined to save your good name. It was ironical that the friend who tried to help me ruined both your life and mine. Had I known about the child, even though I could not have freed myself by law, I should have declared you my wife before the world—not as I’d have wished, but in a binding pact. Dolores, I have come to tell you——”
“So we observe,” slashed His Majesty’s sword-sharp voice. “And might I inquire just why you presume to come to this lady—you who have a perfectly bad wife on Earth?”
“I am divorced by death.”
John continued to look only at her whose good-faith was the sine qua non of his desire. She, he could see, was eager to hear him, despite her apparent fear of the Machiavellian presence. To her he spoke, low and rapidly.
“I found myself in a burning plane at sea. I seemed to hear your voice calling me from far away. But the shortcut I tried to take to you has proved the longest way. When I learned that you had been assigned to Gehenna and I by special license to the Fields, I went mad with rage. That you should be damned and I rewarded for the selfsame crime was unspeakable! They could not drive me back. To be spiritually chained to earth would be bad enough, yet that would have a mortal limit. Even Mors does not seem to know the date of the Second Call. A century on Earth is accounted only an hour here. To wait around in futile transitions from fear to hope—from hope to fear——”
“Why didn’t you go on when you had a chance”—again Satan interposed—“on toward that nice place called Paradise?”