He felt all the indignation natural to a sincere and high-spirited man, who finds that he has been befooled by those whom he has trusted; but, summoning all his powers to extricate himself from his desolate dilemma, he found himself without resource. What public declaration on his part could alter the undeniable fact, now circulating throughout the world, that in the supernatural scene of yesterday he was the willing and the principal actor? Unquestionably he had been very imprudent, not only in that instance, but in his habitual visits to the church; he felt all that now. But he was torn and shattered, infinitely distressed, both in body and in mind; weak and miserable; and he thought he was leaning on angelic hearts, when he found himself in the embrace of spirits of another sphere.
In what a position of unexampled pain did he not now find himself! To feel it your duty to quit the faith in which you have been bred must involve an awful pang; but to be a renegade without the consolation of conscience, against your sense, against your will, alike for no celestial hope and no earthly object—this was agony mixed with self-contempt.
He remembered what Lady Corisande had once said to him about those who quitted their native church for the Roman communion. What would she say now? He marked in imagination the cloud of sorrow on her imperial brow and the scorn of her curled lip.
Whatever happened, he could never return to England—at least for many years, when all the things and persons he cared for would have disappeared or changed, which is worse; and then what would be the use of returning? He would go to America, or Australia, or the Indian Ocean, or the interior of Africa; but even in all these places, according to the correspondence of the Propaganda, he would find Roman priests, and active priests. He felt himself a lost man; not free from faults in this matter, but punished beyond his errors. But this is the fate of men who think they can struggle successfully with a supernatural power.
A servant opened a door and said, in a loud voice, that, with his permission, his eminence, the English cardinal, would wait on him.
CHAPTER 68
It is proverbial to what drowning men will cling. Lothair, in his utter hopelessness, made a distinction between the cardinal and the conspirators. The cardinal had been absent from Rome during the greater portion of the residence of Lothair in that city. The cardinal was his father’s friend, an English gentleman, with an English education, once an Anglican, a man of the world, a man of honor, a good, kind-hearted man. Lothair explained the apparent and occasional cooperation of his eminence with the others, by their making use of him without a due consciousness of their purpose on his part. Lothair remembered how delicately his former guardian had always treated the subject of religion in their conversations. The announcement of his visit, instead of aggravating the distresses of Lothair, seemed, as all these considerations rapidly occurred to him, almost to impart a ray of hope.
“I see,” said the cardinal, as he entered serene and graceful as usual, and glancing at the table, “that you have been reading the account of our great act of yesterday.”
“Yes; and I have been reading it,” said Lothair, reddening, “with indignation; with alarm; I should add, with disgust.”