“You are quite mad,” I repeated.
“Strange,” he said slowly. “You stake your life on my wife’s innocence, yet you refuse me the only means of vindicating it!”
“I would give my life for any one of you—but what you ask is not mine to give.”
“The priest first—the man afterward?” he sneered.
“Long afterward!”
He measured me with a contemptuous eye. “We laymen are ready to give the last shred of flesh from our bones, but you priests intend to keep your cassocks whole.”
“I tell you my cassock is not mine,” I repeated.
“And, by God,” he cried, “you are right; for it’s mine! Who put it on your back but my father? What kept it there but my charity? Peasant! beggar! Hear his holiness pontificate!” “Yes,” I said, “I was a peasant and a beggar when your father found me; and if he had left me one I might have been excused for putting my hand to any ugly job that my betters required of me; but he made me a priest, and so set me above all of you, and laid on me the charge of your souls as well as mine.”
He sat down shaken with dreadful tears. “Ah,” he broke out, “would you have answered me thus when we were boys together, and I stood between you and Andrea?”
“If God had given me the strength.”