Four years later.
“When the shore is won at last,
Who will count the billows past?”
Keble.
It was winter again; and the winds blew harshly and wailingly around the Castle of Arundel. In the stateliest chamber of that Castle, where the hangings were of cramoisie paned with cloth of gold, the evening tapers were burning low, and a black-robed priest knelt beside the bed where an old man lay dying.
“I can think of nothing more, Father,” faintly whispered the penitent. “I have confessed every sin that I have ever sinned,
so far as my memory serveth: and many men have been worse sinners than I. I never robbed a church in all my wars. I have bequeathed rents and lands to the Priory of God and Saint Pancras at Lewes, for two monks to celebrate day by day masses of our Lady and of the Holy Ghost,—two hundred pounds; and for matins and requiem masses in my chapel here, a thousand marks; and four hundred marks to purchase rent lands for the poor; and all my debts I have had a care to pay. Can I perform any other good work? Will that do, Father?”
“Thou canst do nought else, my son,” answered the priest. “Thou hast right nobly purchased the favour of God, and thine own salvation. Thy soul shall pass, white and pure, through the flames of Purgatory, to be triumphantly acquitted at the bar of God.”
And lifting his hands in blessing, he pronounced the unholy incantation,—“Absolvo te!”
“Thank the saints, and our dear Lady!” feebly responded the dying man. “I am clean and sinless.”
Before the morrow dawned on the Conversion of Saint Paul, that old man knew, as he had never known on earth, whether he stood clean and sinless before God or not. There were no bands in that death. The river did not look dark to him; it did not feel cold as his feet touched it. But on the other side what angels met him? and what entrance was accorded, to that sin-defiled and uncleansed soul, into that Land wherein there shall in no wise enter anything that defileth?