CHAPTER XLII
BEFORE THE ALTAR
But for priest, as for warrior, there is no respite from daily duty, to be discharged with scrupulous care and unfailing zeal, however sore may be the heart within, aching under linen garment or proven harness of steel. Assarac must needs officiate at the altar of his god an hour before the sun went down, even had a victorious enemy been wasting the city with fire and sword, or had his own life been about to terminate with the first shadows of night.
How he loathed the mummery, that yet made him all he was; the machinery of which he knew so well each cog-wheel, catch, and lever; the false glare and sparkle that seemed so poor a substitute for the steady rays of truth! And yet he dared not whisper, even to his own heart, how mean and paltry was all this artifice by which he climbed to power.
He had a new religion now—that religion of the heart which sweeps wiser creeds away in a flood of blind unreasoning devotion; which degenerates, without a misgiving, into the wildest fanaticism, and can number its martyrs, as compared with those sacrificed to any other superstition, at the rate of a hundred to one.
He did not conceal from himself that he loved the queen—he, for whom the love of woman must ever be as the blind man's desire for light, fiercer, perhaps, and more ungovernable, because of the very impossibility that it should be realised. Cruel are the pangs of a hunger which is not even fed by hope. Intolerable is a thirst to which the very offer of water seems but mockery and aggravation. Nevertheless, he did not care to strive against his folly now. For a time, he had believed himself invulnerable—thought his very nature kept him safe—and that, for him at least, there must ever be an insuperable bar between admiration, regard, sympathy, and the slavish devotion which others call love. After admiration had become indiscriminating, regard unreasoning, and sympathy painful, he shut his eyes to the truth for about a day; but when he opened them, yielded without effort, plunging wildly into the abyss, owning a certain morbid pride, in the consciousness of his self-immolation, the while.
And now heart, brain, and faculties were all saturated with the poison. His strong will yielded gladly to the spell; his keen intellect was content to follow where it ought to lead; and had the queen bid him help her, as she said, to wrap the world in flames, his own hands would have brought the fire, though it scorched him to the bone.
To say that he loved is to say that he was jealous; but the torture he suffered was to that of other men as a cancer feeding on the vitals to a flesh-wound lacerating the skin. They might fret and struggle, gnashing their teeth, raving vengeance, threatening reprisals, alternately worsting the rival and reproaching the idol; but he must suffer in silence, smiling however sad, erect however crushed and humbled, outwardly serene though troubled to very madness within.
And all unvisited by a ray of light, a glimpse of hope, even by the dream of what might be, which has gilded so many a weary night-watch with fleeting visions of the dawn. Surely, through its very degradation, there was something sublime in such utter self-abasement, such complete self-sacrifice of love!