“Oh, yes, you look queer enough,” she said, with ringing sincerity. “You'll be all the better for a wash and brush up.”
“You forget our business, madam,” said Evan, in a shaking voice; “we have no concern but to kill each other.”
“Well, I shouldn't be killed looking like that if I were you,” she replied, with inhuman honesty.
Evan stood and rolled his eyes in masculine bewilderment. Then came the final change in this Proteus, and she put out both her hands for an instant and said in a low tone on which he lived for days and nights:
“Don't you understand that I did not dare to stop you? What you are doing is so mad that it may be quite true. Somehow one can never really manage to be an atheist.”
Turnbull stood staring at the sea; but his shoulders showed that he heard, and after one minute he turned his head. But the girl had only brushed Evan's hand with hers and had fled up the dark alley by the lodge gate.
Evan stood rooted upon the road, literally like some heavy statue hewn there in the age of the Druids. It seemed impossible that he should ever move. Turnbull grew restless with this rigidity, and at last, after calling his companion twice or thrice, went up and clapped him impatiently on one of his big shoulders. Evan winced and leapt away from him with a repulsion which was not the hate of an unclean thing nor the dread of a dangerous one, but was a spasm of awe and separation from something from which he was now sundered as by the sword of God. He did not hate the atheist; it is possible that he loved him. But Turnbull was now something more dreadful than an enemy: he was a thing sealed and devoted—a thing now hopelessly doomed to be either a corpse or an executioner.
“What is the matter with you?” asked Turnbull, with his hearty hand still in the air; and yet he knew more about it than his innocent action would allow.
“James,” said Evan, speaking like one under strong bodily pain, “I asked for God's answer and I have got it—got it in my vitals. He knows how weak I am, and that I might forget the peril of the faith, forget the face of Our Lady—yes, even with your blow upon her cheek. But the honour of this earth has just this about it, that it can make a man's heart like iron. I am from the Lords of the Isles and I dare not be a mere deserter. Therefore, God has tied me by the chain of my worldly place and word, and there is nothing but fighting now.”
“I think I understand you,” said Turnbull, “but you say everything tail foremost.”