"To murder."
The other's whole manner changed on the instant. He was no longer the stern Churchman, the inveterate friend of Justice, the prejudiced priest, rigid in a pious convention, who could neither bend nor break. The sin of an infidel breaker of the law, that was one thing; the crime of a son of the Church, which a human soul came to relate in its agony, that was another. He had a crass sense of justice, but there was in him a deeper thing still: the revelation of the human soul, the responsibility of speaking to the heart which has dropped the folds of secrecy, exposing the skeleton of truth, grim and staring, to the eye of a secret earthly mentor.
"If it has been hidden all these years, why do you tell it now, my son?"
"It is the only way."
"Why was it hidden?"
"I have come to confess," answered the man bitterly. The priest looked at him anxiously. "You have spoken rightly, my son. I am not here to ask, but to receive."
"Forgive me, but it is my crime I would speak of now. I choose this moment that another should not suffer for what he did not do."
The priest thought of the man they had left in the little house, and the crime with which he was charged, and wondered what the sinner before him was going to say.
"Tell your story, my son, and God give your tongue the very spirit of truth, that nothing be forgotten and nothing excused."
There was a fleeting pause, in which the colour left the priest's face, and, as he opened the door of his mind—of the Church, secret and inviolate—he had a pain at his heart; for beneath his arrogant churchmanship there was a fanatical spirituality of a mediaeval kind. His sense of responsibility was painful and intense. The same pain possessed him always, were the sin that of a child or a Borgia.