Gordon seemed to hear Annabel’s voice repeating an old question: “What do you believe in that is good, I should like to know?” The friar had not asked questions; he had spoken as if voicing a faith common to them both and to all men.
Padre Somalian said no more. He left the room slowly.
The man standing by the window had made no reply. In the old days he would have smiled. Now his brow frowned haggardly. The age-old answer of the churchman! To what multitudinous human miseries it had proffered comfort! The sinless suffering and its promise. What an unostentatiously beautiful belief—if it were only true. If it were only true!
“What an advantage,” he thought, “its possession gives the padre here! If it is true, he will have his reward hereafter; if there is no hereafter, he at the worst can be but with the infidel in his eternal sleep, having had the assistance of an exalted hope through life without subsequent disappointment. I have no horror of the awakening. In the midst of myriads of living and dead creations, why should I be anxious about an atom? It will not please the great ‘I’ that sowed the star-clusters to damn me for an unbelief I cannot help, to a worse perdition than that I walk through now—and shall walk through as long as I live!”
He spoke the last phrase half-aloud. “As long as I live.” Why should it be for long? Here—despair; there—no worse, if not a dreamless sleep!
“Why not?” he said to himself with grim humor. “I should many a good day have blown my brains out but for the recollection that it would pleasure Lady Noël,—and even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her!”
He turned and threw the window open and a scurry of rainy wind whirled the sheets of paper about the floor. He looked out and down. On that side of the island the beach had been only a narrow weedy ribbon soaked by every storm. Now the wind that had driven the sea into the pent lagoon, had piled it deep in the turbid shallows, and the wall fell sheer into the gray-green heave.
“Of what use is my life to any one in the world?” he argued calmly. “Who is there of all that have come nearest to me to whom I have not been a curse? I am bound to a wife who hates me. Years will make my memory a reproach to my child. Through me my enemies stabbed my sister. Shelley, my only comrade in that first year of ostracism, I hurt and disappointed. Teresa, whom I love, and have no right to love—what have I made her life! It is a fitting turn to such a page.”
The inner shutter of the window fastened with a massive iron bolt. He drew the latter from its place, put it into his pocket, and buttoned his coat tightly. A sentence oddly recurred to him at the moment—a verse from a quaint old epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, unknown to the Vulgate, which, written in Armenian, he had found in the monastery library and translated to torture his mind to attention: “Henceforth, no one can trouble me further; for I bear on my body this fetter.” A seemly text for him it would be soon!
He approached the window.