The churchman, with that solemn pronouncement on his lips, stopped short at Gordon’s white, awe-frosted face. There was not true sight but rather a woeful congealed vision in those eyes turned upon the altar; they seemed those of a soul in whom the abrupt certainty of perdition has sheathed itself unawares.
The chaplain drew back. He recognized the man who had come so suddenly to meet that scene. A dark shadow crossed his face. Then muttering a prayer, he followed the nuns to the carriages to bear back the melancholy news to Ravenna.
CHAPTER XLVII
THE COMPLICITY OF THE GODS
“Self-slain!” The words of the priest, as Gordon stood there, seemed to reëcho about him with infinite variations of agony. He had ridden vacant of purpose, destitute of plan—thrilling only to reach her. Desperate, lawless thoughts had rung through his mind as he galloped. Entering the garden he had seen the carriages and heard the chaplain’s cry at the same moment. Then, with the awful instantaneousness of an electric bolt, the blow had fallen. It was the last finality—the closure of the ultimate gateway of hope—the utter assurance of the unescapable doom in which all ends save the worm that dies not and the fire that is not quenched.
He drew closer to the altar, his step dragging as he walked—his infirmity grown all at once painfully apparent—and gazed at the mute face on the cushions. The priest and his escort were forgotten. He knew nothing save that dreadful assertion that had sent the nuns hastily from the door, telling their beads, and had forbidden even the servant to enter.
Self-slain? No, but slain by George Gordon—the accursed bearer of all maranatha, damned to the last jot and tittle. He had done her to death as surely as if his own hand had held the phial lying there to her lips. It was because he had stayed in Ravenna that she lay here dead before the crucifix—the symbol that she had sought at San Lazzarro, that Padre Somalian had prayed to!
Staring across hueless wastes of mental torture to a blank horizon, something the friar had said came to him: “Every man beam a cross of despair to his Calvary.” What a vacuous futility! Infinity, systems, worlds, man, brain. Was this the best the æon-long evolution could offer? This bloodless image nailed upon a tree? What had it availed her?
He suddenly fell on his knees beside her. Dead? Teresa dead? Why, a few months before, at the monastery, he had regarded death for himself with calmness, almost with satisfaction. But not for her—never for her. Was she dead, and he to live on—never to see her, to hear her speak, not even to know that she was somewhere in the world?
He saw for the first time the little book lying open on her breast in the candle-light. He took it mechanically and turned its leaves. As mechanically his eye read, not sensible of what it translated, but as surcharged agony unconsciously seeks relief in the doing of simple, habitual things:
“When presently through all thy veins shall run