Descend on our apostate race.”
As Mary listened, Teresa came and stood beside her. Convent bred, religion to her had meant churchings, candled processionals and adorations before the crucifix which hung always above her bed. Her mind direct, imaginative, yet with a natural freedom from traditional constraint, suffered for the home-nurtured ceremony left behind in her flight with Gordon. But her new experience retained a sense of devotion deeper because more primitive and instinctive than these: a mystic leaning out toward good intelligences all about her—the pure longing with which she had framed the prayer for Gordon so long ago. She listened eagerly now, not only because of the priestly suggestion in the sound, but also from a thought that the ceremony below had been a part of his England.
This was in her mind as a weighty voice intoned the opening sentences, to drop presently to the recitation of the collect for the day.
While thus absorbed, Gordon and Shelley came and leaned with them at the top of the stair. The congregation was responding now to the Litany:
“From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred and malice, and all uncharitableness,
“Good Lord, deliver us.”
It was not alone Mary Shelley to whom memories were hastening. The chant recalled to Gordon, with a singular, minute distinctness, the dreary hours in the Milbanke pew in the old church at Seaham, where he had passed that “treacle-moon” with Annabel. Blindness of heart, hatred, uncharitableness: he had known all these.
“From lightning and tempest—”
One phase of his old life was lifting before him startlingly clear: the phase that confounded the precept with the practice and resented hypocrisy by a wholesale railing at dogma—the sneer with which the philosophic Roman shrugged at the Galilean altars. The ancient speculation had fallen in the wreck at Venice—to rise again one sodden dawn in the La Mira forest. The discarded images had re-arisen then, but with new outlines. They still framed skepticism, but it was desponding, not scoffing—a hopelessness whose climax was reached in his soul’s bitter cry to Padre Somalian at San Lazzarro: “If it were only true!” Since, he had learned the supreme awakening of love which had already aroused his conscience, and now in its development, that love, lighting and warming his whole field of human sympathy, made him conscious of appetences hitherto unguessed.
“That it may please Thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and turn their hearts;