“I shall be always with you,” he answered. “By day, on the sea or in the camp. At night I shall wander with you among the stars.”
“I shall ask the Virgin to watch over you. Every hour I shall pray to God to have you in His keeping, and to guard you from danger.”
His arms tightened. He seemed to hear a chanted litany climbing a marble staircase:
“From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death;
“Good Lord, deliver us.”
SHE BOWED HER HEAD ON THE ARM OF THE BENCH. p. [389].
Had he ever prayed? Not to the God of the orthodox Cassidy, of the stern ecclesiastics who had inveighed against him. Not to the beneficent Father that Dallas and Padre Somalian believed in. Never in his life had he voiced a petition to a higher power. All he had known was that agnostic casuistry of his youth, “The Unknown God”—that fatalistic impersonality of his later career, “The Great Mechanism.” He thought of lines Teresa’s hand had penned, that since a gray dawn when he read and re-read them to the chuckling of a fiend within him had never left his breast. They had opened a spiritual chasm that was ever widening between the old and the new.
“Dearest,” he said, “I would not exchange a prayer of yours for all else life could give. You prayed for me before you ever saw me, when others gave me bitterness and revilings.”
“You never deserved that!”