"Oh, I felt it! I felt it! Something seemed to come out of you and break my will suddenly. Besides"—she hesitated—"besides, there's always something a woman keeps back, they say. I think, perhaps, he is saved from great unhappiness by what you have made me do to-night. I can't say more, even to you."
"My dear, love is never sent idly, never in vain. It is from our ignorant misuse, our blind misapprehension of its meaning, that the pity and the waste come about. Many a precious purpose is brought to nothing by the world's superstition of the happy ending. In love, as in life, those who seek selfishly forever seek vainly; even as they grasp it, the radiant vision turns a corpse within their arms. It is they who humbly and submissively—no matter how hard the law, how intolerable the accident—follow the inscrutable finger beckoning them from pleasant ways, to stumble upon the road that is narrow and steep and dark, who have their heart's desire given them in the end.... Yes! Who is it?"
There was a knock at the door.
"Please, farver, it's Mrs. Murnane come about Jimmy's charackter for the 'am-and-beef shop."
"Say I'm coming.... Would you like to spend a few minutes with me in the church before you go? We have the Forty Hours' devotion this week. I can let you out by the side door into the street. I suppose you have your car?"
She passed before him down the staircase and along a white-washed corridor, whose bluntly pointed windows and doorways were wreathed by texts in Gothic lettering. Mrs. Murnane, a woman with a commanding eye and great digestive capacity, was sitting on a long bench in the hall; the ham-and-beef aspirant, a knock-kneed lad who seemed to grow more uncertain and wavering of outline as he receded from his enormous boots to his cropped white head, sat by her side with an air of being in custody. Behind the bench successive sessions of unwashed heads had besmeared the wall with a grimy average of height.
The church was dark, and silent too; not with the mere absence of sound, but with a positive and penetrative stillness that seemed to radiate from one white disk, rimmed and rayed with gold, and enthroned, amid a phalanx of tapers and sweet waxen flowers, in one of the side chapels. A lad in a scarlet cassock and laced cotta was extinguishing a guttering candle, almost beyond his reach. As he rose on tiptoe the long pole trembled in his hands like a fishing-rod. Within the rails two men, their heads sunk beneath their shoulders, and without the rails two nuns, in broad white cornichons and turned-back sleeves of serge, watched the host motionlessly. On a votive-wheel near by many tapers, some white, some red, were blazing and dripping. The smell of incense was everywhere.
She knelt upon a rush-seated prie-dieu in the same posture of absorbed devotion as the others, but her thoughts strayed, like a child's brought to church by an elder sister. She tried to count the tapers—how many red? how many white?—wondered what the nuns' faces were like behind the flapped white caps. The scene took shape in her head in little biting phrases, just as another kind of artist would have seen it in tone and composition. She was rather restless, wanted to be gone, and even said to herself that this last move of Father Vernon's was in doubtful taste. After going through so much——!
But the silence, the stillness, the enervating loaded atmosphere gained her little by little. She had an access of devotion: tapers, flowers, prostrate fellow-worshippers were all part of some intimate rite of which there were two protagonists—that white sphere toward which, from time to time, she stole an awed glance, and she—a white host herself, with tired, folded pinions, submissive, only waiting for fire from heaven to complete the sacrifice....
... Oh, God—the pain! the pain in her head! She wanted to scream, to faint, but her horror, the refined woman's horror of any "scene," kept her dumb and almost still. She prayed, wildly and incoherently—pressed her gloved fingers into her temples; her forehead was damp with perspiration....