Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself, and proud memories began to flash through his brain. He saw himself half-clothed galloping across the prairie, on his wild Arab; he heard the sounds of mad revelry round the camp fires at night, his own laugh, that of his drunken comrades, and he scented the mud vapour rising from the rushing leviathan rivers which he had forded many a time on his horse's back.
A very different motto had ruled that merry, devil-may-care life. Then, "Repent nothing" had been written in sunbeams on his heart. "Repent nothing!" had cried the voice of the tempest and the laughter of his mistresses, and everything that had language.
But now?
The autumn wind moaned against the leaden casements of the church windows. It made a sort of plaintive, whimpering melody--almost like the whimper of a penitent soul; and when a faint ray of sunshine found its way into the gloomy edifice, it pointed at once a didactic finger at the words which held out hopes of a churchyard solace--
"Peace be with you."
He stretched his limbs and leaned back, and as he did so he heard behind him, scarcely a foot from his ear, a low, soft, bitter weeping; such weeping as comes only from the heart of little children or love-sick women.
He shuddered. A wave of stupid pity, which made him vexed with himself, passed over him and seemed to soften him towards her. In another moment he would have turned round to whisper a word of comfort. But then Ulrich's voice was heard saying, in affectionate remonstrance, "Pull yourself together, dear child." And at the sound Leo became frozen again.
But the sobbing continued. Tender and ingratiating, like an oft-repeated question, it got on his nerves and penetrated to his soul.
"Oh, that I might be left in peace," a voice within him cried. "Alone with my God."
But the woman was there, and there she would stay, sucking from his heart with her sobs all his calmness and strength of purpose.