"Yes, but then what shall I do?—in reality, was it not monstrous of me to dispute the monk's orders, to wish to carry them out in my own way, to take them up at my convenience! If this goes on, I shall sin so much to-day that I shall have to confess again," he said.
To break through this feeling, he threw himself again upon his wheel, but then stupefied himself completely; the device he had tried to keep himself before the Virgin at least was used up. When he wished to abstract himself and to bring up a recollection of Memling, he could not succeed, and his lip-prayers, wearying him, distressed him.
"My soul is worn out," he thought, "I should do well to let it rest, while I stay quiet."
He wandered round the pond, not knowing what to do next.
"Suppose I go to my cell!" He went there, tried to become absorbed in the Little Office of the Virgin, and did not grasp a single word of the phrases he was reading. He went down and began to prowl about the park again.
"This is enough to drive me mad," he cried—and mournfully he exclaimed, "I ought to be happy, to pray in peace and prepare myself for to-morrow's act, yet never have I been so restless, so upset, so far from God!
"But I must finish this penance!" Despair seized him, and he was on the point of letting all go; he mortified himself again, and compelled himself to tell the beads.
He finished by despatching them; he was at the end of his powers. And he immediately found a new means of torture.
He reproached himself with having moaned the prayers negligently, without having even seriously tried to follow their meaning. And he was on the point of beginning the rosary over again, but in the face of the evident folly of this suggestion he pulled himself up, refused to listen, and then he worried himself again.
"It is none the less true that you have not literally fulfilled the task assigned you by the confessor, for your conscience reproaches you for your want of reflection and your wandering."