“O Satan, have mercy on us!”
But the entranced youth cared little now for the diabolic litany. One idea seized and was burning up the vital spark of him. As the creature waxed in beauty he knew her—June Tilney! Yes, it was she—or was it the daughter of the devil in the Rops picture?—who drew him toward her with an irresistible caress in her eyes; eyes full of the glamour of Gehenna, eyes charged with sins without joy, penitence without hope. Forgotten her warnings before this Kundry of Golgotha.
“O Satan come down to us,” rhythmically crooned the grovelling old man.
This, Satan? This radiant maiden with the flowery nimbus and beaming eyes, her young breasts carolling a magnificat as they pointed to the zenith—Oswald stumbled to the foot of the gibbet, in his ears the throbbing of death. Her glance of cadent glory transfixed him. Scorched by the vision, some fibre snapped in his brain and he triumphantly cried:
“Thou art a goddess, not the Devil.”
A freezing blast overturned him, the saints of hell encircled him, as he heard Van Zorn’s grinding sobs:
“Thou hast denied the Devil! Thou hast committed the Supreme Sin! Quickly worship, else be banished forever from the only Paradise!”
Sick, his lips twisting with anguish, Invern had sufficient will to close his eyes and despairingly groan: “Son of Mary, save me!” The apparition crumbled. After a panic plunge he found himself somehow in the wintry street, his forehead wet with fear, his nerves tugging in their sheaths like wild animals leashed, his heart a cinder in a world of smoke....
From Asia Minor, years later, the brothers received a letter signed by Oswald Invern. In it there were misty hints of monastic immurement, and the hopelessness of expiating a certain strange crime, compared with which the sin against the Holy Ghost is but a youthful peccadillo. The Hollin boys giggled in unison.