“There never was a race yet that was altogether bad,” said the priest. “Virtues may descend from remote ancestors as well as vices,—I think you told me moreover that Captain Hulbert’s mother was a good woman.”
“She was. She was one of my mother’s earliest and dearest friends.”
“Then you should have a better opinion of her son. If ever I met a thoroughly good fellow in my life, I believe I met one the day I made Captain Hulbert’s acquaintance.”
“Pray God you may be right,” said Disney, with a sigh. “I am no judge of character.”
He turned abruptly, and skirted the hill on his way to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where he found shade and seclusion in the early afternoon. The carriages of fashionable Rome had not yet begun to drive in at the gate. The cypress avenues, the groves of immemorial ilex, the verdant lawns where the fountains leapt sunward, were peopled only by creatures of fable, fixed in marble, faun and dryad, hero and god. Martin Disney plunged into the shadow of one of those funereal avenues, and—while the sun blazed in almost tropical splendour upon the open lawn in the far distance—he walked as it were in the deep of night, a night whose gloom harmonized with that darker night in his despairing heart.
Great God, how he had loved her! How he had looked up to her, revering even her weakness as the expression of a childlike purity. And while he had been praying for her, and dreaming of her, and longing for her, and thinking of her as the very type of womanly chastity, unapproachable by temptation, unassailable, secure in her innocence and simplicity as Athene or Artemis with all their armour of defence; while he had so loved and trusted her, she had flung herself into the arms of a profligate—as easily won as the lightest wanton. She had done this thing, and then she had welcomed him, with wan, sweet smiles, to his dishonoured home. She had made him drink the cup of shame—a by-word it might be for the whole parish, as well as for that one man who had dared to hint at evil. And yet he had forgiven her—forgiven one to whom pardon meant only a peaceful ending; forgiven as a man holds himself forgiven by an all-merciful God, as he hears words of pity and promise murmured into his ear by the priest upon the scaffold, when the rope is round his neck and the drop is ready to fall. How could he withhold such pardon when he had been taught that God forgives the repentant murderer?
“THOUGH LOVE AND LIFE AND DEATH SHOULD COME AND GO.”