"What you did for me six years ago. Open the gate of a refuge where a sinner may hide the remnant of a worthless life, where I may spend the last dregs in the cup, drop by drop, where I may die day by day, on my knees, in penitential prayer."
"I opened that gate. You were safe in such a refuge; and you broke out again and came back to the world, twenty times worse than you were before. The life you have been leading since you married Provana's widow is about the most worthless, the most abject life that a reasonable being could lead, the life of empty pleasure, of sensuality and self-indulgence, a life that debases the man himself, and corrupts and ruins his associates."
"I had to forget. If all that the world calls pleasure could have been distilled into one little drug that would have blotted out remembrance, I should have wanted no more race-horses, no more racing yachts, no more flying-machines, no more cards or dice, only that one little drug. Father, when I stood before you six years ago in this room, a miserable wretch, I had to keep my secret for her sake. I have nothing to hide now. It was I who killed Mario Provana."
"I knew."
"You knew?"
"Yes, I knew that night as much as I know now. I knew the guilt you wanted to hide in a cloister. I knew your sin and your remorse; but I doubted your perseverance; a doubt that was too speedily justified by the event."
"It was the fatal course my mother took. She brought Vera to the place where I thought that I and my sin were buried. I did not yield without a struggle; in long days of depression, in long nights of fever, I wrestled with Satan for my soul. I called upon my manhood, my honour, my will-power, and I even thought that I had conquered; and then, in an instant, my passionate heart gave way, and I walked out of that house of rest, a fallen spirit. But, oh, the rapture of the moment when I held her in my arms, and told her that I renounced all—the hope of heaven, the certainty of peace—for her love."
"Oh, the pity of it, my unhappy Claude!"
"You ask me no questions, Father?"
"To what end? You are not in the confessional. There may be details that would in some degree mitigate your guilt; but murder is a heinous sin, and I fear in your case it had been led up to by guilt almost as dark, the spoiling of a pure woman's soul. If the murder was not deliberate you cannot urge the same excuse for the sin of seduction, that sin which includes every abomination—hypocrisy, the falsehood that betrays a trusting fellow-creature, the calculating cruelty that sets a man's strength of will against a woman's yielding love."