She looked at the inscription on the cross, legible in the moonlight, deeply cut in large Gothic letters upon the grey stone, filled in with dark crimson.
"Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord."
Who had put that inscription upon the cross? It was not there when the monument was first put up. Christabel remembered going with Jessie to see the grave in that dim half-blank time before she went to Switzerland. Then there was nothing but a name and a date. And now, in awful distinctness, there appeared those terrible words—God's own promise of retribution—the claim of the Almighty to be the sole avenger of human wrongs.
And she, reared by a religious woman, brought up in the love and fear of God, had ignored that sublime and awful attribute of the Supreme. She had not been content to leave her lover's death to the Great Avenger. She had brooded on his dark fate, until out of the gloom of despair there had arisen the image of a crafty and bloody retribution. "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." So runs the dreadful sentence of an older law. The newer, lovelier law, which began in the after-glow of Philosophy, the dawn of Christianity, bids man leave revenge to God. And she, who had once called herself a Christian, had planned and plotted, making herself the secret avenger of a criminal who had escaped the grip of the law.
"Must he lie in his grave, unavenged, until the Day of Judgment?" she asked herself. "God's vengeance is slow."
An hour later, and Christabel, pale and exhausted, her garments heavy with dew, was kneeling by her boy's bed in the faint light of the night-lamp; kneeling by him as she had knelt a year ago, but never since her return from Switzerland—praying as she had not prayed since Angus Hamleigh's death. After those long, passionate prayers, she rose and looked at the slumberer's face—her husband's face in little—but oh! how pure and fresh and radiant. God keep him from boyhood's sins of self-love and self-indulgence—from manhood's evil passions, hatred and jealousy. All her life to come seemed too little to be devoted to watching and guarding this beloved from the encircling snares and dangers of life. Pure and innocent now, in this fair dawn of infancy, he nestled in her arms—he clung to her and believed in her. What business had she with any other fears, desires, or hopes—God having given her the sacred duties of maternity—the master-passion of motherly love?
"I have been mad!" she said to herself; "I have been living in a ghastly dream: but God has awakened me—God's word has cured me."
God's word had come to her at the crisis of her life. A month ago, while her scheme of vengeance seemed still far from fulfilment, that awful sentence would hardly have struck so deeply. It was on the very verge of the abyss that those familiar words caught her; just when the natural faltering of her womanhood, upon the eve of a terrible crime, made her most sensitive to a sublime impression.
The first faint streak of day glimmered in the east, a pale cold light, livid and ghostly upon the edge of the sea yonder, white and wan upon the eastward points of rock and headland, when Jessie Bridgeman was startled from her light slumbers by a voice at her bedside. She was always an early riser, and it cost her no effect to sit up in bed, with her eyes wide open, and all her senses on the alert.