'I thank you with all my heart. Your words touch me very much, but they seem to me somehow remote—impossible. Let me think of them. I am not strong enough to talk more now.'
She bade him good-night, and left him. With her feeble step she slowly mounted the Sassetto path, and it was some little time before her slender form and white dress disappeared among the trees.
Father Benecke remained alone—a prey to many conflicting currents of thought.
* * * * *
For him too the hour had been strangely troubling and revolutionary. On the recognised lines of Catholic confession and direction, all that had been asked of him would have been easy to give. As it was, he had been obliged to deal with the moral emergency as he best could; by methods which, now that the crisis was over, filled him with a sudden load of scrupulous anguish.
The support of a great system had been withdrawn from him. He still felt himself neither man nor priest—wavering in the dark.
This poor woman! He was conscious that her statement of her case had roused in him a kind of anger; so passionate and unblushing had been the egotism of her manner. Even after his long experience he felt in it something monstrous. Had he been tender, patient enough?
What troubled him was this consciousness of the woman, as apart from the penitent, which had overtaken him; the woman with her frail physical health, possibly her terror of death, her broken heart. New perplexities and compunctions, not to be felt within the strong dykes of Catholic practice, rushed upon him as he sat thinking under the falling night. The human fate became more bewildering, more torturing. The clear landscape of Catholic thought upon which he had once looked out was wrapping itself in clouds, falling into new aspects and relations. How marvellous are the chances of human history! The outward ministry had been withdrawn; in its stead this purely spiritual ministry had been offered to him. 'Domine, in cælo misericordia tua—judicia tua abyssus multa!'
* * * * *
Recalling what he knew of Mrs. Burgoyne's history and of Manisty's, his mind trained in the subtleties of moral divination soon reconstructed the whole story. Clearly the American lady now staying with Mrs. Burgoyne—who had showed towards himself such a young and graceful pity—was the other woman.