As the convent came in sight, Manisty paused.
'You are going in to see her?'
The priest assented.
'Then I will come up later.'
They parted, and Father Benecke entered the convent alone.
Five days more! Would anything happen—or nothing? Manisty's wounded vanity held him at arm's length; Miss Foster could not forgive him. But the priest knew Eleanor's heart; and what else he did not know he divined. All rested with the American girl, with the wounded tenderness, the upright independence of a nature, which, as the priest frankly confessed to himself, he did not understand.
He was not, indeed, without pricks of conscience with regard to her. Supposing that she ultimately yielded? It was he who would have precipitated the solution; he who would in truth have given her to Manisty. Might he not, in so doing, have succoured the one life only to risk the other? Were Manisty's the hands in which to place a personality so noble and so trusting as that of the young girl?
But these qualms did not last long. As we have seen he had an invincible tenderness for Manisty. And in his priestly view women were the adjuncts and helpers of men. Woman is born to trouble; and the risks that she must take grow with her. Why fret about the less or more? His own spiritual courage would not have shrunk from any burden that love might lay upon it. In his Christian stoicism—the man of the world might have called it a Christian insensibility—he answered for Lucy.
Why suppose that she would shrink, or ought to shrink? Eve's burden is anyway enormous; and the generous heart scorns a grudging foresight.
As to Mrs. Burgoyne—ah! there at least he might be sure that he had not dared in vain. While Lucy was steel to him, Eleanor not only forgave him, but was grateful to him with a frankness that only natures so pliant and so sweet have the gift to show. In a few hours, as it seemed to him, she had passed from fevered anguish into a state which held him often spellbound before her, so consonant was it to the mystical instincts of his own life. He thought of her with the tenderest reverence, the most sacred rejoicing. Through his intercourse with her, moreover, while he guided and sustained her, he had been fighting his own way back to the sure ground of spiritual hope and confidence. God had not withdrawn from him the divine message! He was about to step forth into the wilderness; but this light went with him.