On the stairs leading to Mrs. Burgoyne's rooms he met Reggie Brooklyn coming down. The young man's face was pale and strained. The priest asked him a question, but he ran past without an answer.
Eleanor was alone on the loggia. It was past eight o'clock, and the trees in the courtyard and along the road were alive with fire-flies. Overhead was the clear incomparable sky, faintly pricked with the first stars. Someone was singing 'Santa Lucia' in the distance; and there was the twanging of a guitar.
'Shall I go away?' he said, standing beside her. 'You wished me to come.
But you are fatigued.'
She gave him her hand languidly.
'Don't go, Father. But let me rest a little.'
'Pay me no attention,' he said. 'I have my office.'
He took out his breviary, and there was silence.
After a while, when he could no longer see even the red letters of his little book and was trusting entirely to memory, Eleanor said, with a sudden clearness of voice,—
A strange thing happened to me to-day, Father. I thought I would tell you. For many many years I have been haunted by a kind of recurrent vision. I think it must have come, to begin with, from the influence of a clergyman—a very stern, imaginative, exacting man—who prepared me for confirmation. Suddenly I see the procession of the Cross; the Lord in front, with the Crown of Thorns dripping with blood; the thieves following; the crowd, the daughters of Jerusalem. Nothing but that—but always very vivid, the colours as bright as the colours of a Van Eyck—and bringing with it an extraordinary sense of misery and anguish—of everything that one wants to forget and refuse in life. The man to whom I trace it was a saint, but a forbidding one. He made me afraid of him; afraid of Christianity. I believed, but I never loved. And when his influence was withdrawn, I threw it all behind me, in a great hurry. But this impression remained—like a nightmare. I remember the day I was presented; there, in the midst of all the feathers and veils and coronets, was the vision,—and the tumult of ghastly and crushing thoughts that spread from it. I remember hating Christianity that day; and its influence in the world.
'Last night, just before the dawn, I looked out; and there was the vision again, sweeping over the forests, and up into the clouds that hung over Monte Amiata. And I hated it no more. There was no accompanying horror. It seemed to me as natural as the woods; as the just-kindling light. And my own soul seemed to be rapt into the procession—the dim and endless procession of all times and nations—and to pass away with it,—I knew not where….