"I know that," said the man, stolidly. "But you cannot tell of me. I have told you under the seal of confession."
It was quite true: come what would, Gesualdo could never reveal what he had heard. His eyes swam, his head reeled, a deadly sickness came upon him; all his short life simple and harmless things had been around him; he had been told of the crimes of men, but he had never been touched by them; he had known of the sins of the world, but he had never realized them. The sense that the murderer of Tasso Tassilo was within a hand's breadth of him, that these eyes which stared at him, this voice which spoke to him, were those of the actual assassin, that it was possible and yet utterly impossible for him to help justice and save innocence,—all this overcame him with its overwhelming burden of horror and of divided duty. He lost all consciousness as he knelt there, and fell heavily forward on the wood-work of the confessional.
His teachers had said aright, in the days of his novitiate, that he would never be of stern enough stuff to deal with the realities of life.
When he recovered his senses, sight and sound and sensibility all returning to him slowly and with a strange, numb, pricking pain in his limbs and his body and his brain, the church was quite dark, and the man who had confessed his crime to him was gone.
Gesualdo gathered himself up with effort, and sat down on the wooden seat and tried to think. He was bitterly ashamed of his own weakness. What was he worth, he, shepherd and leader of men, if at the first word of horror which affrighted him he fainted as women faint, and failed to speak in answer the condemnation which should have been spoken? Was it for such cowardice as this that they had anointed him and received him as a servitor of the Church?
His first impulse was to go and relate his feebleness and failure to his bishop; the next moment he remembered that even so much support as this he must not seek: to no living being must he tell this wretched blood-secret.
The law which respects nothing would not respect the secrets of the confessional; but he knew that all the human law in the world could not alter his own bondage to the duty he had with his own will accepted.
It was past midnight when, with trembling limbs, he groped his way out of the porch of his church and found the entrance of the presbytery and climbed the stone stairs to his own chamber.
Candida opened her door, and thrust her head through the aperture, and cried to him,—
"Where have you been mooning all this while, and the lamp burning to waste, and your good bed yawning for you? You are not a strong man enough to keep these hours, and for a priest they are not decent ones."