How often, waking in the perfumed, darkened chamber from the deep, dreamless slumber that falls on the indulged and satiate senses, had not Dunoisse found himself alone, and realized, with a creeping chill of awe mingled with repugnance, that she was kneeling, a white-robed figure veiled in shadowy hair, before the ivory Crucifix that hung above the prie-dieu, praying....
Ah! with what abandonment of sighs and sobs, and tears!... Ere she would rise, traverse the velvet carpet silently as some pale moonray, and glide, mysteriously smiling, into her lover’s arms.
“Why should I not pray?” she had said to him once. “After all, Christ died for sinners, and I am a sinner.... And even devils believe, they say. It is only men who deny!”
Dunoisse had long joined the ranks of the deniers. He had determined that for him yonder shining, jeweled tabernacle should thenceforth house no Unspeakable Mystery, shelter no Heavenly Guest. Nothing beyond an amiable superstition, an innocent, exquisite myth, embodying a profound religious truth for two hundred and sixty millions of Christians; modified or rejected by the Lutheran, Reformed, and Presbyterian Churches; ignored by Confucianist, Taoist, and Buddhist, abhorred by the Hindu, the Mohammedan, and the Jew, should henceforth be enshrined there. He had come to the conclusion that it was better so.
The light of faith had been quenched in the man’s heart by his own deliberate act of will. He had said to his soul, unwitting that he had thus spoken:
“If I believed, could I continue to live as I am doing, storing up sharp retribution, dreadful expiation, inconceivable anguish for the world to come? Not so! Therefore I will forget such words as Death and Judgment. For these poignant, embittered, passing joys, I am content to barter the hope of eternal bliss.”
And yet, upon those rare occasions when, as now, Dunoisse found himself in the House of his Maker, the still air, fragrant with the incense of the most recent Sacrifice, oppressed him, and the very silence seemed eloquent as a voice of Divine reproach....
For you may slough your skin of State-patronized, easy-going Protestantism as easily as you can change your political convictions, and presently, with Modern Buddhism, or Spiritualism, or Platonism, Christian Science, Agnosticism, Mormonism, or Hedonism, be covered and clad anew, but Catholicism penetrates the bones, and permeates the very marrow. You cannot pluck that forth; it is rooted in the fibers of the soul.
Dunoisse followed his Fate up the great echoing nave of the Cathedral, ushered by the gyrating von Steyregg. Penitents of both sexes, waiting their turn in lengthy rows outside the occupied confessionals, glanced up from their beads, as, in a whisper that rattled amidst the carved rafters of the lofty roof, the agent announced: