"He had borne our Infirmities and Carried out
Sorrows. He was Wounded for our Iniquities.
He was Bruised for our sins."
The words seemed to have a physical as well as mental force and impressiveness. It was as though they swept from the high white Table through the fragrant, wax-lit stillness of the Sanctuary, winnowing the still, spicy air of the dark nave and the lighter side-aisles as with wide, powerful, unseen wings. And despite the presence of nearly a hundred people scattered about the great building, the stillness was extraordinary. It got on the nerves.
Almost awfully upon the nerves. For a long way behind her, where the shadowy dusk brooded thickest, and the white tortured Figure of the Crucified hung drooping from the great Cross of black marble against the background of the towering oak screen, it was as though the first great drops of a thunder-shower were falling, pat, pat, pat! upon the pavement below.
Merely a trick of imagination—and yet it tortured. One knew by sensations like these that one had been frightfully overstrained of late. One had done lots of things one regretted—several things one disliked to think of; one thing that made one hate oneself sometimes with a very fury of intensity, when one wasn't too busy hating him. But since he was drowned, one had felt it scarcely cricket to go on expending fierce resentment and savage disgust and acute loathing in that direction. One heaped it on the living of the two gross, sensual offenders. Oh God! when Sherbrand had said in that tone of triumph:
"I come to you clean!"
How inexpressibly one had abominated oneself. How one had shrunk against the side of the taxicab, pretending to look after wretched little decadent Wyvenhoe and the unquenchable Mrs. Mallison—feigning sudden absorption in the Piccadilly shop-windows, to escape those clear undoubting eyes that pierced one to the very soul. To be thought good when one was wicked, pure when one was the other thing; believed candid when one was a living lie. Ah!—that not only pierced but scorched.
If anybody, a month or so back, had asked Patrine: "Are you a Christian?" she would have retorted: "What are you playing at? Of course I am—I suppose!" Of late that conjectural Being she had called God had receded, faded, grown dimmer, and vanished. But here in the stillness, looking towards the Altar, she was conscious as those candle-flames went up like prayers from faithful souls, that Good and Evil were living warring Forces. You chose White or Black deliberately, and when Death came—it was anything but the end.
Her hair stiffened slightly on her scalp and a light shudder thrilled through her. She felt with a growing awe, and sense of dreadful certainty, that Someone was looking at her. And to relieve the insupportable tension she stretched out her hand, and took a squat, thick little book from the shelf below the seat in front of her. It was a copy of the Douai translation from the Latin Vulgate of the Bible, and there was a purple marker where she opened it, in the middle of the Book of Job.
"Power and terror are with Him...."
That was the first line that caught her eye. A little lower on the page came: