“I hope so; but I think it is best that you should not come here. If you were married, it would be different.”
“I shall not marry,” he replied impatiently. “What then? I am a priest of God, and you may trust me fully. If our Church commenced the confessional, you might enter it without fear, and I—I would listen to the outpourings of your heart. Should you in your grief be afraid to utter them?”
She moved away from him, turning her back; but betrayed herself. He saw the bright colour mount to her neck and mantle there.
“What nonsense you talk!” she said presently, with a forced laugh. “Are you going over to Rome?”
“I might go over to the evil place itself, Ellen, if you were there.”
There was no mistaking the words, the tone, in their diabolic gentleness, their suavity of supreme and total self-surrender. She felt helpless in spite of herself. The man was overmastering her, and rapidly encroaching. She felt like a person morally stifled, and with a strong effort tried to shake the evil influence away.
“I was right,” she said. “We must not meet.”
He smiled sadly.
“As you please. I will come, or I will go, at your will. You have only to say to me, ‘Go and destroy yourself, obliterate yourself for ever from my life, blot yourself out from the roll of living beings,’ and I shall obey you.”
Her spirit revolted more and more against the steadfast, self-assured obliquity of the man. She saw that he was desperate, and that the danger grew with his desperation. In every word he spoke, and in his whole manner, there was the sombre assurance of something between them, of some veiled, but excitable sympathy, which she herself utterly ignored. That moment of wild delirium, when he caught her in his arms and kissed her, seemed, instead of severing them, to have made a link between them. He had been conscious of her indignation, he had even professed penitence; but she saw to her dismay that the fact of his folly filled him, not with fear, but with courage. So she determined to end it once and for ever.