"Very."
"Why—Good God!—I don't want to make her unhappy!"
"I know you don't, my son; I think there is something very high and fine in both of you. Suppose we walk over and see Dolores, and talk it over with her."
"Where to, Father?"
"To the cathedral. Dolores is still in the cathedral. You can have privacy there."
The salesman got up unsteadily. The priest took his arm, and together the two men walked out of the palace. As they passed out at the east entrance, Strawbridge glanced down at the river. Just beneath the piazza a little fish-boat lay moored to the bank. It had been scrubbed and sanded until it gleamed in the sunshine, as white as a bone.
An intermezzo of thoughts danced through the drummer's head as he accompanied the priest, for his final talk with Dolores. He began to suspect that Father Benicio had used the order for the rifles quite as adroitly, to separate him from the señora, as he had used the nun's gown to withdraw the Spanish girl from the bed of General Fombombo. It was the same kind of stratagem, the same kind of hateful cleverness in pulling just the right strings in human beings to move them toward his own ends.
As the two men walked toward the cathedral, Strawbridge looked at the ascetic face of the father, the precise stock about his neck, and his delicate fingers smoothing down the girdle of his cassock. The drummer studied him angrily, and made mental surges to shake loose from this order for rifles and recover his moral right to Dolores again. Moreover, he was uneasy about the approaching interview with the Spanish girl. He began thinking what he would say. He massed his arguments for elopement just as he always massed his selling points before calling on a prospective buyer. He would bring her to his side by the verve and swing of his attack.
In the entrance of the cathedral, the priest dipped his finger in the shell font and crossed himself. Then both men reduced their footfalls almost to silence and moved along the left aisle in front of a row of chapels. The drummer could half see their crosses and passions in the dusky light of the church. Here and there, over the shadowy building, knelt men and women at their devotions. The pleasant smell of incense filled nave and aisles. From the high altar came the monotone of a priest at his prayers. The ensemble softened the drummer's mood. Involuntarily his thoughts began to throw out those filaments of sentiment toward the past, toward the future, which religious buildings invariably evoke. It loosened his self-centeredness. It tended to strew his entity through time and eternity. It whispered to him that he had not always been what he was, nor would he always be. His excited nerves felt this influence, and he tried to resist it. He tried to brace himself against it. He swore mentally and told himself that he ought to stop where he was, that he ought to go no farther into this softening, deorienting building. He tried to re-collect his arguments for elopement.