It was an evil hour when Griffith attacked her saint with violence. The woman was too high-spirited, and too sure of her own rectitude, to endure that: so, instead of crushing her, it drove her to retaliation,—and to imprudence.
These visits to console Father Leonard were quietly watched by Ryder, for one thing. But, worse than that, they placed Mrs. Gaunt in a new position with Leonard, and one that melts the female heart. She was now the protectress and the consoler of a man she admired and revered. I say if anything on earth can breed love in a grand female bosom, this will.
She had put her foot on a sunny slope clad with innocent-looking flowers; but more and more precipitous at every step, and perdition at the bottom.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Father Leonard, visited, soothed, and petted by his idol, recovered his spirits, and, if he pined during her absence, he was always so joyful in her presence that she thought of course he was permanently happy; so then, being by nature magnanimous and placable, she began to smile on her husband again, and a tacit reconciliation came about by natural degrees.
But this produced a startling result.
Leonard, as her confessor, could learn everything that passed between them; he had only to follow established precedents, and ask questions his Church has printed for the use of confessors. He was mad enough to put such interrogatories.
The consequence was, that one day, being off his guard, or literally unable to contain his bursting heart any longer, he uttered a cry of jealous agony, and then, in a torrent of burning, melting words, appealed to her pity. He painted her husband's happiness, and his own misery, and barren desolation, with a fervid, passionate eloquence that paralyzed his hearer, and left her pale and trembling, and the tears of pity trickling down her cheek.
Those silent tears calmed him a little; and he begged her forgiveness, and awaited his doom.
"I pity you," said she, angelically. "What? you jealous of my husband! O, pray to Christ and Our Lady to cure you of this folly."