She watched him as he softly opened the door of the chamber where her husband lay, heard the faint cry that greeted him: “Not you! not you!” then the door closed, and she was alone again.
The priest approached the bed, and spoke with gentleness, yet with authority: “F. O'Donovan is too sick to come; and if you wait for another to be sent for, it will be too late. Think of your soul, and let everything else go. In a few hours you may be in the presence of God, listening to your eternal doom. What will you care then, my poor boy, who helped you to loosen from your conscience the sins you have committed in this [pg 088] miserable world? It cannot be because you hate me so much, this unwillingness. Is it because your sins have been so great? There is no sin that I have not heard confessed, I think; and the greater it was, the greater was my comfort and thankfulness that at last it was forgiven. Come, now, I am putting on my stole. Ask the help of God and of our Blessed Mother, and forget who I am. Remember only what I am—the minister of the merciful God—and that I have no feeling, no thought, no wish, but to save you.”
The bed-curtains made a still deeper shade in that shadowed room, and out from the dimness the face of the sick man gleamed white and wild.
“I cannot!” he said. “You would not want to hear me if you knew. You would never give me absolution. You do not know what my sins are.”
The priest seated himself by the bedside, and took in his strong, magnetic hand the thin and shaking hand of the penitent. “No matter what you may tell me, you cannot surprise me,” he said. “Though you should have committed sacrilege and every crime, I cannot, if I would, refuse you absolution. And I would not wish to. I have only pity and love for you. Tell me all now, as if you were telling your own soul. Have no fear.”
“No priest ever before heard such a confession!” The words came faintly. “You do not know.”
“Confess, in the name of God!” repeated the priest. “The flames of hell are harder to bear than any anger of mine can be. God has sent me hither, and I have only to obey him, and listen to your confession, whatever it may be. It is not my choice nor yours. We are both commanded.”
“Promise me that I shall have absolution! Promise me that you will forgive me!” prayed the young man, clinging to the hand that he had at first shrunk from. “I didn't mean to do what I have done, and I have suffered the torments of the damned for it.”
“I have no right to refuse absolution when you are penitent,” was the answer. “The person who repents and confesses has a right to absolution.”
“You will give it to me, no matter what I may tell you?”