“I went to her home, which was quite a large estate, to bid her good-bye. I still had the indifferent feeling, though my mind had that queer, detached sensation one gets in a fever, and felt, somehow, as if it were outside of the rest of me. Her brothers and sisters and I sat about talking constrainedly until the time came for her departure. She was to go off in the carriage to the station with no one accompanying her save the coachman. It rolled up to the door and they all crowded out to see her off. They were a rather grim lot, standing there, though no one was weeping. As for her, her face had the strangest mixture of joy and sorrow, which was exactly mirrored in her mother’s. The rest were all frankly and achingly unhappy. I was relapsing more and more and more into a dazed condition.
“When she said good-bye to me, I took her hand, quite unconsciously, and kissed it. It was trembling, which pierced my heart and made me gasp violently. I have no recollection at all of her actual departure, but when she was gone I must have been overcome by it, for I heard some one say, ‘He’s going to faint,’ and then one of her brothers took me inside and gave me a drink. I had several more, which increased my state of mental detachment, but did not affect my mental processes in the least. After a while I went outside the house and wandered about the lawn, until finally I sat down on a bench bordering a wide patch of grass on which there were no trees or shrubbery of any kind. I don’t think I noticed it, but night had practically fallen, and darkness was gradually enveloping the place. The thought of her trembling hand kept coming back to me, making the blood in my head throb violently, when suddenly, with a wrench that shook my whole body, my head cleared absolutely. I realized then, for the first time, that she was irretrievably gone, and the realization flung me into a rage. I cursed God in unutterable vileness for taking her from me, for making of life such a deceiving, rotten thing, and for setting me down in the midst of it! I am neither a savage, nor a superstitious idiot, but as I stand here, I wonder I wasn’t struck down by His almighty hand for the filth and blasphemy I put upon my tongue that night!
“Then, out on the very center of the lawn before me, appeared a column of cottony-white smoke which, by indescribable foldings, formed itself into a woman of the most unearthly and terrible beauty. She was naked, and each particle of her white skin seemed to be shouting the fact of her nakedness aloud. The steely outline of her bare flesh cut the stuff of night away, and flashed out its blinding brilliance.
“She commenced to sing. There is a certain way of striking a harp which gives it a shuddering noise, and this, magnified beyond measure, is the nearest thing to a description I can give of the beginning of her song, which poured out of her lips in a thick flame of sound. It pressed down on me with the volume of a thousand storms, when suddenly I realized that she was singing in a man’s voice! Without thought, the conviction flashed on me that this was undoubtedly the devil, and that all her beauty was false. With a shriek of awful fear I called on God to protect me! Immediately the song caught in the throat of the thing, man or beast, whatever it was, and the body commenced to distort into sheer ugliness without form. I don’t know how it finally disappeared, for I went into a raving delirium and swooned.
“The next two months I spent in a sanitarium on the verge of insanity. All I can remember of this is an occasional flash of miraculous fear, when I seemed to be vainly fleeing the avenging hand of God. As soon afterward as I was able, I joined the priesthood, and I don’t mind saying that it was through an actual, original fear of God and nothing else.”
“What about your philosophy?” I asked.
“I still have that,” he answered. “And it required very little reconciliation to keep it. The realization of the part of celibacy in it came to me about a year after I was ordained, as a feeling, or conviction. Of course the refutation of my argument is that the Church makes marriage a sacrament. I suppose most men have this explained to them before they become priests, but I never found it necessary.”
“Is the girl a nun now?” I pursued.
“No,” he said, a faint smile lurking about the corners of his mouth. “She never took the final vows, but left the convent and married. She has five very beautiful children, one of whom, the eldest, I’m marrying next week. In fact, he’s named for me.”