His voice shook, and Florida broke in, “You did nothing wrong. It was I who was cruel for no cause.”
“No, no. You shall not say that,” he returned. “And why should I have cared for a few words, when all your acts had expressed a trust of me that is like heaven to my soul?”
She turned now and looked at him, and he went on. “Ah, I see you do not understand! How could you know what it is to be a priest in this most unhappy city? To be haunted by the strict espionage of all your own class, to be shunned as a spy by all who are not of it! But you two have not put up that barrier which everywhere shuts me out from my kind. You have been willing to see the man in me, and to let me forget the priest.”
“I do not know what to say to you, Don Ippolito. I am only a foreigner, a girl, and I am very ignorant of these things,” said Florida with a slight alarm. “I am afraid that you may be saying what you will be sorry for.”
“Oh never! Do not fear for me if I am frank with you. It is my refuge from despair.”
The passionate vibration of his voice increased, as if it must break in tears. She glanced towards the other room with a little movement or stir.
“Ah, you needn’t be afraid of listening to me!” cried the priest bitterly.
“I will not wake her,” said Florida calmly, after an instant.
“See how you speak the thing you mean, always, always, always! You could not deny that you meant to wake her, for you have the life-long habit of the truth. Do you know what it is to have the life-long habit of a lie? It is to be a priest. Do you know what it is to seem, to say, to do, the thing you are not, think not, will not? To leave what you believe unspoken, what you will undone, what you are unknown? It is to be a priest!”
Don Ippolito spoke in Italian, and he uttered these words in a voice carefully guarded from every listener but the one before his face. “Do you know what it is when such a moment as this comes, and you would fling away the whole fabric of falsehood that has clothed your life—do you know what it is to keep still so much of it as will help you to unmask silently and secretly? It is to be a priest!”