Two days later Hugh Ritson entered the convent church of St. Margaret.
It was evening service, and the nave was thronged from chancel to porch.
The aisles, which were bare of seats, were filled only half-way down,
the rest of the pavement being empty save for a man here and there who
leaned lightly against the great columns of the heavy colonnade.
The sermon had already begun. Hugh Ritson walked up the aisle
noiselessly until he came close behind the throng of people standing
together. Then he stood at the side of a column and looked around on
those in the nave.
He was within range of the preacher's voice, but he hardly listened. His
eyes traversed the church until at last they rested on one spot in the
south transept, where a company of nuns sat with downcast eyes half
closed. The face of one of them was hidden beneath her drooping coif;
the rosary held to her breast was gripped with nervous fingers. Near at
hand there was another face that riveted Hugh Ritson's gaze. It was the
face of Greta, radiant in its own beauty, and tender with the devotional
earnestness of parted lips and of lashes wet with the dew of a bruised
spirit.
From these two his eyes never wandered for longer than a minute!
Languidly he listened to the words that floated over the people, and
held them mute. The preacher was a slight young man, emaciated, pale,
with lustrous eyes, and a voice that had a thin, meek pipe. But the
discourse was in a strain of feverish excitement, a spirit of hard
intolerance, a tone of unrelenting judgment, that would have befitted
the gigantic figure and thunderous accents of the monk Jerome.
"There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is
death." This was the text, twenty times repeated. Men talked of the
rights of conscience, as if conscience were God's law. They babbled of
toleration, as if any heresy were to be endured, if only it were
believed. Conscience! It was the slave of Circumstance. Toleration! It
was the watchword at the gate of hell.
Hugh Ritson listened with a vague consciousness, his eyes fixed
alternately on the nun with the drooping coif and on the fair, upturned
face beside her. At last a word struck him, and made his whole soul to
vibrate. Men, women, the great mute throng, pillars, arches, windows of
figured saints, altar aflame with candles, the surpliced choir, and the
pale, thin face with the burning eyes in the pulpit above--all vanished
in an instant.
What was true, said the preacher, in the realm of thought, could not be
false in the world of life. Men did evil deeds, and justified them to
their own enslaved minds. No way so dark but it had appeared to be the
path of light; none so far wrong but it had seemed to be right. Let man
beware of the lie that he told to his own heart. The end thereof is
death.
Staring from a bloodless face, Hugh Ritson reeled a step backward, and
then clung with a trembling hand to the pillar against which he had
leaned. The harsh scrape of his foot was heard over the hushed church,
and here and there a neck was craned in his direction. His emotion was
gone in an instant. A light curl of the hard lip told that the angel
within him had once again been conquered.
The sermon ended with a rapturous declaration of the immutability of
God's law, and the eternal destinies of man. The world was full of
change, but man, who seemed to change most, changed least. The stars
that hung above had seen the beginning and the end of ages. Before man
was, they were. The old river that flowed past the old city that night
had flowed there centuries ago, and generations of men had lived and
died in joy and sorrow, and still the same waters washed the same
shore. But the stars that measure time itself, and the sea that recorded
it, would vanish away, and man should be when time would be no more.
"They shall perish, but thou shalt endure. They shall wax old as doth a
garment.... But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end."
The preacher finished, and the buzz and rustle of the people shifting in
their seats told of the tension that had been broken. Faces that had
been distorted with the tremors of fear, or contracted with the
quiverings of remorse, or glorified with the lights of ecstasy, resumed
their normal expression.
The vesper hymn was sung by the whole congregation, standing. It floated
up to the blue roof, where the lights that burned low over the people's
heads left in the gloom the texts written on the open timbers and the
imaged Christ hung in the clerestory. There was one voice that did not
sing the vesper hymn; and the close-locked lips of Hugh Ritson were but
the symbol of the close-locked heart.
He was asking himself, was it true that when the fire of the stars
should be burned to ashes, still man would endure? Pshaw! What was man?
These throngs of men, whose great voice swelled like the sea, what were
they? In this old church where they sung, other men had sung before
them, and where were they now? Who should say they had not perished?
Living, believing, dying, they were gone: gone with their sins and
sorrows; gone with their virtues and rewards; gone from all sight and
all memory; and no voice came from them, pealing out of the abyss of
death to join this song of hope. Hope! It was a dream. A dream that
great yearning crowds like these, filling churches and chapels, dreamed
age after age. But it was a dream from which there would be no awakening
to know that it was not true.
The priest and choir left the church. Then the congregation broke up and
separated. Hugh Ritson stood awhile, still leaning against the column of
the colonnade. The nuns in the south transept rose last, and went out by
a little aperture opening from the south aisle. Hugh watched them pass
at the distance of the width of the nave. Greta walked a few paces
behind them. When the people had gone, and she rose from her seat, her
eyes fell on Hugh. Then she dropped her head, and walked down the aisle
with a hurried step. Hugh saw her out; the church was now empty, and the
voluntary was done. He followed her through the door, and entered into
the sacristy.
Before him was another door; it led into the convent. The last of the
line of nuns was passing through it. Greta stood in the sacristy, faint,
with a scared face, one hand at her breast, the other on the base of a
crucifix that stood by the wall. When she saw that he had followed her,
her first impulse was to shrink away; her second was to sink to her
knees at his feet. She did neither. Conquering her faintness, but still
quivering from head to foot, she turned upon him with a defiant look.
"Why do you come here? I do not wish to speak with you. Let me pass,"
she said.
Hugh Ritson made no effort to detain her. He stood before her with
downcast eyes, his infirm foot bent under him. "I come to bid you
farewell," he said, calmly; "I come to say that we meet no more."
"Would that we had parted forever before we met the last time!" said
Greta, fervently.
"Would that we had never met!" said Hugh, in a low voice.
"That was a lie with which you parted me from my husband," she said.
"It was--God forgive me."
"And you knew it was a lie?" said Greta.
"I knew it was a lie."
"Then where is your shame, that you can look me in the face? Have you no
shame?" she said.
"Have you no pity?" said Hugh.
"What pity had you for me? Have you not done me wrong enough already?"
"God knows it is true. And He knows I am a miserable man. Have pity and
forgive me, and say farewell!"
Something of contrition in the tone touched her. She was silent.
"The preacher was wrong," he said. "There is no spirit of evil. We are
betrayed by our own passions, and the chief of those passions is love.
It is the Nemesis that stalks through the world, haunting all men, and
goading some to great wrong."
"It was of your doing that I came here," said Greta.
"Would to God it may be of my doing that you remain here," said Hugh.
"That is a prayer He will not hear. I am leaving this house to-night.
There is some one coming who can unmask your wicked falsehood."
"Parson Christian?" said Hugh.
Greta made no answer, and Hugh continued, "His journey is needless. A
word from my mother would have done all. She is in this house."
"Yes, Heaven forgive you, she is here!" said Greta.
"You are wrong; you do not know all. Where is your husband?"
Greta shook her head. "I have neither seen him nor heard from him since
we parted at these doors," she said.
"And when you leave them to-night, do you leave him behind you?" said
Hugh.
"Heaven forbid!" said Greta, passionately.
Hugh Ritson's bloodless face was awful to look upon. "Greta," he said,
in a tone of anguish, "give up the thought. Look on that false union as
broken forever, and all this misery will end. It was I and you--you and
I. But that is over now. I do not come between you. It is useless to
think of that. I do not offer you my love; you refused it long ago. But
I can not see you my brother's wife. That would be too much for me to
endure. I will not endure it. Have pity upon me. If I have no claim to
your love, have I no right to your pity? What have I suffered for your
love? A life's misery. What have I sacrificed to it? My name--my
place--my inheritance."
Greta lifted her eyes with a look of inquiry.
"What? Has he not even yet told you all?" said Hugh. "No matter. What
has he done to earn your love that I have not done? What has he
suffered? What has he sacrificed?"
"If this is love, it is selfish love," said Greta, in a broken voice.
"Selfish?--be it so. All love is selfish."
"Leave me--leave me!"
Hugh Ritson paused; the warmth of his manner increased. "I will leave
you," he said, "and never seek you again; I will go from you forever,
and crush down the sorrow that must be with me to the end, if you will
promise me one thing."
"What is it?" said Greta, her eyes on the ground.
"It is much," said Hugh, "but it is not all. If the price is great,
think of the misery that it buys--and buries. You would sacrifice
something for me, would you not?"
His voice swelled as he spoke, and his pale face softened, and the light
of hopeless love was in his great eyes.
"Say that you would--for me--me!" He held out his arms toward her as if
soul and body together yearned for one word, one look of love.
Greta stood there, silent and immovable. "What is it?" she repeated.
"Let me think that you would do something for my sake--mine," he
pleaded. "Let me carry away that solace. Think what I have suffered for
you, and all in vain. Think that perhaps it was no fault of mine that
you could not love me; that another woman might have found me worthy to
be loved who had not been unworthy of love from me."
"What is it?" repeated Greta, coldly, but her drooping lashes were wet
with tears.
"Think that I am of a vain, proud, stubborn spirit; that in all this
world there is neither man nor woman, friend nor enemy, to whom I have
sued for grace or favor; that since I was a child I have never even
knelt in prayer in God's house that man might see or God might hear.
Then think that I am at your feet, a miserable man."
"What is it?" said Greta, again.
Hugh Ritson paused, and then added, more calmly: "That you should take
the vows and the veil, and stay here until death."
Greta lifted her eyes. Hugh's eyes were bent upon her.
"No, I can not. I should be false to my marriage vows," she said,
quietly.
"To be true to them is to be false to yourself, to your husband, and to
me," said Hugh.
"I love my husband," said Greta, with an eloquent glance. "To be true to
them is to be true to him."
There was a pause. Hugh Ritson's manner underwent a change. It was the
white heat of high passion that broke the silence when he spoke again.
"Greta," he said, and his deep voice had a strong tremor, "if there is
any truth in what that priest told us to-night--if it is not a dream and
a solemn mockery made to enchant or appal the simple--if there is a God
and judgment--my soul is already too heavily burdened with sins against
you and yours. I would have eased it of one other sin more black than
these; but it was not to be."
"What do you mean?" said Greta. Her face was panic-stricken.
Hugh Ritson came a step nearer.
"That your husband is in my hands--that one word from me would commit
him to a doom more dreadful than death--that if he is to be saved as a
free man, alive, you must renounce him forever."
"Speak plain. What do you mean?" said Greta.
"Choose--quick! Which shall it be? You for this convent, or your husband
for lifelong imprisonment?"
Greta's mind was in a whirl. She was making for the door in front of
them. He stepped before her.
"I parted you with a lie," he said, "but to me it was not always a lie.
I believed it once. Do you think I should have denied my self my
inheritance, and let a bastard stand in my place, if I had not believed
it?"
"What further lie is this?" said Greta.
"No matter. Heaven knows. And all I did was for love of you. Is it so
guilty a thing that I have loved you--to all lengths and ends of love? I
meant to put a hemisphere between you--to send him to Australia, and
you back home to Cumberland. What if the lie had then been outfaced? I
should have parted you, and that would have been enough."
"And now, when your revenge falls idle at your feet, you come to me on
your knees," said Greta.
"Revenge? That was but a feeble revenge," said Hugh. "He would have
learned the truth and come back to claim you. There would have been no
peace for me while he was alive and free. Do I come to you on my knees?
Yes; but it is to pray of you to save your husband. Is it so much that I
ask of you? Think what is earned by it. If you have no pity for me, have
you none for him?"
She was struggling to pass him.
"Greta," he said, "choose, and at once. It is now or never.
To-night--to-morrow will be too late. You for a holy life of
self-renouncement, or your husband to drag out his miserable days in
penal servitude."
"This is only another lie. Let me pass," she said.
"It is the truth, as sure as God hears us," said Hugh.
"I shall never believe it."
"I will swear it." He laid a strong hand on her wrist. "I will swear it
at the very foot of God's altar."
He tried to draw her back into the church. She resisted.
"Let me go; I will cry for help."
He dropped her wrist, and fell back from her. She drew herself up in
silence, and walked slowly away.
He stood a moment alone in the sacristy. Then he went out through the
church. It was empty and all but dark. The sacristan, with a long rod,
was putting out the lights one by one. He turned, with arm uplifted, to
look after the halting figure that passed down the aisle and out at the
west porch.