"And if you succeed in finding and establishing this new will, you mean to divert the money to your own use?"
"If the will is valid, is not the money mine?"
The Father looked at him a moment before he answered. Then he sighed.
"My son," he asked, "would you have put that question six months ago?"
Maurice flushed, but he did not wish to show that he understood.
"There was not then in your heart a wish to wrest property from the church that you might enjoy it yourself."
"I haven't any wish now to take from the church anything which is not mine already."
"By divine right or by human?" the Father inquired with cold inflexibility.
Maurice began to be irritated. He felt that he was being treated with too high a hand.
"Have I no rights as a man?" demanded he warmly.
The other sighed once more, and a look of genuine pain came into his face.
"My son," he said with a gentleness which touched Maurice in spite of himself, "when you gave yourself to the church, did you keep back part of the price? Was not your gift all you were and all you might possess?"
Maurice was silent. He could not for shame answer, that he did not then know that he had so much to give, and he realized too that this would then have made no difference. He felt as if he were now being held to a pledge which he had never meant to make, yet he could not see what reply there was to the words of the Superior. He cast down his eyes, but he said in his heart that he would not yield his claim; that the demand was unjust.
"I have for some time," Father Frontford went on, "in fact ever since your return, seen with pain that your heart is no longer single to the good of the church. An earthly passion has eaten into your soul. Your confessions are evidently attempts to satisfy your own conscience by telling as little as possible of the doubts which you have been harboring in your heart. Now there is given you an opportunity to see for yourself, without the possibility of disguise, what your true feeling is. The question now is whether you are seeking your own will or the good of religion. Will you fail us and yourself?"
Maurice was touched by the tone in which this was said. While he had been growing to be less and less in sympathy with Father Frontford and with the ideals which the brotherhood represented, he had never for an instant ceased to believe in the sincerity of the Superior. He might think him narrow, mistaken, even at times so blinded by desire for the success of the brotherhood as to become almost Jesuitical in method; but he felt that the Father lived faithful to his belief, ready, if the cause required, to sacrifice himself utterly. He could not but be moved by the appeal which the priest made, and by the genuine feeling which rang through every word.