“How did she die? It must have been very sudden. Tell me, for pity’s sake!”
“Calm yourself, reverend sir. Ah! you must have a tender disposition to feel another’s loss so much. You could not feel it more deeply, if you had lost a person very dear to you--a wife of your own bosom, so to speak.”
“I--I esteemed the lady,” stammered the clergyman, shrinking before the others cold, scrutinizing gaze. “She was so good, so noble!”
“Ah! was she not? But you asked me how she died? I think it was some obscure affection of the _heart_. She was always so emotional, so impulsive; and latterly, I fear, she was under great excitement. You will be grieved to hear she passed away in bitter mental pain.”
Santley started. Haldane continued, in the same cold voice, always keeping his eyes fixed steadily on those of the clergyman.
“There was something on her mind--some load, some trouble, some cruel self-reproach. I gathered from her fragmentary words that she was unhappy, that she sought my forgiveness for some fault of which she considered herself guilty. Whatever that fault was, it preyed upon her life, and hastened her end.”
“Why did not you send for me? It is horrible to think she died without the last offices of religion. I would have comforted her, prayed with her; I-----”
He paused in confusion, shrinking before the other’s steady gaze.
“There was no time,” answered Haldane; “and besides, to be honest, I did not care to have a clergyman.”
“It was not an outrage!” cried Santley. “It was blasphemous!”
“Pardon me. I don’t believe in confession, even at the extreme moment and I thought that, if she had anything to reveal, it had better be told to the person most interested, namely, her husband.”
“What I say. I am aware you are not a Roman Catholic, but I am afraid your sentiments lean dangerously to the offices of that pertinacious priesthood. You would doubtless have asked her to pour her secret into your ears, with a view to absolution. I preferred to keep her dying message sacred to myself. If she had erred and was penitent, as I suppose, no priest, Catholic or Protestant, lay or clerical, could absolve her?”
Utterly bewildered and aghast, the unfortunate clergyman listened on. Surely hell had opened, and the thick sulphurous fumes were rising up to cover and darken the wholesome earth. That cold, grim figure, talking so calmly and watching him so keenly; that other dark figure of the Spaniard, still crouching near them in the doorway; surely, too, these were not men, but devils, sent to torture him and drive him mad. He looked around him. The snow-clad wood stretched on every side, save where the white lawns opened, marked with damp black spots of thaw, and stretching up to the doors of the gloomy mansion; but overhead the dark heavens had opened for a moment, and one sickly beam, falling aslant from the vaporous sky, was gleaming on the mansion’s roof. Unconsciously he fixed his eyes on that spot of brightness, in wonder and in terror, for he was thinking of the piteous sight within the house.