"Oh, my God!" he cried, "is it all in vain?--so many prayers? so many struggles?--and shall I fail of salvation at last?"
He seemed to himself as a swimmer, who, having exhausted his last gasp of strength in reaching the shore, is suddenly lifted up on a cruel wave and drawn back into the deep. There seemed nothing for him but to fold his arms and sink.
For he felt no strength now to resist,--he felt no wish to conquer,--he only prayed that he might lie there and die. It seemed to him that the love which possessed him and tyrannized over his very being was a doom,--a curse sent upon him by some malignant fate with whose power it was vain to struggle. He detested his work,--he detested his duties,--he loathed his vows,--and there was not a thing in his whole future to which he looked forward otherwise than with the extreme of aversion, except one to which he clung with a bitter and defiant tenacity,--the spiritual guidance of Agnes. Guidance!--he laughed aloud, in the bitterness of his soul, as he thought of this. He was her guide,--her confessor,--to him she was bound to reveal every change of feeling; and this love that he too well perceived rising in her heart for another,--he would wring from her own confessions the means to repress and circumvent it. If she could not be his, he might at least prevent her from belonging to any other,--he might at least keep her always within the sphere of his spiritual authority. Had he not a right to do this?--had he not a right to cherish an evident vocation,--a right to reclaim her from the embrace of an excommunicated infidel, and present her as a chaste bride at the altar of the Lord? Perhaps, when that was done, when an irrevocable barrier should separate her from all possibility of earthly love, when the awful marriage-vow should have been spoken which should seal her heart for heaven alone, he might recover some of the blessed calm which her influence once brought over him, and these wild desires might cease, and these feverish pulses be still.
Such were the vague images and dreams of the past and future that floated over his mind, as he lay in a heavy sort of lethargy on the floor of his cell, and hour after hour passed away. It grew afternoon, and the radiance of evening came on. The window of the cell overlooked the broad Mediterranean, all one blue glitter of smiles and sparkles. The white-winged boats were flitting lightly to and fro, like gauzy-winged insects in the summer air,--the song of the fishermen drawing their nets on the beach floated cheerily upward. Capri lay like a half-dissolved opal in shimmering clouds of mist, and Naples gleamed out pearly clear in the purple distance. Vesuvius, with its cloud-spotted sides, its garlanded villas and villages, its silvery crown of vapor, seemed a warm-hearted and genial old giant lying down in his gorgeous repose and holding all things on his heaving bosom in a kindly embrace.