“I will with pleasure, if you will be content with my interpretation of it,” Mr. Schöninger said with a smile.

He was not in the least displeased with the priest's lecture, and, on the contrary, decidedly liked it. He was stirred by anything which consecrated art as an embodiment of the divine rather than a mere expression of the human.

Surprise is but a short-lived emotion; and when Mr. Schöninger was left alone that night, with the first opportunity in many months of thinking in an unobserved solitude, he wondered more at his own calmness than at anything which had happened to him. The hideous suffering from which he had but just escaped looked far away, and so alien that he could contemplate it almost with a cold inquisitiveness, as something in which he had no part. It was scarcely more to him than the delirious dreams of a fever which had passed away. Indignation and a desire to revenge himself might rise again, would rise again; but for the present they slept. The first joy of freedom, too, was over. Nothing remained but a feeling of quiet and security. Doubtless he had, without knowing it, been soothed by the many kind and regretful words that had been addressed to him that day, and felt less disposed to dwell on his own wrongs when he knew that so many others were thinking and speaking of them.

All round the room assigned to him hung the pictures that had belonged to Mother Chevreuse—an old-fashioned portrait of her husband in the uniform of a French officer, a S. Ignatius of Loyola, a S. Antony preaching to the fishes, a print, on a gold ground, of the miraculous Lady of Perpetual Succor, and a Santa Prassede sleeping on her slab of granite.

Mr. Schöninger held his candle up to examine each of these, all but the portrait familiar to him in their originals; and as he looked, the places where he had first seen them, the stately palaces and the quiet churches, enclosed his imagination within their walls. He saw again the lines of sombre columns leading up to the glowing mosaics of the tribune, where the vision of S. John hung petrified in air; the dim lamp in the mysterious chapel of the Colonna Santa shone out again inside its grating, and the walls glittered dimly back. He saw the thickets of camellias mantled with bloom under an April sky, a little forest of white at the right hand, and a forest of rose-red at the left, and ever the fountains sparkling through.

Mr. Schöninger put aside the curtain that hardly barred the full moonlight from the room, and leaned out into the night. Not many streets distant Honora Pembroke sat wakeful and mourning, alone with her dead. By what fatality was it that the silent woman lying there, and the weeping one beside her, should have the power to stand, with their softness and their pallor, between him and his remembrance of that gloomy mansion of hate and crime, the shadow of whose portal had but just slipped from him? The cold and trembling hands he had kissed that night had quenched for a time all anger in his heart.

He sighed, thinking of that sad household, and his gaze turned tenderly and steadily in its direction. He would have liked to call down a blessing on the head he loved had it not been so much nearer the source of all blessing than he was. She was right, no matter what she believed. All she held good was good, at least as far as she was concerned, and no blame of false doctrine could be imputed to her.

A ray of light stronger than that of the moon shining across his eyes attracted his attention. It came from F. Chevreuse's sitting-room, the one window of which was at right angles with the window where he leaned. A small, displaced fold of the curtain showed him the priest on his knees there before a crucifix, his hands clasped, his black-robed form as motionless as if it had been carved out of ebony. Here, too! Could he have no other friend than a Christian priest for his hand and heart to cling to?

Yet all was sweet and peaceful, and everything conspired to soothe him. The air touched him with a breath too soft to be called a breeze, the city was still about him, and only a foamy murmur told where the sleepless river flowed.

Triumph, joy, and sweetness he had felt, and at last came gratitude to God and forgiveness of man. One of his last thoughts that night was of pity for Lawrence Gerald.

“It was necessary that I should have some disguise, and I had none; but I had seen Mr. Schöninger lay his shawl down in Mrs. Ferrier's garden, and I thought he had left it there. I took that for another sign. If the shawl were not there, I would go home again. It was there, and I wrapped myself in it, and walked toward the priest's house, ready to turn back at the least obstacle. The only person I saw was a policeman, and he was behind me, so that I was forced to go forward. A thunder-shower was coming up, and the sound of it deadened my steps. When I reached the door, I stopped again, and, for the first time, made a plan. If any one should find me unlocking it, I would say that my mother was sick, and I had come for Mother Chevreuse. If Andrew or Jane should meet and know me as I entered, I would tell the same story, and would ask for Mother Chevreuse, and then confess the whole truth to her. I knew she would pity, and perhaps she would help, me. If Mother Chevreuse herself should come upon me, and recognize me, I would confess to her, and beg her mercy. Nobody saw or heard me till I had got the money into my hands, and was going away; and then it was too late to confess. All my irresolution had gone away, and I was desperate. It was no longer a question of confessing to one person, but of being exposed before three, and, of course, before the world. All the excuses I had made for myself before became as nothing, and I knew that I was a thief. The money was in my hands, I had earned it, and I meant to keep it. The rest is all like a flash of lightning. Why did she cling so to me? I told her twice to let go, or I might hurt her. My blood was all in my head. If those two servants had come and seen me there, I should have killed myself before their faces. I heard their steps coming, and I pushed her with all my strength. I did not stop to think where we were. She let go then; but I have felt her soft hands clinging to me ever since. It maddens a man to have a woman's soft hands clinging to him when he wants to get away. After that, I ran back to Mrs. Ferrier's garden, and left the shawl, and then I went home.

“My wife found me out, I do not know how, and I never asked; and it is she who writes this from my dictation. John, my mother's footman, found me out, and I have never asked him how. He will sign this, but without reading it. I think he has no proof against me. F. Chevreuse knows nothing except what he has learned in the confessional. This will be left with him, to be opened four weeks from to-day. With him, also, I leave a letter to my dearest mother, whom I am not worthy to name, and a letter for Mr. Schöninger.”

The letter to his mother was buried with her. No one ever read it, unless those dead eyes could see. The letter to Mr. Schöninger was simply to beg the forgiveness which, the writer added, he scarcely hoped to receive.

The confession was written in a clear, even hand, with evident deliberation and painstaking on the part of the amanuensis; and if the writer's heart had trembled, not a line showed it. Only here and there a large blister on the paper showed where a tear had fallen.

Mr. and Mrs. Grundy were shocked at the writer's insensibility; but then Annette Ferrier always was queer, they added.

Perhaps only one of the many who read that confession was aware of the sting it contained for F. Chevreuse, or dreamed that those “soft, clinging hands” would be felt by him also, as well as by the criminal, for many a day. Mr. Schöninger shrank with a pang of sympathetic pain when he saw the words, and almost wondered that Annette Gerald could, even in that moment of supreme misery, have been unaware of their cruelty.

“I own to you,” F. Chevreuse confessed years afterward to F. O'Donovan, “that when I first read those words, I realized for one moment how a man might be willing to kill another. The image of him flinging off my mother's clinging hands—well, well! The time will never come when I can speak calmly of it. Fortunately for me then, it was Holy Week, and I had my crucified Lord before me, and plenty of work on my hands. Mr. Schöninger helped me, too. I knew what he meant, though he made no explanation. He only said, ‘Your Christ is strong, if he can keep your hand from clinching.’ ”

Christ was strong, and the Jew was yet to feel his might.

Just at present, however, he had earthly things to think of, and a trial to endure particularly disagreeable to one of his temperament. He had to be a second time the lion of the hour, to be stared at, followed, observed in all he did, listened to in all he said—in short, to be the temporary victim of public curiosity.

This man had called himself a Jew, partly from an inherited allegiance, which ran in his blood, though it was no longer niched in his brain, partly, also, from a generous unwillingness to desert the unfortunate. He cherished the fragments of his ancient traditions as the poet and the antiquary cherish the ruins of an antique temple, in which the vulgar see only broken rocks and rubbish, but from which their imaginations can rebuild portico and sculptured frieze and painted ceiling. Their eyes can discern the acanthus leaf where it lies half choked in dust, and the dying glimmer of what once was gold, and, faintly burning through its encrusting soil, the imperishable color of that rare stone, blue as the vault of a midnight sky. In the ruin of his people Mr. Schöninger still beheld and gloried in that sublime race which, in the early world, had borne the day-star on their foreheads.

But it was only a memory to him, and the present was all vanity.

While in prison, he had thought that liberty was, of all things, the most precious. In his emptied heart it had been the one object of longing; and in the first moments of freedom he had found it intoxicating. But the joy it gave effervesced and died away like foam, and the emptiness remained. Looking back on that prison life, he almost wondered at the agony it had caused him, or even that the shameful death which had threatened him should have had power to move him so, or that the opinions and the enmities of men should have struck such bitterness from his soul. What was it all but motes in the beam? “Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.”

But life must be lived, and work must be done; and he took up the duties that came to hand, and performed them almost as if he loved them.

One small pleasure, indeed, he gave himself. Escaping from the city, with as much care as if he had been flying from justice, he took a long, solitary walk in the pine-woods where, nearly a year before, he had gone with a May party, and, searching there, he brought back handfuls of pale, nodding snow-drops, and sent them by a trusty messenger to Honora Pembroke.

She made no answer, but the messenger saw her lay the delicate blossoms in the white hand of the dead, while her tears fell on them, drop by drop.

Mr. Schöninger's generosity of feeling would have prompted him to attend the funeral, but his good taste prevented. He would have been too much observed there. He watched the procession as it passed by his window—an old-fashioned, solemn, genuine New-England funeral; no mourning carriages with laughing people inside, no hired bearers but a long line of friends and neighbors, who knew and lamented the dead, walking after her with downcast faces, to stand by her grave till the earth should have covered her in.

In a town like Crichton such a death for such a cause would create a deep impression; and crowds stood all about the cottage when the friends who were admitted came out from its doors, and a grave silence prevailed in all the streets as they passed through them.

It was Good Friday; and that evening, for the first time, the new organist was to take charge of the choir in the Immaculate Conception. There was but little to do, for the singers were not in training—only a hymn or two to sing before the sermon, and nothing after.

Mr. Schöninger was glad that he should thus be able to leave the church before the sermon without seeming disrespectful to F. Chevreuse, as he would have seemed in going out and coming in again when the sermon was over. He had not the least objection to hearing Catholic sermons, provided they did not bore him—had, indeed, heard many of them; but he did not wish to hear F. Chevreuse speak on the passion and death of Christ. To him, that had always been the weakest point in the Christian theology. He could reverence almost to the verge of adoration the sublime humility and sweetness and patience of that life which they called divine; but he shrank from the agony which crowned it as something weak and unfitting. A life so perfect ending thus was to him incongruous; as though the eye, travelling up a lofty and exquisite column, should see a rude block at the top instead of a perfect capital.

“If it does not prove the falsehood of the whole,” Mr. Schöninger said to himself, “it proves a great mistake somewhere; and I would rather not hear such a man as F. Chevreuse try to make it seem reasonable.”

But he would not be in too great a hurry to go. He lingered a little, arranged the music, and stopped at the door of the choir long enough to hear the priest announce his text: The Lord hath laid upon him the iniquities of us all.

“My Isaiah!” he thought. “I wonder what he meant in writing that?”

“Good Friday is, to my mind, not so much a day of sorrow as a day of remorse,” the priest began. “The Jews were ungrateful, and we are ungrateful.”

“That dear, just soul!” Mr. Schöninger muttered with a smile, as he went slowly out.

Going down the stairs, he caught now and then a sentence. “We sin, and are forgiven, and then we sin again; and we sin against a God whom we acknowledge; they sinned against a God in whom they did not believe.”

And again: “Peter sinned once, but he never denied his Master a second time; Magdalene was once a sinner, but never again.”

Mr. Schöninger stopped at a narrow pointed window near the foot of the stairs, and looked out into the night. He had half a mind to go back and listen to the sermon. There was something enchaining in the way F. Chevreuse preached. His were no cut-and-dried orations where the form is first laid out, and each part fitted in as exact as a mosaic, and where no fault can be found, except that there is such an absence of faults. He poured his heart out; he announced a truth, and then, in a few sentences, he threw a picture before their eyes to illustrate it; he walked the platform where he stood, and seemed at times so transported by his feelings as to forget that he was not talking to himself alone.

Mr. Schöninger paused in the lower door, and listened again, hating to stay, hating still more to go away, so empty did his soul feel.

The speaker gave a brief backward glance over what he had already said. They had seen the agony in the garden, and now they were going to see what it meant. They had seen the cup put aside by the hand of Christ, and now they were going to see him drink it to the dregs. They had seen him bear uncomplainingly the stripes and the thorns, now they were going to hear him cry out in the agony of desolation.

With a rapid touch he sketched the scene—the surging, angry crowd, driving and hurrying forward a man in the midst, who drags and stumbles under a heavy cross.

The priest wrung his hands slowly, walking to and fro, with that sight before him. “O my God!” he said, half to himself, “is it thus that I see thee? Thy divinity is reduced so small—so small that it requires all the fulness of my faith to discern it. This man is covered with dust and blood. He hath fallen beneath his load, and the dust of the street is on him, on his hands, and even his face, with the blood and the sweat. They buffet him, they laugh at him”—the speaker faced his congregation suddenly, stretching out his hands to them. “A God! a God!” he cried, and was for a moment silent.

Mr. Schöninger turned away, shuddering at this image of Divinity in the dust.

Yet he had not gone far when, in spite of him, his feet were drawn back.

F. Chevreuse stood beside the great black and white crucifix, to which he did not seem to dare to lift his eyes.

“The cup is at his lips at last! He has lost sight of the Father! The Lord has laid upon him the iniquities of us all. All the murders, all the adulteries of the world are on him; all the sacrileges are on him; all the brutality, the foulness, the lies, the treacheries, the meannesses, the cruelties—they are all heaped upon him. All iniquities, past, present, and to come, overclouded and hid his divine innocence out of sight. And the Father, seeing him so, relented not, spared him not, but poured on his head the full measure of his hatred of our sins, as if he were the criminal who was guilty of them all.”

Mr. Schöninger started back as if lightning had flashed in his face, uttered a faint cry, and hurried from the church.

He walked once rapidly round the square, baring his head to the tender coolness of the air. When he reached the church again, F. Chevreuse had finished speaking, and was just turning away. But he paused, as he saw Mr. Schöninger walk up the aisle as unconscious of the astonished congregation who gazed at him as if the church had been empty.

He knelt at the communion railing.

“F. Chevreuse,” he said in a voice that every one heard, so still were all, “I have not yet kissed the cross on which my God was crucified.”

F. Chevreuse drew the small crucifix from his girdle, and presented it, his hands trembling and tears rolling down his face; and all the congregation fell on their knees while the Jew kissed the cross on which his God was crucified.

To Be Continued.