aforetime huntress refused to be captured.  He took a silver cross from a table-drawer and laid it on the pistol-case.  ’There, Chummy,’ he said; that was all; not sermonizing or proselytizing.  He was partly comprehended by Chumley Potts, fully a week later.  The unsuspecting fellow, soon to be despatched in the suite of Brailstone, bore away an unwontedly affectionate dismissal to his bed, and spoke some rather squeamish words himself, as he recollected with disgust when he ran about over London repeating his executioner’s.

The Cross on the pistol-case may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood’s thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners must have their immediate termination.  These old friends were the plague-infected clothes he flung off his body.  But the Cross where it lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that box, was authoritative to decree his passage through a present torture, by the agency of the hand he held back from the solution of his perplexity, at the cost which his belief in the Eternal would pay.  Henrietta had mentioned her husband’s defeat, by some dastardly contrivance.  He had to communicate, for the disburdening of his soul, not only that he was guilty, but the meanest of criminals, in being no more than half guilty.  His training told him of the contempt women entertain toward the midway or cripple sinner, when they have no special desire to think him innocent.  How write, or even how phrase his having merely breathed in his ruffian’s hearing the wish that he might hear of her husband’s defeat!  And with what object?  Here, too, a woman might, years hence, if not forgive, bend her head resignedly over the man’s vile nature, supposing strong passion his motive.  But the name for the actual motive?  It would not bear writing, or any phrasing round it.  An unsceptred despot bidden take a fair woman’s eyes into his breast, saw and shrank.  And now the eyes were Carinthia’s:  he saw a savage bridegroom, and a black ladder-climber, and the sweetest of pardoning brides, and the devil in him still insatiate for revenge upon her who held him to his word.

He wrote, read, tore the page, trimmed the lamp, and wrote again.  He remembered Gower Woodseer’s having warned him he would finish his career a monk.  Not, like Feltre, an oily convert, but under the hood, yes, and extracting a chartreuse from his ramble through woods richer far than the philosopher’s milk of Mother Nature’s bosom.  There flamed the burning signal of release from his torments; there his absolving refuge, instead of his writing fruitless, intricate, impossible stuff to a woman.  The letter was renounced and shredded:  the dedicated ascetic contemplated a hooded shape, washed of every earthly fleck.  It proved how men may by power of grip squeeze raptures out of pain.

CHAPTER XLV

CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND WHAT HAPPENED