The priest came from his little house, bending forward against the wind, his eyes partially protected from the driving sand by blue spectacles. His face, which was habitually grave, to-day looked sad and stern, like the face of a man about to perform a task that was against his inclination, even perhaps against his conscience. He glanced at the waiting Arabs and hastened into the church, taking off his spectacles as he did so, and wiping his eyes, which were red from the action of the sand-grains, with a silk pocket-handkerchief. When he reached the sacristy he shut himself into it alone for a moment. He sat down on a chair and, leaning his arms upon the wooden table that stood in the centre of the room, bent forward and stared before him at the wall opposite, listening to the howling of the wind.
Father Roubier had an almost passionate affection for his little church of Beni-Mora. So long and ardently had he prayed and taught in it, so often had he passed the twilight hours in it alone wrapped in religious reveries, or searching his conscience for the shadows of sinful thoughts, that it had become to him as a friend, and more than a friend. He thought of it sometimes as his confessor and sometimes as his child. Its stones were to him as flesh and blood, its altars as lips that whispered consolation in answer to his prayers. The figures of its saints were heavenly companions. In its ugliness he perceived only beauty, in its tawdriness only the graces that are sweet offerings to God. The love that, had he not been a priest, he might have given to a woman he poured forth upon his church, and with it that other love which, had it been the design of his Heavenly Father, would have fitted him for the ascetic, yet impassioned, life of an ardent and devoted monk. To defend this consecrated building against outrage he would, without hesitation, have given his last drop of blood. And now he was to perform in it an act against which his whole nature revolted; he was to join indissolubly the lives of these two strangers who had come to Beni-Mora--Domini Enfilden and Boris Androvsky. He was to put on the surplice and white stole, to say the solemn and irreparable "Ego Jungo," to sprinkle the ring with holy water and bless it.
As he sat there alone, listening to the howling of the storm outside, he went mentally through the coming ceremony. He thought of the wonderful grace and beauty of the prayers of benediction, and it seemed to him that to pronounce them with his lips, while his nature revolted against his own utterance, was to perform a shameful act, was to offer an insult to this little church he loved.
Yet how could he help performing this act? He knew that he would do it. Within a few minutes he would be standing before the altar, he would be looking into the faces of this man and woman whose love he was called upon to consecrate. He would consecrate it, and they would go out from him into the desert man and wife. They would be lost to his sight in the town.
His eye fell upon a silver crucifix that was hanging upon the wall in front of him. He was not a very imaginative man, not a man given to fancies, a dreamer of dreams more real to him than life, or a seer of visions. But to-day he was stirred, and perhaps the unwonted turmoil of his mind acted subtly upon his nervous system. Afterward he felt certain that it must have been so, for in no other way could he account for a fantasy that beset him at this moment.
As he looked at the crucifix there came against the church a more furious beating of the wind, and it seemed to him that the Christ upon the crucifix shuddered.
He saw it shudder. He started, leaned across the table and stared at the crucifix with eyes that were full of an amazement that was mingled with horror. Then he got up, crossed the room and touched the crucifix with his finger. As he did so, the acolyte, whose duty it was to help him to robe, knocked at the sacristy door. The sharp noise recalled him to himself. He knew that for the first time in his life he had been the slave of an optical delusion. He knew it, and yet he could not banish the feeling that God himself was averse from the act that he was on the point of committing in this church that confronted Islam, that God himself shuddered as surely even He, the Creator, must shudder at some of the actions of his creatures. And this feeling added immensely to the distress of the priest's mind. In performing this ceremony he now had the dreadful sensation that he was putting himself into direct antagonism with God. His instinctive horror of Androvsky had never been so great as it was to-day. In vain he had striven to conquer it, to draw near to this man who roused all the repulsion of his nature. His efforts had been useless. He had prayed to be given the sympathy for this man that the true Christian ought to feel towards every human being, even the most degraded. But he felt that his prayers had not been answered. With every day his antipathy for Androvsky increased. Yet he was entirely unable to ground it upon any definite fact in Androvsky's character. He did not know that character. The man was as much a mystery to him as on the day when they first met. And to this living mystery from which his soul recoiled he was about to consign, with all the beautiful and solemn blessings of his Church, a woman whose character he respected, whose innate purity, strength and nobility he had quickly divined, and no less quickly learned to love.
It was a bitter, even a horrible, moment to him.
The little acolyte, a French boy, son of the postmaster of Beni-Mora, was startled by the sight of the Father's face when he opened the sacristy door. He had never before seen such an expression of almost harsh pain in those usually kind eyes, and he drew back from the threshold like one afraid. His movement recalled the priest to a sharp consciousness of the necessities of the moment, and with a strong effort he conquered his pain sufficiently to conceal all outward expression of it. He smiled gently at the little boy and said:
"Is it time?"