"O, no!" said Hilda. "They would be quite inconsistent with so much
richness of color in the interior of the church. Besides, it is a Gothic
ornament, and only suited to that style of architecture, which requires
a gorgeous dimness."
"Nevertheless," continued the sculptor, "yonder square apertures,
filled with ordinary panes of glass, are quite out of keeping with the
superabundant splendor of everything about them. They remind me of that
portion of Aladdin's palace which he left unfinished, in order that
his royal father-in-law might put the finishing touch. Daylight, in its
natural state, ought not to be admitted here. It should stream through a
brilliant illusion of saints and hierarchies, and old scriptural images,
and symbolized dogmas, purple, blue, golden, and a broad flame of
scarlet. Then, it would be just such an illumination as the Catholic
faith allows to its believers. But, give me--to live and die in--the
pure, white light of heaven!"
"Why do you look so sorrowfully at me?" asked Hilda, quietly meeting his
disturbed gaze. "What would you say to me? I love the white light too!"
"I fancied so," answered Kenyon. "Forgive me, Hilda; but I must needs
speak. You seemed to me a rare mixture of impressibility, sympathy,
sensitiveness to many influences, with a certain quality of common
sense;--no, not that, but a higher and finer attribute, for which I find
no better word. However tremulously you might vibrate, this quality,
I supposed, would always bring you back to the equipoise. You were a
creature of imagination, and yet as truly a New England girl as any with
whom you grew up in your native village. If there were one person in
the world whose native rectitude of thought, and something deeper, more
reliable, than thought, I would have trusted against all the arts of a
priesthood,--whose taste alone, so exquisite and sincere that it rose
to be a moral virtue, I would have rested upon as a sufficient
safeguard,--it was yourself!"
"I am conscious of no such high and delicate qualities as you allow me,"
answered Hilda. "But what have I done that a girl of New England birth
and culture, with the right sense that her mother taught her, and the
conscience that she developed in her, should not do?"
"Hilda, I saw you at the confessional!" said Kenyon.
"Ah well, my dear friend," replied Hilda, casting down her eyes, and
looking somewhat confused, yet not ashamed, "you must try to forgive me
for that,--if you deem it wrong, because it has saved my reason, and
made me very happy. Had you been here yesterday, I would have confessed
to you."
"Would to Heaven I had!" ejaculated Kenyon.
"I think," Hilda resumed, "I shall never go to the confessional again;
for there can scarcely come such a sore trial twice in my life. If I had
been a wiser girl, a stronger, and a more sensible, very likely I might
not have gone to the confessional at all. It was the sin of others that
drove me thither; not my own, though it almost seemed so. Being what
I am, I must either have done what you saw me doing, or have gone mad.
Would that have been better?"