Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/187

Rh hell! it is over-much. I would be an honest man, look you. I have a master to serve, I bid you remember. It is true enough that I love you out of all measure; there is no sin in that which I cannot help; but misery there is, by our Saviour. The sin is gaping all about me, itching here, aching there, gnawing and groping without cease, or stint, or allay. Yes, yes, I know this is true—God help me! I love you deplorably; but I will not touch you. You are the ever-blessed thing to me; but I will make you the ever-abhorred thing, anathema maranatha. I love you, I worship you, I adore you; you are my saint, my church, my altar, my soul's peculiar food; you shall be my devil, his hell, his cauldron, my venomous offence. And all this you shall be that I may love you yet more, yet incomprehensibly more, and (withal) live honest. I will hate you because I adore you. Ah! and I will prove whether by hating you most of all I cannot drown myself in love." He threw himself out of her reach, and rocked with hidden face.

Here was pretty hearing for a pretty bride. Molly, with heaving bosom, stood abashed and dumb, and troubled profoundly. Not only had she never tried to stem so fierce a torrent of love, nor ever shuddered under such dry heat in men's words—she had never yet dreamed of so much passion in men created. And glorious passion, too, it seemed, so stern and repressed—a passion which hugged a fetter, a splendid misery of denial. Of course she had nothing to say; she never had anything to say; yet she longed to say or do something. Her interest in all these fine things was