Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/177

 it was too late. And what good had this atonement brought to himself or to God or to the world? What had it brought him in the end but old age and doubt? It had not made Laura alive again. It had not restored her faith before she died, so that she might die in peace.

And here was Fulco raving about faith and saints and a peasant's Heaven filled with pink and blue plaster images and magenta paper wreaths. That was the cruel joke Nature had played on him—making Fulco not in the image of Laura or himself, so that he might have had a son to be proud of, but in the image of that vulgar and scheming old woman, Laura's mother, who connived at her daughter's sin because she saw her one day as the Marquise d'Astier. That was Nature's bitter jest, that and this stupid adoration which Fulco had for the man he did not even know was his father. If Fulco had not been stupid he might have guessed long ago that there was some reason for this stranger's interest in him. And Fulco had become a priest because he, Father d'Astier, was a priest. This fat, stupid, pimply little man was his son, his heir, who should have been the Marquis d'Astier. Suddenly he felt a sickening wave of distaste and hatred for his own son. He was stupid, stupid, and he could never be rid of him.

Then all at once he knew a fierce desire to beat his head against the floor. "I am proud and worldly like all the others. I have learned nothing at all. I am no different. O God, teach me humility."

Fulco's thin monotonous voice trickled through