After duly reproving her, the Saint told her to make clean her breast by confession, declaring she would then be able to repent.
Thus exhorted, Sister Ursula replied, in accents half suffocated by irrepressible emotion: “My secret is, that I loved you—you, holy father—when I was young: my unrepented sin is, that I have never been able to banish that love from my heart.”
“Alas! sister,” rejoined the holy man, trembling in spite of himself, “we have been equally unhappy. In days, long gone by, I could not behold unmoved the charms of the fair and noble Lady Ursula Braose. But I conquered the passion, and repented that I had ever indulged it. Thou must do likewise. The struggle may be hard, but strength will be given thee for it. Hast thou aught more to confess?”
And the poor recluse, who shed abundance of tears, replying in the negative, the Saint gave her absolution, saying that the penance he had already enjoined was sufficient, and that ere the morrow her breast would be free from its load. Struck by her looks, which were those of one not long for this world, he told her that if her sickness should prove mortal, dirges and trentals should be said for the repose of her soul.
The recluse thanked him, and after a while became composed and even cheerful.
Saint Cuthman tarried in the cell, discoursing with her upon the glorious prospects of futurity, and carefully avoiding any reference to the past, until, from the door of the little structure, which opened toward the west, he beheld the sun sink into the sea. Telling the good sister that a thousand lives depended upon her vigilance, he gave her his benediction and departed, never more to behold her alive.
As he took his way towards the north-eastern boundary of the ancient encampment, a noise resembling thunder smote his ear, and the ground shook so violently beneath his feet that he could scarcely stand, but reeled to and fro, as if his brain—his! whose lips no drink stronger than water had ever passed—had been assailed by the fumes of wine. Nevertheless, he went on, and, after a while, reached the lofty headland overlooking Poynings.
Here, as he expected, he beheld the Arch-Fiend at work. The infernal excavator had already made a great breach into the down, and enormous fragments of chalk and flint-stones rolled down with a terrific crash, like that caused by an avalanche amidst the Alps. Every stroke of his terrible pickaxe shook the hill to its centre. No one, who was not sustained by supernatural power, could have stood firmly upon the quaking headland. But Saint Cuthman, planting his staff upon the ground, remained unmoved—the only human witness of the astounding scene. The Fiend’s proportions had now become colossal, and he looked like one of that giant race whom poets of heathendom tell us warred against Jove. His garb was suited to his task, and resembled that of a miner. His brawny and hirsute arms were bared to the shoulder, and the curled goat’s-horns were visible on his uncovered head. His implements had become enormous as himself, and the broadest and heaviest anchor-fluke ever forged was as nought to the curved iron head of his pickaxe. Each stroke plunged fathom-deep into the ground, and tore up huge boulder-like masses of chalk, the smallest of which might have loaded a wain. The Fiend worked away with might and main, and the concussion produced by his tremendous strokes was incessant and terrible, echoing far over the Weald like the rattling of a dreadful thunderstorm.
But the sand ran out, and Sister Ursula turned her glass for the first time.
Suddenly, the Fiend stopped, and clapped his hand to his side, as if in pain—” A sharp stitch!” quoth he. “My side tingles as if pricked by a thousand pins. The sensation is by no means pleasant—but ’twill soon pass!” Then perceiving the Saint watching him, he called out derisively—” Aha! art thou there, thou saintly man? What thinkest thou now of the chance of escape for thy friends in the Weald? Thou art a judge of such matters, I doubt not. Is my Dyke broad enough and profound enough, thinkest thou—or shall I widen it and deepen it yet more?” And the chasm resounded with his mocking laughter.