radley of other presentations,
and realised with irritation, which must have been tenfold in Hilda, how
he rebelled against the part. Perhaps this was enough in itself to
send her dramatic impulse to another focus, and the strangeness of the
adventure was a very thing she would delight in. Whatever may be said
about it, while yet the shock of the woman's earthly passion with its
divine object was receding from Arnold's mind before the exquisite charm
and faithfulness of the worshipping Magdalene, he became aware that in
some special way he sat judging and pitying her. She had hardly lifted
her eyes to him twice, yet it was he, intimately he, who responded as
if from afar off, to the touch of her infinite solicitude and abasement,
the joy and the shame of her love. As he watched and knew, his lips
tightened and his face paled with the throb of his own renunciation, he
folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood, and was caught
up into a knowledge and an imitation of how the spotless Original would
have looked upon a woman suffering and transported thus. The poverty of
the play faded out; he became almost unaware of the pinchbeck and the
fustian of Patullo's invention, and its insufferable mixture with the
fabric of which every thread was precious beyond imagination. He looked
down with tender patience and compassion upon the development of the
woman's intrigue in the palace, through the very flower of her crafts
and guiles, to save Him who had transfigured her from the hands of
the rabble and the high priests; he did not even shrink from the
inexpressibly grating note of the purified Magdalene's final passionate
tendering of her personal sacrifice to the enamoured Pilate as the price
of His freedom, and when at the last she wept at His feet where He lay
bound and delivered, and wrapped them, in the agony of her abandonment,
in the hair of her head, the priest's lips almost moved in words other
than those of the playwright--words that told her he knew the height
and the depth of her sacrifice and forgave it, "Neither do I condemn
thee...." In his exultation he saw what it was to perform miracles,
to remit sins. The spark of divinity that was in him glowed to a
white heat; the woman on the stage warmed her hands at it in two
consciousnesses. She was stirred through all her artistic sense in a
new and delicious way, and wakened in some dormant part of her to
a knowledge beautiful and surprising. She felt in every