Quite at the end of the hall, five paces from the Knight's motionless head, three priests in black and silver vestments were kneeling before a black altar, reciting the Penitential Psalms in a quiet, monotonous voice, verse and verse, the one in the middle leading; and Angela automatically joined the two assistants in responding, but so low that they did not hear her.
The Knight bore a resemblance to her father, that was all. Perhaps it was only a waxen image she saw, or a wraith in that long dream of hers, of which she could not quite remember the beginning. She knew that she was nothing to the image, and that it was nothing to her. While her lips repeated the grand dirge of the King-poet in Saint Jerome's noble old Latin words, her thoughts followed broken threads, each cut short by a question that lacks an answer, by the riddle man has asked of the sky and the sea and the earth since the beginning: What does it mean?
What could it mean? The senseless facts were there, plain enough. That morning she had seen her father, she had kissed his hand in the old-fashioned way, and he had kissed her forehead, and they had exchanged a few words, as usual. She remembered that for the thousandth time she had wished that his voice would soften a little and that he would put his arms round her and draw her closer to him. But he had been just as always, for he was bound and stiffened in the unwieldy armour of his conventional righteousness. Angela had read of the Puritans in history, and an Englishman might smile at the thought that she could not fancy the sternest of them as more thoroughly puritanical than her father, who had been brought up by priests from his childhood. But such as he was, he had been her father that morning. The motionless figure of the Knight of Malta on the black velvet pall was not he, nor a likeness of him, nor anything human at all. It was the outward visible presence of death, it was a dumb thing that knew the answer to the riddle but could not tell it; in a way, it was the riddle itself.
While her half-stunned intelligence stumbled among chasms of thought that have swallowed up transcendent genius, her lips unconsciously said the Penitential Psalms after the priests at the altar. At the convent she had been a little vain of knowing them by heart better than the nuns themselves, for she had a good memory, and she had often been rebuked for taking pride in her gift. It was not her fault if the noble poetry meant nothing to her at the most solemn hour of her life, though its deep human note had appealed profoundly to her the last time she had repeated the words. Nothing meant anything now, in the face of the unanswered riddle; nothing but the answer could have any meaning.