IL PADRE FRANCESCO
The next morning Elsie awoke, as was her custom, when the very faintest
hue of dawn streaked the horizon. A hen who has seen a hawk balancing
his wings and cawing in mid-air over her downy family could not
have awakened with her feathers, metaphorically speaking, in a more
bristling state of caution.
"Spirits in the gorge, quotha?" said she to herself, as she vigorously
adjusted her dress. "I believe so,--spirits in good sound bodies,
I believe; and next we shall hear, there will be rope-ladders, and
climbings, and the Lord knows what. I shall go to confession this very
morning, and tell Father Francesco the danger; and instead of taking
her down to sell oranges, suppose I send her to the sisters to carry
the ring and a basket of oranges?"
"Ah, ah!" she said, pausing, after she was dressed, and addressing a
coarse print of Saint Agnes pasted against the wall,--"you look very
meek there, and it was a great thing, no doubt, to die as you did; but
if you'd lived to be married and bring up a family of girls, you'd
have known something greater. Please, don't take offense with a poor
old woman who has got into the way of speaking her mind freely! I'm
foolish, and don't know much,--so, dear lady, pray for me!" And old
Elsie bent her knee and crossed herself reverently, and then went out,
leaving her young charge still sleeping.
It was yet dusky dawn when she might have been seen kneeling, with her
sharp, clear-cut profile, at the grate of a confession-box in a church
in Sorrento. Within was seated a personage who will have some influence
on our story, and who must therefore be somewhat minutely introduced to
the reader.
Il Padre Francesco had only within the last year arrived in the
neighborhood, having been sent as superior of a brotherhood of
Capuchins, whose convent was perched on a crag in the vicinity. With
this situation came a pastoral care of the district; and Elsie and her
grand-daughter found in him a spiritual pastor very different from
the fat, jolly, easy Brother Girolamo, to whose place he had been
appointed. The latter had been one of those numerous priests taken from
the peasantry, who never rise above the average level of thought of
the body from which they are drawn. Easy, gossipy, fond of good living
and good stories, sympathetic in troubles and in joys, he had been a
general favorite in the neighborhood, without exerting any particularly
spiritualizing influence.
It required but a glance at Father Francesco to see that he was in all
respects the opposite of this. It was evident that he came from one of
the higher classes, by that indefinable air of birth and breeding which
makes itself felt under every change of costume. Who he might be, what
might have been his past history, what rank he might have borne, what
part played in the great warfare of life, was all of course sunk in the
oblivion of his religious profession, where, as at the grave, a man
laid down name and fame and past history and worldly goods, and took up
a coarse garb and a name chosen from the roll of the saints, in sign
that the world that had known him should know him no more.
Imagine a man between thirty and forty, with that round, full, evenly
developed head, and those chiseled features, which one sees on ancient
busts and coins no less than in the streets of modern Rome. The
cheeks were sunken and sallow; the large, black, melancholy eyes had
a wistful, anxious, penetrative expression, that spoke a stringent,
earnest spirit, which, however deep might be the grave in which it
lay buried, had not yet found repose. The long, thin, delicately
formed hands were emaciated and bloodless; they clasped with a nervous
eagerness a rosary and crucifix of ebony and silver,--the only mark of
luxury that could be discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and
squalid. The whole picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been
painted and hung in a gallery, was such as must have stopped every
person of a certain amount of sensibility before it with the conviction
that behind that strong, melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one
of those hidden histories of human passion in which the vivid life of
mediæval Italy was so fertile.
He was listening to Elsie, as she kneeled, with that easy air of
superiority which marks a practiced man of the world, yet with a grave
attention which showed that her communication had awakened the deepest
interest in his mind. Every few moments he moved slightly in his seat,
and interrupted the flow of the narrative by an inquiry concisely put,
in tones which, clear and low, had a solemn and severe distinctness,
producing, in the still, dusky twilight of the church, an almost
ghostly effect.
When the communication was over, he stepped out of the confessional
and said to Elsie in parting, "My daughter, you have done well to take
this in time. The devices of Satan in our corrupt times are numerous
and artful, and they who keep the Lord's sheep must not sleep. Before
many days I will call and examine the child; meanwhile I approve your
course."
It was curious to see the awestruck, trembling manner in which old
Elsie, generally so intrepid and commanding, stood before this man
in his brown rough woolen gown with his corded waist; but she had an
instinctive perception of the presence of the man of superior birth no
less than a reverence for the man of religion.
After she had departed from the church, the Capuchin stood lost in
thought; and to explain his revery, we must throw some further light on
his history.
Il Padre Francesco, as his appearance and manner intimated, was in
truth from one of the most distinguished families of Florence. He was
one of those whom an ancient writer characterizes as "men of longing
desire." Born with a nature of restless stringency that seemed to doom
him never to know repose, excessive in all things, he had made early
trial of ambition, of war, and of what the gallants of his time called
love,--plunging into all the dissipated excesses of a most dissolute
age, and outdoing in luxury and extravagance the foremost of his
companions.
The wave of a great religious impulse--which in our times would have
been called a revival--swept over the city of Florence, and bore him,
with multitudes of others, to listen to the fervid preaching of the
Dominican monk, Jerome Savonarola; and amid the crowd that trembled,
wept, and beat their breasts under his awful denunciations, he, too,
felt within himself a heavenly call,--the death of an old life, and the
uprising of a new purpose.
The colder manners and more repressed habits of modern times can give
no idea of the wild fervor of a religious revival among a people so
passionate and susceptible to impressions as the Italians. It swept
society like a spring torrent from the sides of the Apennines, bearing
all before it. Houses were sacked with religious fervor by penitent
owners, and licentious pictures and statuary and books, and all the
thousand temptations and appliances of a luxurious age, were burned in
the great public square. Artists convicted of impure and licentious
designs threw their palettes and brushes into the expiatory flames, and
retired to convents, till called forth by the voice of the preacher,
and bid to turn their art into higher channels. Since the days of
Saint Francis no such profound religious impulse had agitated the
Italian community.
In our times a conversion is signalized by few outward changes, however
deep the inner life; but the life of the Middle Ages was profoundly
symbolical, and always required the help of material images in its
expression.
The gay and dissolute young Lorenzo Sforza took leave of the world with
rites of awful solemnity. He made his will and disposed of all his
worldly property, and assembling his friends, bade them the farewell
of a dying man. Arrayed as for the grave, he was laid in his coffin,
and thus carried from his stately dwelling by the brethren of the
Misericordia, who, in their ghostly costume, with mournful chants and
lighted candles, bore him to the tomb of his ancestors, where the
coffin was deposited in the vault, and its occupant passed the awful
hours of the night in darkness and solitude. Thence he was carried, the
next day, almost in a state of insensibility, to a neighboring convent
of the severest order, where, for some weeks, he observed a penitential
retreat of silence and prayer, neither seeing nor hearing any living
being but his spiritual director.
The effect of all this on an ardent and sensitive temperament can
scarcely be conceived; and it is not to be wondered at that the once
gay and luxurious Lorenzo Sforza, when emerging from this tremendous
discipline, was so wholly lost in the worn and weary Padre Francesco
that it seemed as if in fact he had died and another had stepped into
his place. The face was ploughed deep with haggard furrows, and the
eyes were as those of a man who has seen the fearful secrets of another
life. He voluntarily sought a post as far removed as possible from the
scenes of his early days, so as more completely to destroy his identity
with the past; and he devoted himself with enthusiasm to the task of
awakening to a higher spiritual life the indolent, self-indulgent monks
of his order, and the ignorant peasantry of the vicinity.
But he soon discovered, what every earnest soul learns who has been
baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and
inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and
convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the
spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence
and indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,--that the
curse of Cassandra is upon him, forever to burn and writhe under
awful visions of truths which no one around him will regard. In early
life the associate only of the cultivated and the refined, Father
Francesco could not but experience at times an insupportable _ennui_
in listening to the confessions of people who had never learned
either to think or to feel with any degree of distinctness, and whom
his most fervent exhortations could not lift above the most trivial
interests of a mere animal life. He was weary of the childish quarrels
and bickerings of the monks, of their puerility, of their selfishness
and self-indulgence, of their hopeless vulgarity of mind, and utterly
discouraged with their inextricable labyrinths of deception. A
melancholy deep as the grave seized on him, and he redoubled his
austerities, in the hope that by making life painful he might make it
also short.
But the first time that the clear, sweet tones of Agnes rang in his
ears at the confessional, and her words, so full of unconscious poetry
and repressed genius, came like a strain of sweet music through the
grate, he felt at his heart a thrill to which it had long been a
stranger, and which seemed to lift the weary, aching load from off his
soul, as if some invisible angel had borne it up on his wings.
In his worldly days he had known women as the gallants in Boccaccio's
romances knew them, and among them one enchantress whose sorceries
had kindled in his heart one of those fatal passions which burn out
the whole of a man's nature, and leave it, like a sacked city, only
a smouldering heap of ashes. Deepest, therefore, among his vows of
renunciation had been those which divided him from all womankind. The
gulf that parted him and them was in his mind deep as hell, and he
thought of the sex only in the light of temptation and danger. For
the first time in his life, an influence serene, natural, healthy,
and sweet breathed over him from the mind of a woman,--an influence
so heavenly and peaceful that he did not challenge or suspect it,
but rather opened his worn heart insensibly to it, as one in a fetid
chamber naturally breathes freer when the fresh air is admitted.
How charming it was to find his most spiritual exhortations seized upon
with the eager comprehension of a nature innately poetic and ideal!
Nay, it sometimes seemed to him as if the suggestions which he gave
her dry and leafless she brought again to him in miraculous clusters
of flowers, like the barren rod of Joseph, which broke into blossoms
when he was betrothed to the spotless Mary; and yet, withal, she was
so humbly unconscious, so absolutely ignorant of the beauty of all she
said and thought, that she impressed him less as a mortal woman than as
one of those divine miracles in feminine form of which he had heard in
the legends of the saints.
Thenceforward his barren, discouraged life began to blossom with
wayside flowers,--and he mistrusted not the miracle, because the
flowers were all heavenly. The pious thought or holy admonition that he
saw trodden under the swinish feet of the monks he gathered up again in
hope,--_she_ would understand it; and gradually all his thoughts became
like carrier-doves, which, having once learned the way to a favorite
haunt, are ever fluttering to return thither.
Such is the wonderful power of human sympathy, that the discovery
even of the existence of a soul capable of understanding our inner
life often operates as a perfect charm; every thought, and feeling,
and aspiration carries with it a new value, from the interwoven
consciousness that attends it of the worth it would bear to that other
mind; so that, while that person lives, our existence is doubled in
value, even though oceans divide us.
The cloud of hopeless melancholy which had brooded over the mind of
Father Francesco lifted and sailed away, he knew not why, he knew not
when. A secret joyfulness and alacrity possessed his spirits; his
prayers became more fervent and his praises more frequent. Until now,
his meditations had been most frequently those of fear and wrath,--the
awful majesty of God, the terrible punishment of sinners, which he
conceived with all that haggard, dreadful sincerity of vigor which
characterized the modern Etruscan phase of religion of which the
"Inferno" of Dante was the exponent and the outcome. His preachings
and his exhortations had dwelt on that lurid world seen by the severe
Florentine, at whose threshold hope forever departs, and around whose
eternal circles of living torture the shivering spirit wanders dismayed
and blasted by terror.
He had been shocked and discouraged to find how utterly vain had been
his most intense efforts to stem the course of sin by presenting these
images of terror: how hard natures had listened to them with only a
coarse and cruel appetite, which seemed to increase their hardness and
brutality; and how timid ones had been withered by them, like flowers
scorched by the blast of a furnace; how, in fact, as in the case of
those cruel executions and bloody tortures then universal in the
jurisprudence of Europe, these pictures of eternal torture seemed to
exert a morbid demoralizing influence which hurried on the growth of
iniquity.
But since his acquaintance with Agnes, without his knowing exactly
why, thoughts of the Divine Love had floated into his soul, filling it
with a golden cloud like that which of old rested over the mercy-seat
in that sacred inner temple where the priest was admitted alone. He
became more affable and tender, more tolerant to the erring, more fond
of little children; would stop sometimes to lay his hand on the head
of a child, or to raise up one who lay overthrown in the street. The
song of little birds and the voices of animal life became to him full
of tenderness; and his prayers by the sick and dying seemed to have a
melting power, such as he had never known before. It was spring in his
soul,--soft, Italian spring,--such as brings out the musky breath of
the cyclamen, and the faint, tender perfume of the primrose, in every
moist dell of the Apennines.
A year passed in this way, perhaps the best and happiest of his
troubled life,--a year in which, insensibly to himself, the weekly
interviews with Agnes at the confessional became the rallying points
around which the whole of his life was formed, and she the unsuspected
spring of his inner being.
It was his duty, he said to himself, to give more than usual time and
thought to the working and polishing of this wondrous jewel which had
so unexpectedly been intrusted to him for the adorning of his Master's
crown; and so long as he conducted with the strictest circumspection
of his office, what had he to fear in the way of so delightful a duty?
He had never touched her hand; never had even the folds of her passing
drapery brushed against his garments of mortification and renunciation;
never, even in pastoral benediction, had he dared lay his hand on that
beautiful head. It is true, he had not forbidden himself to raise his
glance sometimes when he saw her coming in at the church door and
gliding up the aisle with downcast eyes, and thoughts evidently so far
above earth that she seemed, like one of Fra Angelico's angels, to be
moving on a cloud, so encompassed with stillness and sanctity that he
held his breath as she passed.
But in the confession of Dame Elsie that morning he had received a
shock which threw his whole interior being into a passionate agitation
which dismayed and astonished him.
The thought of Agnes, his spotless lamb, exposed to lawless and
licentious pursuit, of whose nature and probabilities his past life
gave him only too clear an idea, was of itself a very natural source of
anxiety. But Elsie had unveiled to him her plans for her marriage, and
consulted him on the propriety of placing Agnes immediately under the
protection of the husband she had chosen for her; and it was this part
of her communication which had awakened the severest internal recoil,
and raised a tumult of passions which the priest vainly sought either
to assuage or understand.
As soon as his morning duties were over, he repaired to his convent,
sought his cell, and, prostrate on his face before the crucifix, began
his internal reckoning with himself. The day passed in fasting and
solitude.
It is now golden evening, and on the square, flat roof of the convent,
which, high-perched on a crag, overlooks the bay, one might observe a
dark figure slowly pacing backward and forward. It is Father Francesco;
and as he walks up and down, one could see by his large, bright,
dilated eye, by the vivid red spot on either sunken cheek, and by the
nervous energy of his movements, that he is in the very height of some
mental crisis,--in that state of placid _extase_ in which the subject
supposes himself perfectly calm, because every nerve is screwed to the
highest point of tension and can vibrate no more.
What oceans had that day rolled over him and swept him, as one may see
a little boat rocked on the capricious surges of the Mediterranean!
Were, then, all his strivings and agonies in vain? Did he love this
woman with any earthly love? Was he jealous of the thought of a future
husband? Was it a tempting demon that said to him, "Lorenzo Sforza
might have shielded this treasure from the profanation of lawless
violence, from the brute grasp of an inappreciative peasant, but Father
Francesco cannot"? There was a moment when his whole being vibrated
with a perception of what a marriage bond might have been that was
indeed a sacrament, and that bound together two pure and loyal souls
who gave life and courage to each other in all holy purposes and heroic
deeds; and he almost feared that he had cursed his vows,--those awful
vows, at whose remembrance his inmost soul shivered through every nerve.
But after hours of prayer and struggle, and wave after wave of
agonizing convulsion, he gained one of those high points in human
possibility where souls can stand a little while at a time, and where
all things seem so transfigured and pure that they fancy themselves
thenceforward forever victorious over evil.
As he walks up and down in the gold-and-purple evening twilight, his
mind seems to him calm as that glowing sea that reflects the purple
shores of Ischia, and the quaint, fantastic grottoes and cliffs of
Capri. All is golden and glowing; he sees all clear; he is delivered
from his spiritual enemies; he treads them under his feet.
Yes, he says to himself, he loves Agnes,--loves her all-sacredly as
her guardian angel does, who ever beholdeth the face of her Father in
Heaven. Why, then, does he shrink from her marriage? Is it not evident?
Has that tender soul, that poetic nature, that aspiring genius,
anything in common with the vulgar coarse details of a peasant's life?
Will not her beauty always draw the eye of the licentious, expose her
artless innocence to solicitation which will annoy her and bring upon
her head the inconsiderate jealousy of her husband? Think of Agnes made
subject to the rude authority, to the stripes and correction, which men
of the lower class, under the promptings of jealousy, do not scruple
to inflict on their wives! What career did society, as then organized,
present to such a nature, so perilously gifted in body and mind? He has
the answer. The Church has opened a career to woman which all the world
denies her.
He remembers the story of the dyer's daughter of Siena, the fair
Saint Catharine. In his youth he had often visited the convent where
one of the first artists of Italy has immortalized her conflicts and
her victories, and knelt with his mother at the altar where she now
communes with the faithful. He remembered how, by her sanctity, her
humility, and her holy inspirations of soul, she had risen to the
courts of princes, whither she had been sent as ambassadress to arrange
for the interests of the Church; and then rose before his mind's eye
the gorgeous picture of Pinturicchio, where, borne in celestial repose
and purity amid all the powers and dignitaries of the Church, she is
canonized as one of those that shall reign and intercede with Christ in
heaven.
Was it wrong, therefore, in him, though severed from all womankind
by a gulf of irrevocable vows, that he should feel a kind of jealous
property in this gifted and beautiful creature? and though he might
not, even in thought, dream of possessing her himself, was there sin in
the vehement energy with which his whole nature rose up in him to say
that no other man should,--that she should be the bride of Heaven alone?
Certainly, if there were, it lurked far out of sight, and the priest
had a case that might have satisfied a conscience even more fastidious;
and he felt a sort of triumph in the results of his mental scrutiny.
Yes, she should ascend from glory to glory,--but his should be the hand
that should lead her upward. He would lead her within the consecrated
grate,--he would pronounce the awful words that should make it
sacrilege for all other men to approach her; and yet through life he
should be the guardian and director of her soul, the one being to whom
she should render an obedience as unlimited as that which belongs to
Christ alone.
Such were the thoughts of this victorious hour, which, alas! were
destined to fade as those purple skies and golden fires gradually went
out, leaving, in place of their light and glory, only the lurid glow of
Vesuvius.