THE PENANCE
The course of our story requires us to return to the Capuchin convent,
and to the struggles and trials of its Superior; for in his hands is
the irresistible authority which must direct the future life of Agnes.
From no guilty compliances, no heedless running into temptation, had
he come to love her. The temptation had met him in the direct path of
duty; the poison had been breathed in with the perfume of sweetest and
most life-giving flowers: nor could he shun that temptation, nor cease
to inhale that fatal sweetness, without confessing himself vanquished
in a point where, in his view, to yield was to be lost. The subtle
and deceitful visit of Father Johannes to his cell had the effect of
thoroughly rousing him to a complete sense of his position, and making
him feel the immediate, absolute necessity of bringing all the energy
of his will, all the resources of his nature, to bear on its present
difficulties. For he felt, by a fine intuition, that already he was
watched and suspected; any faltering step now, any wavering, any change
in his mode of treating his female penitents, would be maliciously
noted. The military education of his early days had still left in his
mind a strong residuum of personal courage and honor, which made him
regard it as dastardly to flee when he ought to conquer, and therefore
he set his face as a flint for victory.
But reviewing his interior world, and taking a survey of the work
before him, he felt that sense of a divided personality which often
becomes so vivid in the history of individuals of strong will and
passion. It seemed to him that there were two men within him: the
one turbulent, passionate, demented; the other vainly endeavoring by
authority, reason, and conscience to bring the rebel to subjection. The
discipline of conventual life, the extraordinary austerities to which
he had condemned himself, the monotonous solitude of his existence,
all tended to exalt the vivacity of the nervous system, which, in the
Italian constitution, is at all times disproportionately developed;
and when those weird harp-strings of the nerves are once thoroughly
unstrung, the fury and tempest of the discord sometimes utterly
bewilders the most practiced self-government.
But he felt that _something_ must be done with himself, and done
immediately; for in a few days he must again meet Agnes at the
confessional. He must meet her, not with weak tremblings and passionate
fears, but calm as Fate, inexorable as the Judgment-Day. He must hear
her confession, not as man, but as God; he must pronounce his judgments
with a divine dispassionateness. He must dive into the recesses of her
secret heart, and, following with subtile analysis all the fine courses
of those fibres which were feeling their blind way towards an earthly
love, must tear them remorselessly away. Well could he warn her of
the insidiousness of earthly affections; better than any one else he
could show her how a name that was blended with her prayers and borne
before the sacred shrine in her most retired and solemn hours might at
last come to fill all her heart with a presence too dangerously dear.
He must direct her gaze up those mystical heights where an unearthly
marriage awaited her, its sealed and spiritual bride; he must hurry her
footsteps onward to the irrevocable issue.
All this was before him. But ere it could be done, he must subdue
himself,--he must become calm and pulseless, in deadly resolve; and
what prayer, what penance, might avail for this? If all that he had
already tried had so miserably failed, what hope? He resolved to quit
for a season all human society, and enter upon one of those desolate
periods of retreat from earthly converse well known in the annals of
saintship as most prolific in spiritual victories.
Accordingly, on the day after the conversation with Father Johannes,
he startled the monks by announcing to them that he was going to leave
them for several days.
"My brothers," he said, "the weight of a fearful penance is laid upon
me, which I must work out alone. I leave you to-day, and charge you not
to seek to follow my footsteps; but, as you hope to escape hell, watch
and wrestle for me and yourselves during the time I am gone. Before
many days I hope to return to you with renewed spiritual strength."
That evening, while Agnes and her uncle were sitting together in their
orange-garden, mingling their parting prayers and hymns, scenes of a
very different description surrounded the Father Francesco.
One who looks on the flowery fields and blue seas of this enchanting
region thinks that the Isles of the Blest could scarcely find on earth
a more fitting image; nor can he realize, till experience proves it to
him, that he is in the immediate vicinity of a weird and dreary region
which might represent no less the goblin horrors of the damned.
Around the foot of Vesuvius lie fair villages and villas, garlanded
with roses and flushing with grapes, whose juice gains warmth from
the breathing of its subterraneous fires, while just above them
rises a region more awful than can be created by the action of any
common causes of sterility. There, immense tracts sloping gradually
upward show a desolation so peculiar, so utterly unlike every common
solitude of Nature, that one enters upon it with the shudder we
give at that which is wholly unnatural. On all sides are gigantic
serpent convolutions of black lava, their immense folds rolled into
every conceivable contortion, as if, in their fiery agonies, they had
struggled and wreathed and knotted together, and then grown cold and
black with the imperishable signs of those terrific convulsions upon
them. Not a blade of grass, not a flower, not even the hardiest lichen,
springs up to relieve the utter deathliness of the scene. The eye
wanders from one black, shapeless mass to another, and there is ever
the same suggestion of hideous monster life, of goblin convulsions and
strange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One's very footsteps
have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one's garments brushing over the
rough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp, remorseless touch,
as if its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest
contact revealed it.
The sun was just setting over the beautiful Bay of Naples,--with its
enchanted islands, its jeweled city, its flowery villages, all bedecked
and bedropped with strange shiftings and flushes of prismatic light and
shade, as if they belonged to some fairy-land of perpetual festivity
and singing,--when Father Francesco stopped in his toilsome ascent up
the mountain, and seating himself on ropy ridges of black lava, looked
down on the peaceful landscape.
Above his head, behind him, rose the black cone of the mountain, over
whose top the lazy clouds of thin white smoke were floating, tinged
with the evening light; around him, the desolate convulsed waste,
so arid, so supernaturally dreary; and below, like a soft enchanted
dream, the beautiful bay, the gleaming white villas and towers, the
picturesque islands, the gliding sails, flecked and streaked and dyed
with the violet and pink and purple of the evening sky. The thin new
moon and one glittering star trembled through the rosy air.
The monk wiped from his brow the sweat that had been caused by the toil
of his hurried journey, and listened to the bells of the Ave Maria
pealing from the different churches of Naples, filling the atmosphere
with a soft tremble of solemn dropping sound, as if spirits in the
air took up and repeated over and over the angelic salutation which
a thousand earthly lips were just then uttering. Mechanically he
joined in the invocation which at that moment united the hearts of all
Christians, and as the words passed his lips, he thought, with a sad,
desolate longing, of the hour of death of which they spake.
"It must come at last," he said. "Life is but a moment. Why am I so
cowardly? why so unwilling to suffer and to struggle? Am I a warrior
of the Lord, and do I shrink from the toils of the camp, and long for
the ease of the court before I have earned it? Why do we clamor for
happiness? Why should we sinners be happy? And yet, O God, why is the
world made so lovely as it lies there, why so rejoicing, and so girt
with splendor and beauty, if we are never to enjoy it? If penance and
toil were all we were sent here for, why not make a world grim and
desolate as this around me?--then there would be nothing to seduce us.
But our path is a constant fight; Nature is made only to be resisted;
we must walk the sharp blade of the sword over the fiery chasm to
Paradise. Come, then!--no shrinking!--let me turn my back on everything
dear and beautiful, as now on this landscape!"
He rose and commenced the perpendicular ascent of the cone, stumbling
and climbing over the huge sliding blocks of broken lava, which grated
and crunched beneath his feet with a harsh metallic ring. Sometimes a
broken fragment or two would go tinkling down the rough path behind
him, and sometimes it seemed as if the whole loose black mass from
above were about to slide, like an avalanche, down upon his head;--he
almost hoped it would. Sometimes he would stop, overcome by the toil
of the ascent, and seat himself for a moment on a black fragment, and
then his eye would wander over the wide and peaceful panorama below.
He seemed to himself like a fly perched upon some little roughness of
a perpendicular wall, and felt a strange airy sense of pleasure in
being thus between earth and heaven. A sense of relief, of beauty,
and peacefulness would steal over him, as if he were indeed something
disfranchised and disembodied, a part of the harmonious and beautiful
world that lay stretched out beneath him; in a moment more he would
waken himself with a start, and resume his toilsome journey with a
sullen and dogged perseverance.
At last he gained the top of the mountain,--that weird, strange
region where the loose, hot soil, crumbling beneath his feet, was no
honest foodful mother-earth, but an acrid mass of ashes and corrosive
minerals. Arsenic, sulphur, and many a sharp and bitter salt were in
all he touched, every rift in the ground hissed with stifling steam,
while rolling clouds of dun sullen smoke, and a deep hollow booming,
like the roar of an immense furnace, told his nearness to the great
crater. He penetrated the sombre tabernacle, and stood on the very
brink of a huge basin, formed by a wall of rocks around a sunken plain,
in the midst of which rose the black cone of the subterraneous furnace,
which crackled and roared, and from time to time spit up burning stones
and cinders, or oozed out slow ropy streams of liquid fire.
The sulphurous cliffs were dyed in many a brilliant shade of brown and
orange by the admixture of various ores, but their brightness seemed
strange and unnatural, and the dizzying whirls of vapor, now enveloping
the whole scene in gloom, now lifting in this spot and now in that,
seemed to magnify the dismal pit to an indefinite size. Now and then
there would come up from the very entrails of the mountain a sort of
convulsed sob of hollow sound, and the earth would quiver beneath his
feet, and fragments from the surrounding rocks would scale off and
fall with crashing reverberations into the depth beneath; at such
moments it would seem as if the very mountain were about to crush in
and bear him down in its ruins.
Father Francesco, though blinded by the smoke and choked by the vapor,
could not be content without descending into the abyss and exploring
the very _penetralia_ of its mysteries. Steadying his way by means of
a cord which he fastened to a firm projecting rock, he began slowly
and painfully clambering downward. The wind was sweeping across the
chasm from behind, bearing the noxious vapors away from him, or he must
inevitably have been stifled. It took him some little time, however, to
effect his descent; but at length he found himself fairly landed on the
dark floor of the gloomy enclosure.
The ropy, pitch-black undulations of lava yawned here and there in
red-hot cracks and seams, making it appear to be only a crust over some
fathomless depth of molten fire, whose moanings and boilings could be
heard below. These dark congealed billows creaked and bent as the monk
stepped upon them, and burned his feet through his coarse sandals; yet
he stumbled on. Now and then his foot would crush in, where the lava
had hardened in a thinner crust, and he would draw it suddenly back
from the lurid red-hot metal beneath. The staff on which he rested
was constantly kindling into a light blaze as it slipped into some
heated hollow, and he was fain to beat out the fire upon the cooler
surface. Still he went on half-stifled by the hot and pungent vapor,
but drawn by that painful, unnatural curiosity which possesses one in
a nightmare dream. The great cone in the centre was the point to which
he wished to attain,--the nearest point which man can gain to this
eternal mystery of fire. It was trembling with a perpetual vibration, a
hollow, pulsating undertone of sound like the surging of the sea before
a storm, and the lava that boiled over its sides rolled slowly down
with a strange creaking; it seemed the condensed, intensified essence
and expression of eternal fire, rising and still rising from some
inexhaustible fountain of burning.
Father Francesco drew as near as he could for the stifling heat and
vapor, and, resting on his staff, stood gazing intently. The lurid
light of the fire fell with an unearthly glare on his pale, sunken
features, his wild, haggard eyes, and his torn and disarranged
garments. In the awful solitude and silence of the night he felt his
heart stand still, as if indeed he had touched with his very hand the
gates of eternal woe, and felt its fiery breath upon his cheek. He
half-imagined that the seams and clefts which glowed in lurid lines
between the dark billows would gape yet wider and show the blasting
secrets of some world of fiery despair below. He fancied that he heard
behind and around the mocking laugh of fiends, and that confused clamor
of mingled shrieks and lamentations which Dante describes as filling
the dusky approaches to that forlorn realm where hope never enters.
"Ah, God," he exclaimed, "for this vain life of man! They eat, they
drink, they dance, they sing, they marry and are given in marriage,
they have castles and gardens and villas, and the very beauty of
Paradise seems over it all,--and yet how close by burns and roars the
eternal fire! Fools that we are, to clamor for indulgence and happiness
in this life, when the question is, to escape everlasting burnings! If
I tremble at this outer court of God's wrath and justice, what must be
the fires of hell? These are but earthly fires; they can but burn the
body: those are made to burn the soul; they are undying as the soul
is. What would it be to be dragged down, down, down, into an abyss of
soul-fire hotter than this for ages on ages? This might bring merciful
death in time: that will have no end."
The monk fell on his knees and breathed out piercing supplications.
Every nerve and fibre within him seemed tense with his agony of prayer.
It was not the outcry for purity and peace, not a tender longing for
forgiveness, not a filial remorse for sin, but the nervous anguish
of him who shrieks in the immediate apprehension of an unendurable
torture. It was the cry of a man upon the rack, the despairing scream
of him who feels himself sinking in a burning dwelling. Such anguish
has found an utterance in Stradella's celebrated "Pietà, Signore,"
which still tells to our ears, in its wild moans and piteous shrieks,
the religious conceptions of his day; for there is no phase of the
Italian mind that has not found expression in its music.
When the oppression of the heat and sulphurous vapor became too
dreadful to be borne, the monk retraced his way and climbed with
difficulty up the steep sides of the crater, till he gained the
summit above, where a comparatively free air revived him. All night
he wandered up and down in that dreary vicinity, now listening to
the mournful roar and crackle of the fire, and now raising his voice
in penitential psalms or the notes of that terrific "Dies Iræ" which
sums up all the intense fear and horror with which the religion of the
Middle Ages clothed the idea of the final catastrophe of humanity.
Sometimes prostrating himself with his face towards the stifling soil,
he prayed with agonized intensity till Nature would sink in a temporary
collapse, and sleep, in spite of himself, would steal over him.
So waned the gloomy hours of the night away, till the morning broke in
the east, turning all the blue wavering floor of the sea to crimson
brightness, and bringing up, with the rising breeze, the barking of
dogs, the lowing of kine, the songs of laborers and boatmen, all fresh
and breezy from the repose of the past night.
Father Francesco heard the sound of approaching footsteps climbing the
lava path, and started with a nervous trepidation. Soon he recognized
a poor peasant of the vicinity, whose child he had tended during a
dangerous illness. He bore with him a little basket of eggs, with a
melon and a fresh green salad.
"Good-morning, holy father," he said, bowing humbly. "I saw you coming
this way last night, and I could hardly sleep for thinking of you; and
my good woman, Teresina, would have it that I should come out to look
after you. I have taken the liberty to bring a little offering;--it was
the best we had."
"Thank you, my son," said the monk, looking wistfully at the fresh,
honest face of the peasant. "You have taken too much trouble for such a
sinner. I must not allow myself such indulgences."
"But your Reverence must live. Look you," said the peasant, "at least
your Reverence will take an egg. See here, how handily I can cook
one," he added, striking his stick into a little cavity of a rock,
from which, as from an escape-valve, hissed a jet of hot steam,--"see
here, I nestle the egg in this little cleft, and it will be done in a
twinkling. Our good God gives us our fire for nothing here."
There was something wholesomely kindly and cheerful in the action and
expression of the man, which broke upon the overstrained and disturbed
musings of the monk like daylight on a ghastly dream. The honest,
loving heart sees love in everything; even the fire is its fatherly
helper, and not its avenging enemy.
Father Francesco took the egg, when it was done, with a silent gesture
of thanks.
"If I might make bold to say," said the peasant, encouraged, "your
Reverence should have some care for yourself. If a man will not feed
himself, the good God will not feed him; and we poor people have too
few friends already to let such as you die. Your hands are trembling,
and you look worn out. Surely you should take something more, for the
very love of the poor."
"My son, I am bound to do a heavy penance, and to work out a great
conflict. I thank you for your undeserved kindness. Leave me now to
myself, and come no more to disturb my prayers. Go, and God bless you!"
"Well," said the peasant, putting down the basket and melon, "I shall
leave these things here, any way, and I beg your Reverence to have a
care of yourself. Teresina fretted all night for fear something might
come to you. The _bambino_ that you cured is grown a stout little
fellow, and eats enough for two,--and it is all of you; so she cannot
forget it. She is a busy little woman, is Teresina; and when she gets
a thought in her head, it buzzes, buzzes, like a fly in a bottle, and
she will have it your Reverence is killing yourself by inches, and says
she, 'What will all the poor do when he is gone?' So your Reverence
must pardon us. We mean it all for the best."
So saying, the man turned and began sliding and slipping down the steep
ashy sides of the mountain cone with a dexterity which carried him to
the bottom in a few moments; and on he went, sending back after him a
cheerful little air, the refrain of which is still to be heard in our
days in that neighborhood. A word or two of the gay song fluttered back
on the ear of the monk,--
"Tutta gioja, tutta festa."
So gay and airy it was in its ringing cadence that it seemed a musical
laugh springing from sunny skies, and came fluttering into the dismal
smoke and gloom of the mountaintop like a very butterfly of sound.
It struck on the sad, leaden ear of the monk much as we might fancy
the carol of a robin over a grave might seem, could the cold sleeper
below wake one moment to its perception. If it woke one regretful sigh
and drew one wandering look downward to the elysian paradise that
lay smiling at the foot of the mountain, he instantly suppressed the
feeling and set his face in its old deathly stillness.