THE PILGRIMAGE
The morning sun rose clear and lovely on the old red rocks of Sorrento,
and danced in a thousand golden scales and ripples on the wide
Mediterranean. The shadows of the gorge were pierced by long golden
shafts of light, here falling on some moist bed of crimson cyclamen,
there shining through a waving tuft of gladiolus, or making the
abundant yellow fringes of the broom more vivid in their brightness.
The velvet-mossy old bridge, in the far shadows at the bottom, was lit
up by a chance beam, and seemed as if it might be something belonging
to fairy-land.
There had been a bustle and stir betimes in the little dove-cot, for
to-morrow the inmates were to leave it for a long, adventurous journey.
To old Elsie, the journey back to Rome, the city of her former days
of prosperity, the place which had witnessed her ambitious hopes, her
disgrace and downfall, was full of painful ideas. There arose to her
memory, like a picture, those princely halls, with their slippery, cold
mosaic floors, their long galleries of statues and paintings, their
enchanting gardens, musical with the voice of mossy fountains, fragrant
with the breath of roses and jasmines, where the mother of Agnes had
spent the hours of her youth and beauty. She seemed to see her flitting
hither and thither down the stately ilex-avenues, like some gay
singing-bird, to whom were given gilded cages and a constant round of
caresses and sweets, or like the flowers in the parterres, which lived
and died only as the graceful accessories of the grandeur of an old
princely family.
She compared, mentally, the shaded and secluded life which Agnes had
led with the specious and fatal brilliancy which had been the lot of
her mother,--her simple peasant garb with those remembered visions of
jewelry and silk and embroideries with which the partial patronage of
the Duchess or the ephemeral passion of her son had decked out the poor
Isella; and then came swelling at her heart a tumultuous thought, one
which she had repressed and kept down for years with all the force of
pride and hatred. Agnes, peasant-girl though she seemed, had yet the
blood of that proud old family in her veins; the marriage had been a
true one; she herself had witnessed it.
"Yes, indeed," she said to herself, "were justice done, she would now
be a princess,--a fit mate for the nobles of the land; and here I ask
no more than to mate her to an honest smith,--I that have seen a prince
kneel to kiss her mother's hand,--yes, he did,--entreat her on his
knees to be his wife,--I saw it. But then, what came of it? Was there
ever one of these nobles that kept oath or promise to us of the people,
or that cared for us longer than the few moments we could serve his
pleasure? Old Elsie, you have done wisely! keep your dove out of the
eagle's nest: it is foul with the blood of poor innocents whom he has
torn to pieces in his cruel pride!"
These thoughts swelled in silence in the mind of Elsie, while she was
busy sorting and arranging her household stores, and making those
thousand-and-one preparations known to every householder, whether of
much or little, who meditates a long journey.
To Agnes she seemed more than ever severe and hard; yet probably there
never was a time when every pulse of her heart was beating more warmly
for the child, and every thought of the future was more entirely
regulated with reference to her welfare. It is no sinecure to have the
entire devotion of a strong, enterprising, self-willed friend, as Agnes
had all her life found. One cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs of
thistles, and the affection of thorny and thistly natures has often
as sharp an acid and as long prickers as wild gooseberries; yet it is
their best, and must be so accepted.
Agnes tried several times to offer her help to her grandmother, but
was refused so roughly that she dared not offer again, and therefore
went to her favorite station by the parapet in the garden, whence she
could look up and down the gorge, and through the arches of the old
mossy Roman bridge that spanned it far down by the city-wall. All these
things had become dear to her by years of familiar silent converse.
The little garden, with its old sculptured basin and the ever-lulling
dash of falling water; the tremulous draperies of maiden's-hair, always
beaded with shining drops; the old shrine, with its picture, its lamp,
and flower-vase; the tall, dusky orange-trees, so full of blossoms and
fruit, so smooth and shining in their healthy bark,--all seemed to
her as so many dear old friends whom she was about to leave, perhaps
forever.
What this pilgrimage would be like, she scarcely knew: days and weeks
of wandering,--over mountain-passes; in deep, solitary valleys,--as
years ago, when her grandmother brought her, a little child, from Rome.
In the last few weeks, Agnes seemed to herself to have become wholly
another being. Silently, insensibly, her feet had crossed the enchanted
river that divides childhood from womanhood, and all the sweet ignorant
joys of that first early paradise lay behind her. Up to this time her
life had seemed to her a charming dream, full of blessed visions and
images: legends of saints, and hymns, and prayers had blended with
flower-gatherings in the gorge, and light daily toils.
Now a new, strange life had been born within her,--a life full of
passions, contradictions, and conflicts. A love had sprung up in her
heart, strange and wonderful, for one who till within these few weeks
had been entirely unknown to her, who had never toiled for, or housed,
or clothed, or cared for her as her grandmother had, and yet whom a few
short interviews, a few looks, a few words, had made to seem nearer
and dearer than the old, tried friends of her childhood. In vain she
confessed it as a sin, in vain she strove against it; it came back to
her in every hymn, in every prayer. Then she would press the sharp
cross to her breast, till a thousand stings of pain would send the
blood in momentary rushes to her pale cheek, and cause her delicate
lips to contract with an expression of stern endurance, and pray that
by any penance and anguish she might secure his salvation.
To save one such glorious soul, she said to herself, was work enough
for one little life. She was willing to spend it all in endurance,
unseen by him, unknown to him, so that at last he should be received
into that Paradise which her ardent imagination conceived so vividly.
Surely, there she should meet him, radiant as the angel of her dream;
and then she would tell him that it was all for his sake that she had
refused to listen to him here. And these sinful longings to see him
once more, these involuntary reachings of her soul after an earthly
companionship, she should find strength to overcome in this pilgrimage.
She should go to Rome,--the very city where the blessed Paul poured
out his blood for the Lord Jesus,--where Peter fed the flock, till his
time, too, came to follow his Lord in the way of the cross. She should
even come near to her blessed Redeemer; she should go up, on her knees,
those very steps to Pilate's hall where He stood bleeding, crowned with
thorns,--His blood, perhaps, dropping on the very stones. Ah, could
any mortal love distract her there? Should she not there find her
soul made free of every earthly thrall to love her Lord alone,--as she
had loved Him in the artless and ignorant days of her childhood,--but
better, a thousand times?
"Good-morning to you, pretty dove!" said a voice from without the
garden-wall; and Agnes, roused from her reverie, saw old Jocunda.
"I came down to help you off," she said, as she came into the little
garden. "Why, my dear little saint! you are looking white as a sheet,
and with those tears! What's it all for, baby?"
"Ah, Jocunda! grandmamma is angry with me all the time now. I wish I
could go once more to the convent and see my dear Mother Theresa. She
is angry, if I but name it; and yet she will not let me do anything
here to help her, and so I don't know _what_ to do."
"Well, at any rate, don't cry, pretty one! Your grandmamma is worked
with hard thoughts. We old folks are twisted and crabbed and full of
knots with disappointment and trouble, like the mulberry-trees that
they keep for vines to run on. But I'll speak to her; I know her ways;
she shall let you go; I'll bring her round."
"So-ho, sister!" said the old soul, hobbling to the door and looking
in at Elsie, who was sitting flat on the stone floor of her cottage,
sorting a quantity of flax that lay around her. The severe Roman
profile was thrown out by the deep shadows of the interior,--and the
piercing black eyes, the silver-white hair, and the strong, compressed
lines of the mouth, as she worked, and struggled with the ghosts of her
former life, made her look like no unapt personification of one of the
Fates reviewing her flax before she commenced the spinning of some new
web of destiny.
"Good-morning to you, sister!" said Jocunda. "I heard you were off
to-morrow, and I came to see what I could do to help you."
"There's nothing to be done for me, but to kill me," said Elsie. "I am
weary of living."
"Oh, never say that! Shake the dice again, my old man used to say,--God
rest his soul! Please Saint Agnes, you'll have a brave pilgrimage."
"Saint Agnes be hanged!" said Elsie, gruffly. "I'm out with her.
It was she put all these notions into my girl's head. Because she
didn't get married herself, she don't want any one else to. She has
no consideration. I've done with her: I told her so this morning. The
candles I've burned and the prayers I've gone through with, that she
might prosper me in this one thing! and it's all gone against me. She's
a baggage, and shall never see another penny of mine,--that's flat!"
Such vituperation of saints and sacred images may be heard to this day
in Italy, and is a common feature of idol-worship in all lands; for,
however the invocation of the saints could be vitalized in the hearts
of the few spiritual, there is no doubt that in the mass of the common
people it had all the well-defined symptoms of the grossest idolatry,
among which fits of passionate irreverence are one. The feeling which
tempts the enlightened Christian in sore disappointment and vexation to
rise in rebellion against a wise Providence, in the childish twilight
of uncultured natures finds its full expression unawed by reverence or
fear.
"Oh, hush, now!" said Jocunda. "What is the use of making her angry
just as you are going to Rome, where she has the most power? All sorts
of ill-luck will befall you. Make up with her before you start, or you
may get the fever in the marshes and die, and then who will take care
of poor Agnes?"
"Let Saint Agnes look after her; the girl loves her better than she
does me, or anybody else," said Elsie. "If she cared anything about me,
she'd marry and settle down, as I want her to."
"Oh, there you are wrong," said Jocunda. "Marrying is like your dinner:
one is not always in stomach for it, and one's meat is another's
poison. Now who knows but this pilgrimage may be the very thing to
bring the girl round? I've seen people cured of too much religion by
going to Rome. You know things ain't there as our little saint fancies.
Why, between you and me, the priests themselves have their jokes on
those who come so far to so little purpose. More shame for 'em, say I,
too; but we common people mustn't look into such things too closely.
Now take it cheerfully, and you'll see the girl will come back tired
of tramping and able to settle down in a good home with a likely
husband. I have a brother in Naples who is turning a pretty penny in
the fisheries; I will give you directions to find him; his wife is a
wholesome Christian woman; and if the little one be tired by the time
you get there, you might do worse than stop two or three days with
them. It's a brave city; seems made to have a good time in. Come, you
let her just run up to the convent to bid good-by to the Mother Theresa
and the sisters."
"I don't care where she goes," said Elsie, ungraciously.
"There, now!" said Jocunda, coming out, "Agnes, your grandmother bids
you go to the convent to say good-by to the sisters; so run along,
there's a little dear. The Mother Theresa talks of nothing else but you
since she heard that you meditated this; and she has broken in two her
own piece of the True Cross which she's carried in the gold and pearl
reliquary that the Queen sent her, and means to give it to you. One
doesn't halve such gifts, without one's whole heart goes with them."
"Dear mother!" said Agnes, her eyes filling with tears, "I will take
her some flowers and oranges for the last time. Do you know, Jocunda, I
feel that I never shall come back here to this dear little home where
I have been so happy,--everything sounds so mournful and looks so
mournful!--I love everything here so much!"
"Oh, dear child, never give in to such fancies, but pluck up heart.
You will be sure to have luck, wherever you go,--especially since the
mother will give you that holy relic. I myself had a piece of Saint
John Baptist's thumbnail sewed up in a leather bag, which I wore day
and night all the years I was tramping up and down with my old man; but
when he died, I had it buried with him to ease his soul. For you see,
dear, he was a trooper, and led such a rackety up-and-down life, that I
doubt but his confessions were but slipshod, and he needed all the help
he could get, poor old soul! It's a comfort to think he has it."
"Ah, Jocunda, seems to me it were better to trust to the free love of
our dear Lord who died for us, and pray to Him, without ceasing, for
his soul."
"Like enough, dearie; but then, one can't be too sure, you know. And
there isn't the least doubt in my mind that that was a true relic,
for I got it in the sack of the city of Volterra, out of the private
cabinet of a noble lady, with a lot of jewels and other matters that
made quite a little purse for us. Ah, that was a time, when that city
was sacked! It was hell upon earth for three days, and all our men
acted like devils incarnate; but then they always will in such cases.
But go your ways now, dearie, and I'll stay with your grandmamma; for,
please God, you must be up and away with the sun to-morrow."
Agnes hastily arranged a little basket of fruit and flowers, and
took her way down through the gorge, under the Roman bridge, through
an orange-orchard, and finally came out upon the seashore, and so
along the sands below the cliffs on which the old town of Sorrento is
situated.
So cheating and inconsistent is the human heart, especially in the
feminine subject, that she had more than once occasion to chide
herself for the thrill with which she remembered passing the cavalier
once in this orange-garden, and the sort of vague hope which she
detected that somewhere along this road he might appear again.
"How perfectly wicked and depraved I must be," she said to herself, "to
find any pleasure in such a thought of one I should pray never to meet
again!"
And so the little soul went on condemning herself in those exaggerated
terms which the religious vocabulary of conventual life furnished
ready-made for the use of penitents of every degree, till by the time
she arrived at the convent she could scarcely have been more oppressed
with a sense of sin, if she had murdered her grandmother and eloped
with the cavalier.
On her arrival in the convent court, the peaceful and dreamy stillness
contrasted strangely with the gorgeous brightness of the day outside.
The splendid sunshine, the sparkling seas, the songs of the boatmen,
the brisk passage of gliding sails, the bright hues of the flowers that
garlanded the rocks, all seemed as if the earth had been arrayed for
some gala-day; but the moment she had passed the portal, the silent,
mossy court, with its pale marble nymph, its lull of falling water, its
turf snow-dropt with daisies and fragrant with blue and white violets,
and the surrounding cloistered walks, with their pictured figures of
pious history, all came with a sad and soothing influence on her nerves.
The nuns, who had heard the news of the projected pilgrimage, and
regarded it as the commencement of that saintly career which they had
always predicted for her, crowded around her, kissing her hands and
her robe, and entreating her prayers at different shrines of especial
sanctity that she might visit.
The Mother Theresa took her to her cell, and there hung round her neck,
by a golden chain, the relic which she designed for her, and of whose
genuineness she appeared to possess no manner of doubt.
"But how pale you are, my sweet child!" she said. "What has happened to
alter you so much? Your cheeks look so thin, and there are deep, dark
circles round your eyes."
"Ah, my mother, it is because of my sins."
"Your sins, dear little one! What sins can you be guilty of?"
"Ah, my dear mother, I have been false to my Lord, and let the love of
an earthly creature into my heart."
"What can you mean?" said the mother.
"Alas, dear mother, the cavalier who sent that ring!" said Agnes,
covering her face with her hands.
Now the Mother Theresa had never left the walls of that convent since
she was ten years old,--had seen no men except her father and uncle,
who once or twice made her a short call, and an old hunchback who took
care of their garden, safe in his armor of deformity. Her ideas on the
subject of masculine attractions were, therefore, as vague as might be
the conceptions of the eyeless fishes in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky
with regard to the fruits and flowers above ground. All that portion of
her womanly nature which might have throbbed lay in a dead calm. Still
there was a faint flutter of curiosity, as she pressed Agnes to tell
her story, which she did with many pauses and sobs and blushes.
"And is he so very handsome, my little heart?" she said, after
listening. "What makes you love him so much in so little time?"
"Yes,--he is beautiful as an angel."
"I never saw a young man, really," said the Mother Theresa. "Uncle
Angelo was lame, and had gray hair; and papa was very fat, and had a
red face. Perhaps he looks like our picture of Saint Sebastian;--I have
often thought that I might be in danger of loving a young man that
looked like him."
"Oh, he is more beautiful than that picture or any picture!" said
Agnes, fervently; "and, mother, though he is excommunicated, I can't
help feeling that he is as good as he is beautiful. My uncle had strong
hopes that he should restore him to the True Church; and to pray for
his soul I am going on this pilgrimage. Father Francesco says, if I
will tear away and overcome this love, I shall gain so much merit that
my prayers will have power to save his soul. Promise me, dear mother,
that you and all the sisters will help me with your prayers;--help me
to work out this great salvation, and then I shall be so glad to come
back here and spend all my life in prayer!"