DARKER STILL.
When Sebastian came into the court, he found a little crowd of domestics
gathered round the courier, listening to the details of their master’s
death.
The letter of which Torquatus was the bearer to him, had produced its
desired effect. He called at his villa, and spent a few days with his
daughter, on his way to Asia. He was more than usually affectionate; and
when they parted, both father and daughter seemed to have a melancholy
foreboding that they would meet no more. He soon, however, recovered his
spirits at Baiæ, where a party of good livers anxiously awaited him; and
where he considered himself obliged to stay, while his galley was being
fitted up and stored with the best wines and provisions which Campania
afforded, for his voyage. He indulged, however, his luxurious tastes to
excess; and on coming out of a bath, after a hearty supper, he was
seized with a chill, and in four-and-twenty hours was a corpse. He had
left his undivided wealth to his only child. In fine, the body was being
embalmed when the courier started, and was to be brought by his galley
to Ostia.
On hearing this sad tale, Sebastian was almost sorry that he had spoken
as he had done of death, and left the house with mournful thoughts.
Fabiola’s first plunge into the dark abyss of grief was deep and dismal,
down into unconsciousness. Then the buoyancy of youth and mind bore her
up again to the surface; and her view of life, to the horizon, was as of
a boundless ocean of black seething waves, on which floated no living
thing save herself. Her woe seemed utter and unmeasured; and she closed
her eyes with a shudder, and suffered herself to sink again into
obliviousness, till once more roused to wakefulness of mind. Again and
again she was thus tossed up and down, between transient death and life,
while her attendants applied remedies to what they deemed a succession
of alarming fits and convulsions. At length she sat up, pale, staring,
and tearless, gently pushing aside the hand that tried to administer
restoratives to her. In this state she remained long; a stupor, fixed
and deadly, seemed to have entranced her; the pupils were almost
insensible to the light, and fears were whispered of her brain becoming
oppressed. The physician, who had been called, uttered distinctly and
forcibly into her ears the question: “Fabiola, do you know that your
father is dead?” She started, fell back, and a bursting flood of tears
relieved her heart and head. She spoke of her father, and called for him
amidst her sobs, and said wild and incoherent, but affectionate things
about, and to, him. Sometimes she seemed to think him still alive, then
she remembered he was dead; and so she wept and moaned, till sleep took
the turn of tears, in nursing her shattered mind and frame.
Euphrosyne and Syra alone watched by her. The former had, from time to
time, put in the commonplaces of heathen consolation, had reminded her
too, how kind a master, how honest a man, how loving a father he had
been. But the Christian sat in silence, except to speak gentle and
soothing words to her mistress, and served her with an active delicacy,
which even then was not unnoticed. What could she do more, unless it was
to pray? What hope for else, than that a new grace was folded up, like
a flower, in this tribulation; that a bright angel was riding in the
dark cloud that overshadowed her humbled lady?
As grief receded it left some room for thought. This came to Fabiola in
a gloomy and searching form. “What was become of her father? Whither was
he gone? Had he melted into unexistence, or had he been crushed into
annihilation? Had _his_ life been searched through by that unseen eye
which sees the invisible? Had he stood the proof of that scrutiny which
Sebastian and Syra had described? Impossible! Then what had become of
him?” She shuddered as she thought, and put away the reflection from her
mind.
Oh, for a ray from some unknown light, that would dart into the grave,
and show her what it was! Poetry had pretended to enlighten it, and even
glorify it; but had only, in truth, remained at the door, as a genius
with drooping head, and torch reversed. Science had stepped in, and come
out scared, with tarnished wings and lamp extinguished in the fetid air;
for it had only discovered a charnel-house. And philosophy had barely
ventured to wander round and round, and peep in with dread, and recoil,
and then prate or babble; and, shrugging its shoulders, own that the
problem was yet unsolved, the mystery still veiled. Oh, for something,
or some one, better than all these, to remove the dismal perplexity!
While these thoughts dwell like gloomy night on the heart of Fabiola,
her slave is enjoying the vision of light, clothed in mortal form,
translucid and radiant, rising from the grave as from an alembic, in
which have remained the grosser qualities of matter, without impairing
the essence of its nature. Spiritualized and free, lovely and glorious,
it springs from the very hot-bed of corruption. And another and another,
from land and sea; from reeking cemetery, and from beneath consecrated
altar; from the tangled thicket where solitary murder has been
committed on the just, and from fields of ancient battle done by Israel
for God; like crystal fountains springing into the air, like brilliant
signal-lights, darted from earth to heaven, till a host of millions,
side by side, repeoples creation with joyous and undying life. And how
knows she this? Because One, greater and better than poet, sage, or
sophist, had made the trial; had descended first into the dark couch of
death, had blessed it, as He had done the cradle, and made infancy
sacred; rendering also death a holy thing, and its place a sanctuary. He
went into it in the darkest of evening, and He came forth from it in the
brightest of morning; He was laid there wrapped in spices, and he rose
again robed in His own fragrant incorruption. And from that day the
grave had ceased to be an object of dread to the Christian soul, for it
continued what he had made it,--the furrow into which the seed of
immortality must needs be cast.
The time was not come for speaking of these things to Fabiola. She
mourned still, as they must mourn who have no hope. Day succeeded day in
gloomy meditation on the mystery of death, till other cares mercifully
roused her. The corpse arrived, and such a funeral followed as Rome then
seldom witnessed. Processions by torch-light, in which the waxen
effigies of ancestors were borne, and a huge funeral pile, built up of
aromatic wood, and scented by the richest spices of Arabia, ended in her
gathering up a few handfuls of charred bones, which were deposited in an
alabaster urn, and placed in a niche of the family sepulchre, with the
name inscribed of their former owner.
Calpurnius spoke the funeral oration; in which, according to the
fashionable ideas of the day, he contrasted the virtues of the
hospitable and industrious citizen with the false morality of those men
called Christians, who fasted and prayed all day, and were stealthily
insinuating their dangerous principles into every noble family, and
spreading disloyalty and immorality in every class. Fabius, he could
have no doubt, if there was any future existence, whereon philosophers
differed, was now basking on a green bank in Elysium, and quaffing
nectar. “And oh!” concluded the old whining hypocrite, who would have
been sorry to exchange one goblet of Falernian for an amphora[115] of
that beverage, “oh! that the gods would hasten the day when I, his
humble client, may join him in his shady repose and sober banquets!”
This noble sentiment gained immense applause.
To this care succeeded another. Fabiola had to apply her vigorous mind
to examine, and close her father’s complicated affairs. How often was
she pained at the discovery of what to her seemed injustice, fraud,
over-reaching and oppression, in the transactions of one whom the world
had applauded as the most honest and liberal of public contractors!
[Illustration: The Peacock, as an Emblem of the Resurrection, found in
the Catacombs.]
In a few weeks more, in the dark attire of a mourner, Fabiola went forth
to visit her friends. The first of these was her cousin Agnes.