It was fifteen years later when the brethren of the little Community
of San Ambrogio gathered in their chapel to sing the requiem over
their founder and first General, Father Denfili, who died, old and
blind, after twenty years of retirement into obscurity. But there
were more than his brethren there. For all those years he had
occupied, day after day, the solitude of a little confessional in the
chapel. He had had his penitents there, and, in a general way, the
brethren of San Ambrogio knew that there were among them many
distinguished ones; but they were not prepared for the revelation that
his obsequies gave them. Cardinals, Roman nobles, soldiers, prelates,
priests and citizens crowded into the little chapel. They were those
who had knelt week after week at the feet of the saint.
But there was one penitent, greater than them all in dignity and
sanctity, who could not come. The tears blinded him that morning when
he said Mass in his own chapel at the Vatican for the soul of Father
Denfili. At the hour of the requiem he looked longingly toward Via
Paoli, where his old spiritual father was lying dead before the altar
of the cloister chapel; and the tears came again into eyes that needed
all their vision to gaze far out, from his watch-tower, on the City
and the World.