The Cardinal was seated,--he rose as Moretti appeared.
"I beg your Eminence to spare yourself!" said Moretti suavely, with a
deep salutation, "And to pardon me for thus coming unannounced into the
presence of one so highly esteemed by the Holy Father as Cardinal
Bonpre!"
The Cardinal gave a gesture of courteous deprecation; and Monsignor
Moretti, lifting his, till then, partially lowered eyelids, flashed an
angry regard upon the Abbe Vergniaud, who resting his back against the
book-case behind him, met his glance with the most perfect composure.
Close to him stood his son and would-be murderer Cyrillon,--his dark
handsome face rendered even handsomer by the wistful and softened
expression of his eyes, which ever and anon rested upon his father with
a look of mingled wonder and respect. There was a brief silence--of a
few seconds at most,--and then Moretti spoke again in a voice which
thrilled with pent-up indignation, but which he endeavoured to render
calm and clear as he addressed the Cardinal.
"Your Eminence is without doubt aware of the cause of my visit to you.
If, as I understand, your Eminence was present at Notre Dame de Lorette
this morning, and witnessed the regrettable conduct of the faithless
son of the Church here present--"
"Pardon! This is my affair." interposed Vergniaud, stepping forward,
"His Eminence, Cardinal Bonpre, is not at all concerned in the matter
of the difficult dispute which has arisen between me and my own
conscience. You call me faithless, Monsignor,--will you explain what
you mean by 'faithless' under these present conditions of argument?"
"It shows the extent and hopelessness of your retrogression from all
good that you should presume to ask such a question," answered Moretti,
growing white under the natural darkness of his skin with an impotency
of rage he could scarcely suppress, "Your sermon this morning was an
open attack on the Church, and the amazing scene at its conclusion is a
scandal to Christianity!"
"The attack on the Church I admit," said the Abbe quietly, "I am not
the only preacher in the world who has so attacked it. Christ Himself
would attack it if He were to visit this earth again!"
Moretti turned angrily towards the Cardinal.
"Your Eminence permits this blasphemy to be uttered in your presence?"
he demanded.
"Nay, wherever and whenever I perceive blasphemy, my son, I shall
reprove it," said the Cardinal, fixing his mild eyes steadily on
Moretti's livid countenance, "I cannot at present admit that our
unhappy and repentant brother here has blasphemed. In his address to
his congregation to-day he denounced social hypocrisy, and also pointed
out certain failings in the Church which may possibly need
consideration and reform; but against the Gospel of Christ, or against
the Founder of our Faith I heard no word that could be judged
ill-fitting. As for the conclusion which so very nearly ended in
disaster and crime, there is nothing to be said beyond the fact that
both the persons concerned are profoundly sorry for their sins."
"No sorrow can wipe out such infamy--" began Moretti hotly.
"Patience! Patience, my son!" and the Cardinal raised his hand with a
slight gesture of authority, "Surely we must believe the words of our
Blessed Lord, 'There is more joy in Heaven over one sinner that
repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons which have no need of
repentance'!"
"And on this old and well-worn phrase you excuse a confessed heretic?"
said Moretti, with a sneer.
"This old and well-worn phrase is the saying of our Master," answered
the Cardinal firmly, "And it is as true as the truth of the sunshine
which, in its old and well-worn way, lights up this world gloriously
every morning! I would stake my very life on the depth and the truth of
Vergniaud's penitence! Who, seeing and knowing the brand of disgrace he
has voluntarily burnt into his own social name and honour, could doubt
his sincerity, or refuse to raise him up, even as our Lord would have
done, saying, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee! Go, and sin no more!'?"
Moretti's furtive eyes disappeared for a moment under his discoloured
eyelids, which quivered rapidly like the throbbings in the throat of an
angry snake. Before he could speak again however, Vergniaud interposed.
"Why trouble His Eminence with my crimes or heresies?" he said quietly,
"I am grateful to him from my soul for his gentleness and charity of
judgment--but I need no defence--not even from him. I am answerable to
God alone!--neither to Church nor Creed! It was needful that I should
speak as I spoke to-day--"
"Needful to scandalize the Church?" demanded Moretti sharply.
"The Church is not scandalized by a man who confesses himself an
unworthy member of it!" returned Vergniaud, "It is better to tell the
truth and go out of the Church than to remain in it as a liar and a
hypocrite."
"According to your own admission you have been a liar and a hypocrite
for twenty-five years!" said Moretti bitterly, "You should have made
your confession before, and have made it privately. There is something
unnatural and reprehensible in the sudden blazon you have made to the
public of your gross immorality."
"'A sudden blazon' you call it,--" said the Abbe, "Well, perhaps it is!
But murder will out, no matter how long it is kept in. You are not
entirely aware of my position, Monseigneur. Have you the patience to
hear a full explanation?"
"I have the patience to hear because it is my duty to hear," replied
Moretti frigidly, "I am bound to convey the whole of this matter to His
Holiness."
"True! That is your duty, and who shall say it is not also your
pleasure!" and Vergniaud smiled a little. "Well!--Convey to His
Holiness the news that I, Denis Vergniaud, am a dying man, and that
knowing myself to be in that condition, and that two years at the
utmost, is my extent of life on this planet, I have taken it seriously
into my head to consider as to whether I am fit to meet death with a
clean conscience. Death, Monsignor, admits of no lying, no politeness,
no elegant sophistries! Now, the more I have considered, the more I am
aware of my total unfitness to confront whatever may be waiting for me
in the Afterwards of death--(for without doubt there is an
afterwards,)--and being conscious of having done at least one grave
injury to an innocent person, I have taken the best and quickest way to
make full amends. I wronged a woman--this boy's mother--" and he
indicated with a slight gesture Cyrillon, who had remained a silent
witness of the scene,--"and the boy himself from early years set his
mind and his will to avenge his mother's dishonour. I--the chief actor
in the drama,--am thus responsible for a woman's misery and shame; and
am equally responsible for the murderous spirit which has animated one,
who without this feeling, would have been a promising fellow enough.
The woman I wronged, alas!--is dead, and I cannot reinstate her name,
save in an open acknowledgment of her child, my son. I do acknowledge
him,--I acknowledge him in your presence, and therefore virtually in
the presence of His Holiness. I thus help to remove the stigma I myself
set on his name. Plainly speaking, Monsignor, we men have no right
whatever to launch human beings into the world with the 'bar sinister'
branded upon them. We have no right, if we follow Christ, to do
anything that may injure or cause trouble to any other creature. We
have no right to be hasty in our judgment, even of sin."
"Sin is sin,--and demands punishment--" interrupted Moretti.
"You quote the law of Moses, Monsignor! I speak with the premise 'if'.
IF we follow Christ;--if we do not, the matter is of course different.
We can then twist Scripture to suit our own purpose. We can organise
systems which are agreeable to our own convenience or profit, but which
have nothing whatever of Christ's Divine Spirit of universal love and
compassion in them. My action this morning was unusual and quixotic no
doubt. Yet, it seemed to me the only way to comport myself under those
particular circumstances. I did a wrong--I seek to make amends. I
believe this is what God would have me do. I believe that the Supernal
Forces judge our sins against each other to be of a far worse nature
than sins against Church or Creed. I also believe that if we try to
amend our injustices and set crooked things straight, death will be an
easier business, and Heaven will come a little nearer to our souls. As
for my attack on the Church--"
"Ah truly! What of your attack on the Church?" said Moretti, his small
eyes glistening, and his breath going and coming quickly.
"I would say every word of it again with absolute conviction," declared
Vergniaud, "for I have said nothing but the truth! There is a movement
in the world, Monsignor, that all the powers of Rome are unable to cope
with!--the movement of an advancing resistless force called Truth,--the
Voice of God,--the Voice of Christ! Truth cannot be choked, murdered
and killed nowadays as in the early Inquisition! Rather than that the
Voice of Truth should be silenced or murdered now at this period of
time, God will shake down Rome!"
"Not so!" exclaimed Moretti hotly--"Every nation in the world shall
perish before Rome shall lose her sacred power! She is the 'headstone
of the corner'--and 'upon whomsoever that stone shall fall, it shall
grind him to powder!'"
"You think so?" and Verginaud shrugged his shoulders ever so
slightly--"Well! For me, I believe that material as well as spiritual
forces combine to fight against long-concealed sin and practised old
hypocrisies. It would not surprise me if the volcanic agencies which
are for ever at work beneath the blood-stained soil of Italy, were to
meet under the Eternal City, and in one fell burst of flame and thunder
prove its temporary and ephemeral worth! The other day an earthquake
shook the walls of Rome and sent a warning shock through St. Peter's.
St. Peter's, with its vast treasures, its gilded shrines, its locked-up
wealth, its magnificence,--a strange contrast to Italy itself!--Italy
with its people ground down under the heel of a frightful taxation,
starving, and in the iron bonds of poverty! 'The Pope is a prisoner and
can do nothing'? Monsignor, the Pope is a prisoner by his own choice!
If he elected to walk abroad among the people and scatter Peter's Pence
among the sick and needy, he would then perhaps be BEGINNING to do the
duties our Lord enjoined on all His disciples!"
Moretti had stood immovable during this speech, his dark face rigid,
his eyes downcast, listening to every word, but now he raised his hand
with an authoritative gesture.
"Enough!" he said, "I will hear no more! You know the consequences of
this at the Vatican?"
"I do."
"You are prepared to accept them?"
"As prepared as any of the truth-tellers who were burned for the love
of Christ by the Inquisition," replied Vergniaud deliberately. "The
world is wide,--there is room for me in it outside the Church."
"One would imagine you were bitten by the new 'Christian Democratic'
craze," said Moretti with a cold smile, "And that you were a reader and
follower of the Socialist, Gys Grandit!"
At this name, Vergniaud's son Cyrillon stirred, and lifting his dark
handsome head turned his flashing eyes full on the speaker.
"Did you address me, Monsignor?" he queried, in a voice rich with the
musical inflexions of Southern France, "I am Gys Grandit!"
Had he fired another pistol shot in the quiet room as he had fired it
in the church, it could hardly have created a more profound sensation.
"You--you--" stammered Moretti, retreating from him as from some
loathsome abomination, "You--Gys Grandit!"
"You, Cyrillon!--you!--you, my son!"--and the Abbe almost lost breath
in the extremity of his amazement, while Cardinal Bonpre half rose from
his chair doubting whether he had heard aright. Gys Grandit!--the
writer of fierce political polemics and powerful essays that were the
life and soul, meat and drink of all the members of the Christian
Democratic party!
"Gys Grandit is my nom-de-plume," pursued the young man, composedly, "I
never had any hope of being acknowledged as Cyrillon Vergniaud, son of
my father,--I had truly no name and resolved to create one. That is the
sole explanation. My history has made me--not myself."
There was a dead pause. At last Moretti spoke.
"I have no place here!" he said, biting his lips hard to keep them from
trembling with rage, "This house which I thought was the abode of a
true daughter of the Church, Donna Sovrani, is apparently for the
moment a refuge for heretics. And I find these heretics kept in
countenance by Cardinal Felix Bonpre, whose reputation for justice and
holiness should surely move him to denounce them were he not held in
check by some malignant spirit of evil, which seems to possess this
atmosphere--"
"Monsignor Moretti," interposed the Cardinal with dignity, "it is no
part of justice or holiness to denounce anything or anybody till the
full rights of the case have been heard. I was as unaware as yourself
that this young man, Cyrillon Vergniaud, was the daring writer who has
sent his assumed name of 'Gys Grandit' like a flame through Europe. I
have read his books, and cannot justly denounce them, because they are
expressed in the language of one who is ardently and passionately
seeking for Truth. Equally, I cannot denounce the Abbe, because he has
confessed his sin, declared himself as he is, to the public, saved his
son from being a parricide, and has to some extent we trust, made his
peace with God. If you can find any point on which, as a servant of
Christ, I can denounce these two human beings who share with me the
strange and awful privileges of life and death, and the promise of an
immortal hereafter, I give you leave to do so. The works of Gys Grandit
do not blaspheme Christ,--they call, they clamour, they appeal for
Christ through all and in all--"
"And with all this clamour and appeal their writer is willing to become
a murderer!" said Moretti satirically.
Young Vergniaud sprang forward.
"Monsignor, in the name of the Master you profess to serve I would
advise you to set a watch upon your tongue!" he said, "Granted that I
was willing to murder the man who had made my mother's life a misery, I
was also willing to answer to God for it! I saw my mother die--" here
he gave a quick glance towards the Abbe who instinctively shrank at his
words, "I shall pain you, my father, by what I say, but the pain is
perhaps good for us both! I repeat--I saw my mother die. She passed
away uncomforted after a long life of patient loneliness and
sorrow--for she was faithful to the last, ever faithful! I have seen
her weep in the silence of the night!--I have heard her ever since I
was able to understand the sound of weeping! Oh, those tears!--Do you
not think God has seen them! She worked and toiled, and starved herself
to educate me,--she had no friends, for she had 'fallen', they said,
and sometimes she could get no employment, and often we starved
together; and when I thought of the man who had done this thing, even
as a young boy I said to myself, 'I will kill him!' She did not mean,
poor mother, to curse her lover to me--but unconsciously she did,--her
sorrow was so great--her loneliness so bitter!"
Moretti gave a gesture of impatience and contempt. Cyrillon noted it,
and his dark eyes flashed, but he went on steadily,--
"And then I saw her die--she stretched her poor thin hard-working hands
out to God, and over and over again she muttered and moaned in her
fever the refrain of an old peasant song we have in Touraine, 'Oh, la
tristesse d'avoir aime!' If you had heard her--if you had seen her--if
you had, or have a heart to feel, nerves to wrench, a brain to rack,
blood to be stung to frenzy, you would,--seeing your mother perish
thus,--have thought, that to kill the man who had made such a wreck of
a sweet pure life, would be a just, aye even a virtuous deed! I thought
so. But my intended vengeance was frustrated--whether by the act of
God, who can say? But the conduct of the man whom I am now proud to
call my father--"
"You have great cause for pride!" said Moretti sarcastically.
"I think I have"--said the young man, "In the close extremity of death
at my hands, he won my respect. He shall keep it. It will be my glory
now to show him what a son's love and pardon may be. If it be true as I
understand, that he is attacked by a disease which needs must be fatal,
his last hours will not be desolate! It may be that I shall give him
more comfort than Churches,--more confidence than Creeds! It may be
that the clasp of my hand in his may be a better preparation for his
meeting with God,--and my mother,--than the touch of the Holy Oils in
Extreme Unction!"
"Like all your accursed sect, you blaspheme the
Sacraments"--interrupted Moretti indignantly--"And in the very presence
of one of her chiefest Cardinals, you scorn the Church!"
Cyrillon gave a quick gesture of emphatic denial.
"Monsignor, I do not scorn the Church,--but I think that honesty and
fair dealing with one another is better than any Church! Christ had no
Church. He built no temples, He amassed no wealth,--He preached simply
to those who would hear Him under the arching sky,--in the open air! He
prophesied the fall of temples; 'In this place,' He said, 'is One
greater than the temple.' [Footnote: Matt. xii. v. 6.] He sought to
destroy long built-up hypocrisies. 'My house is called the house of
prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.' Thieves, not only of
gold, but of honour!--thieves of the very Gospel, which has been
tampered with and twisted to suit the times, the conditions and
opinions of varying phases of priestcraft. Who that has read, and
thought, and travelled and studied the manuscripts hidden away in the
old monasteries of Armenia and Syria, believes that the Saviour of the
world ever condescended to 'pun' on the word Petrus, and say, 'On this
Rock (or stone) I will build my Church,' when He already knew that He
had to deal with a coward who would soon deny Him?"
"Enough! I will hear no further!" cried Moretti, turning livid with
fury--"Cardinal Bonpre, I appeal to you . . ."