“In order that she may receive the sacrament with you on the eve of your
first separation.”
“If that is her only reason her first words will clear her. I must hear
those words, Egidio!”
“You are quite mad,” I repeated.
“Strange,” he said slowly. “You stake your life on my wife’s innocence, yet
you refuse me the only means of vindicating it!”
“I would give my life for any one of you--but what you ask is not mine to
give.”
“The priest first--the man afterward?” he sneered.
“Long afterward!”
He measured me with a contemptuous eye. “We laymen are ready to give the
last shred of flesh from our bones, but you priests intend to keep your
cassocks whole.”
“I tell you my cassock is not mine,” I repeated.
“And, by God,” he cried, “you are right; for it’s mine! Who put it on your
back but my father? What kept it there but my charity? Peasant! beggar!
Hear his holiness pontificate!” “Yes,” I said, “I was a peasant and a
beggar when your father found me; and if he had left me one I might have
been excused for putting my hand to any ugly job that my betters required
of me; but he made me a priest, and so set me above all of you, and laid on
me the charge of your souls as well as mine.”
He sat down shaken with dreadful tears. “Ah,” he broke out, “would you have
answered me thus when we were boys together, and I stood between you and
Andrea?”
“If God had given me the strength.”
“You call it strength to make a woman’s soul your stepping-stone to
heaven?”
“Her soul is in my care, not yours, my son. She is safe with me.”
“She? But I? I go out to meet death, and leave a worse death behind me!”
He leaned over and clutched my arm. “It is not for myself I plead but for
her--for her, Egidio! Don’t you see to what a hell you condemn her if I
don’t come back? What chance has she against that slow unsleeping hate?
Their lies will fasten themselves to her and suck out her life. You and
Marianna are powerless against such enemies.”
“You leave her in God’s hands, my son.”
“Easily said--but, ah, priest, if you were a man! What if their poison
works in me and I go to battle thinking that every Austrian bullet may be
sent by her lover’s hand? What if I die not only to free Italy but to free
my wife as well?”
I laid my hand on his shoulder. “My son, I answer for her. Leave your faith
in her in my hands and I will keep it whole.”
He stared at me strangely. “And what if your own fail you?”
“In her? Never. I call every saint to witness!”
“And yet--and yet--ah, this is a blind,” he shouted; “you know all and
perjure yourself to spare me!”
At that, my son, I felt a knife in my breast. I looked at him in anguish
and his gaze was a wall of metal. Mine seemed to slip away from it, like a
clawless thing struggling up the sheer side of a precipice.
“You know all,” he repeated, “and you dare not let me hear her!”
“I dare not betray my trust.”
He waved the answer aside.
“Is this a time to quibble over church discipline? If you believed in her
you would save her at any cost!”
I said to myself, “Eternity can hold nothing worse than this for me--“ and
clutched my resolve again like a cross to my bosom.
Just then there was a hand on the door and we heard Donna Marianna.
“Faustina has sent to know if the _signar parocco_ is here.”
“He is here. Bid her come down to the chapel.” Roberto spoke quietly, and
closed the door on her so that she should not see his face. We heard her
patter away across the brick floor of the _salone_.
Roberto turned to me. “Egidio!” he said; and all at once I was no more than
a straw on the torrent of his will.
The chapel adjoined the room in which we sat. He opened the door, and in
the twilight I saw the light glimmering before the Virgin’s shrine and the
old carved confessional standing like a cowled watcher in its corner. But
I saw it all in a dream; for nothing in heaven or earth was real to me but
the iron grip on my shoulder.
“Quick!” he said and drove me forward. I heard him shoot back the bolt of
the outer door and a moment later I stood alone in the garden. The sun had
set and the cold spring dusk was falling. Lights shone here and there in
the long front of the villa; the statues glimmered gray among the thickets.
Through the window-pane of the chapel I caught the faint red gleam of the
Virgin’s lamp; but I turned my back on it and walked away.
* * * * *
All night I lay like a heretic on the fire. Before dawn there came a call
from the villa. The Count had received a second summons from Milan and was
to set out in an hour. I hurried down the cold dewy path to the lake. All
was new and hushed and strange as on the day of resurrection; and in the
dark twilight of the garden alleys the statues stared at me like the
shrouded dead.
In the _salone_, where the old Count’s portrait hung, I found the
family assembled. Andrea and Gemma sat together, a little pinched, I
thought, but decent and self-contained, like mourners who expect to
inherit. Donna Marianna drooped near them, with something black over her
head and her face dim with weeping. Roberto received me calmly and then
turned to his sister.
“Go fetch my wife,” he said.
While she was gone there was silence. We could hear the cold drip of the
garden-fountain and the patter of rats in the wall. Andrea and his wife
stared out of window and Roberto sat in his father’s carved seat at the
head of the long table. Then the door opened and Faustina entered.
When I saw her I stopped breathing. She seemed no more than the shell of
herself, a hollow thing that grief has voided. Her eyes returned our images
like polished agate, but conveyed to her no sense of our presence. Marianna
led her to a seat, and she crossed her hands and nailed her dull gaze on
Roberto. I looked from one to another, and in that spectral light it seemed
to me that we were all souls come to judgment and naked to each other as to
God. As to my own wrongdoing, it weighed on me no more than dust. The only
feeling I had room for was fear--a fear that seemed to fill my throat and
lungs and bubble coldly over my drowning head.
Suddenly Roberto began to speak. His voice was clear and steady, and I
clutched at his words to drag myself above the surface of my terror. He
touched on the charge that had been made against his wife--he did not say
by whom--the foul rumor that had made itself heard on the eve of their
first parting. Duty, he said, had sent him a double summons; to fight for
his country and for his wife. He must clear his wife’s name before he was
worthy to draw sword for Italy. There was no time to tame the slander
before throttling it; he had to take the shortest way to its throat. At
this point he looked at me and my soul shook. Then he turned to Andrea and
Gemma.
“When you came to me with this rumor,” he said quietly, “you agreed to
consider the family honor satisfied if I could induce Don Egidio to let me
take his place and overhear my wife’s confession, and if that confession
convinced me of her innocence. Was this the understanding?”
Andrea muttered something and Gemma tapped a sullen foot.
“After you had left,” Roberto continued, “I laid the case before Don Egidio
and threw myself on his mercy.” He looked at me fixedly. “So strong was his
faith in my wife’s innocence that for her sake he agreed to violate the
sanctity of the confessional. I took his place.”
Marianna sobbed and crossed herself and a strange look flitted over
Faustina’s face.
There was a moment’s pause; then Roberto, rising, walked across the room to
his wife and took her by the hand.
“Your seat is beside me, Countess Siviano,” he said, and led her to the
empty chair by his own.
Gemma started to her feet, but her husband pulled her down again.
“Jesus! Mary!” We heard Donna Marianna moan.
Roberto raised his wife’s hand to his lips. “You forgive me,” he said, “the
means I took to defend you?” And turning to Andrea he added slowly: “I
declare my wife innocent and my honor satisfied. You swear to stand by my
decision?”
What Andrea stammered out, what hissing serpents of speech Gemma’s clinched
teeth bit back, I never knew--for my eyes were on Faustina, and her face
was a wonder to behold.
She had let herself be led across the room like a blind woman, and had
listened without change of feature to her husband’s first words; but as
he ceased her frozen gaze broke and her whole body seemed to melt against
his breast. He put his arm out, but she slipped to his feet and Marianna
hastened forward to raise her up. At that moment we heard the stroke
of oars across the quiet water and saw the Count’s boat touch the
landing-steps. Four strong oarsmen from Monte Isola were to row him down
to Iseo, to take horse for Milan, and his servant, knapsack on shoulder,
knocked warningly at the terrace window.
“No time to lose, excellency!” he cried.
Roberto turned and gripped my hand. “Pray for me,” he said low; and with a
brief gesture to the others ran down the terrace to the boat.
Marianna was bathing Faustina with happy tears.
“Look up, dear! Think how soon he will come back! And there is the
sunrise--see!”
Andrea and Gemma had slunk away like ghosts at cock-crow, and a red dawn
stood over Milan.
* * * * *
If that sun rose red it set scarlet. It was the first of the Five Days in
Milan--the Five Glorious Days, as they are called. Roberto reached the city
just before the gates closed. So much we knew--little more. We heard of him
in the Broletto (whence he must have escaped when the Austrians blew in
the door) and in the Casa Vidiserti, with Casati, Cattaneo and the rest;
but after the barricading began we could trace him only as having been
seen here and there in the thick of the fighting, or tending the wounded
under Bertani’s orders. His place, one would have said, was in the
council-chamber, with the soberer heads; but that was an hour when every
man gave his blood where it was most needed, and Cernuschi, Dandolo,
Anfossi, della Porta fought shoulder to shoulder with students, artisans
and peasants. Certain it is that he was seen on the fifth day; for among
the volunteers who swarmed after Manara in his assault on the Porta Tosa
was a servant of palazzo Siviano; and this fellow swore he had seen his
master charge with Manara in the last assault--had watched him, sword
in hand, press close to the gates, and then, as they swung open before
the victorious dash of our men, had seen him drop and disappear in the
inrushing tide of peasants that almost swept the little company off its
feet. After that we heard nothing. There was savage work in Milan in those
days, and more than one well-known figure lay lost among the heaps of dead
hacked and disfeatured by Croat blades.
At the villa, we waited breathless. News came to us hour by hour: the very
wind seemed to carry it, and it was swept to us on the incessant rush of
the rain. On the twenty-third Radetsky had fled from Milan, to face Venice
rising in his path. On the twenty-fourth the first Piedmontese had crossed
the Ticino, and Charles Albert himself was in Pavia on the twenty-ninth.
The bells of Milan had carried the word from Turin to Naples, from Genoa to
Ancona, and the whole country was pouring like a flood-tide into Lombardy.
Heroes sprang up from the bloody soil as thick as wheat after rain, and
every day carried some new name to us; but never the one for which we
prayed and waited. Weeks passed. We heard of Pastrengo, Goito, Rivoli; of
Radetsky hemmed into the Quadrilateral, and our troops closing in on him
from Rome, Tuscany and Venetia. Months passed--and we heard of Custozza. We
saw Charles Albert’s broken forces flung back from the Mincio to the Oglio,
from the Oglio to the Adda. We followed the dreadful retreat from Milan,
and saw our rescuers dispersed like dust before the wind. But all the while
no word came to us of Roberto.
These were dark days in Lombardy; and nowhere darker than in the old villa
on Iseo. In September Donna Marianna and the young Countess put on black,
and Count Andrea and his wife followed their example. In October the
Countess gave birth to a daughter. Count Andrea then took possession of the
palazzo Siviano, and the two women remained at the villa. I have no heart
to tell you of the days that followed. Donna Marianna wept and prayed
incessantly, and it was long before the baby could snatch a smile from her.
As for the Countess Faustina, she went among us like one of the statues in
the garden. The child had a wet-nurse from the village, and it was small
wonder there was no milk for it in that marble breast. I spent much of
my time at the villa, comforting Donna Marianna as best I could; but
sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when we three sat in the dimly-lit
_salone_, with the old Count’s portrait overhead, and I looked up and
saw the Countess Faustina in the tall carved seat beside her husband’s
empty chair, my spine grew chill and I felt a cold wind in my hair.
The end of it was that in the spring I went to see my bishop and laid my
sin before him. He was a saintly and merciful old man, and gave me a
patient hearing.
“You believed the lady innocent?” he asked when I had ended.
“Monsignore, on my soul!”
“You thought to avert a great calamity from the house to which you owed
more than your life?”
“It was my only thought.”
He laid his hand on my shoulder.
“Go home, my son. You shall learn my decision.”
Three months later I was ordered to resign my living and go to America,
where a priest was needed for the Italian mission church in New York. I
packed my possessions and set sail from Genoa. I knew no more of America
than any peasant up in the hills. I fully expected to be speared by naked
savages on landing; and for the first few months after my arrival I wished
at least once a day that such a blessed fate had befallen me. But it is
no part of my story to tell you what I suffered in those early days. The
Church had dealt with me mercifully, as is her wont, and her punishment
fell far below my deserts....
I had been some four years in New York, and no longer thought of looking
back from the plough, when one day word was brought me that an Italian
professor lay ill and had asked for a priest. There were many Italian
refugees in New York at that time, and the greater number, being
well-educated men, earned a living by teaching their language, which was
then included among the accomplishments of fashionable New York. The
messenger led me to a poor boarding-house and up to a small bare room on
the top floor. On the visiting-card nailed to the door I read the name “De
Roberti, Professor of Italian.” Inside, a gray-haired haggard man tossed on
the narrow bed. He turned a glazed eye on me as I entered, and I recognized
Roberto Siviano.
I steadied myself against the door-post and stood staring at him without a
word.
“What’s the matter?” asked the doctor who was bending over the bed. I
stammered that the sick man was an old friend.
“He wouldn’t know his oldest friend just now,” said the doctor. “The
fever’s on him; but it will go down toward sunset.”