Sweet saint, sweet lady, may a sinful soul
Approach thee with an offering of love,
And lay at thy dear feet a weary heart
That loves thee, as it loveth God above!
If blessed Mary may without a stain
Receive the love of sinners most defiled,
If the fair saints that walk with her in white
Refuse not love from earth's most guilty child,
Shouldst thou, sweet lady, then that love deny
Which all-unworthy at thy feet is laid?
Ah, gentlest angel, be not more severe
Than the dear heavens unto a loving prayer!
Howe'er unworthily that prayer be said,
Let thine acceptance be like that on high!
There might have been times in Agnes's life when the reception of this
note would have astonished and perplexed her; but the whole strain of
thought and conversation this evening had been in exalted and poetical
regions, and the soft stillness of the hour, the wonderful calmness
and clearness of the moonlight, all seemed in unison with the strange
incident that had occurred, and with the still stranger tenor of the
paper. The soft melancholy, half-religious tone of it was in accordance
with the whole undercurrent of her life, and prevented that start of
alarm which any homage of a more worldly form might have excited. It
is not to be wondered at, therefore, that she read it many times with
pauses and intervals of deep thought, and then with a movement of
natural and girlish curiosity examined the rich jewel which had inclosed
it. At last, seeming to collect her thoughts, she folded the paper and
replaced it in its sparkling casket, and, unlocking the door of the
shrine, laid the gem with its inclosure beneath the lily-spray, as
another offering to the Madonna. "Dear Mother," she said, "if indeed it
be so, may he rise from loving me to loving thee and thy dear Son, who
is Lord of all! Amen!" Thus praying, she locked the door and turned
thoughtfully to her repose, leaving the monk pacing up and down in the
moonlit garden.
Meanwhile the Cavalier was standing on the velvet mossy bridge which
spanned the stream at the bottom of the gorge, watching the play of
moonbeams on layer after layer of tremulous silver foliage in the clefts
of the black, rocky walls on either side. The moon rode so high in the
deep violet-colored sky, that her beams came down almost vertically,
making green and translucent the leaves through which they passed,
and throwing strongly marked shadows here and there on the
flower-embroidered moss of the old bridge. There was that solemn,
plaintive stillness in the air which makes the least sound--the hum
of an insect's wing, the cracking of a twig, the patter of falling
water--so distinct and impressive.
It needs not to be explained how the Cavalier, following the steps of
Agnes and her grandmother at a distance, had threaded the path by which
they ascended to their little sheltered nook,--how he had lingered
within hearing of Agnes's voice, and, moving among the surrounding rocks
and trees, and drawing nearer and nearer as evening shadows drew on, had
listened to the conversation, hoping that some unexpected chance might
gain him a moment's speech with his enchantress.
The reader will have gathered from the preceding chapter that the
conception which Agnes had formed as to the real position of her admirer
from the reports of Giulietta was false, and that in reality he was
not Lord Adrian, the brother of the King, but an outcast and landless
representative of one branch of an ancient and noble Roman family, whose
estates had been confiscated and whose relations had been murdered, to
satisfy the boundless rapacity of Caesar Borgia, the infamous favorite
of the notorious Alexander VI.
The natural temperament of Agostino Sarelli had been rather that of the
poet and artist than of the warrior. In the beautiful gardens of his
ancestral home it had been his delight to muse over the pages of Dante
and Ariosto, to sing to the lute and to write in the facile flowing
rhyme of his native Italian the fancies of the dream-land of his youth.
He was the younger brother of the family,--the favorite son and
companion of his mother, who, being of a tender and religious nature,
had brought him up in habits of the most implicit reverence and devotion
for the institutions of his fathers.
The storm which swept over his house, and blasted all his worldly
prospects, blasted, too, and withered all those religious hopes and
beliefs by which alone sensitive and affectionate natures can be healed
of the wounds of adversity without leaving distortion or scar. For his
house had been overthrown, his elder brother cruelly and treacherously
murdered, himself and his retainers robbed and cast out, by a man who
had the entire sanction and support of the Head of the Christian
Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. So said the current belief of his
times,--the faith in which his sainted mother died; and the difficulty
with which a man breaks away from such ties is in exact proportion to
the refinement and elevation of his nature.
In the mind of our young nobleman there was a double current. He was a
Roman, and the traditions of his house went back to the time of Mutius
Scaevola; and his old nurse had often told him that grand story of how
the young hero stood with his right hand in the fire rather than betray
his honor. If the legends of Rome's ancient heroes cause the pulses of
colder climes and alien races to throb with sympathetic heroism, what
must their power be to one who says, "_These were my fathers_"? Agostino
read Plutarch, and thought, "_I_, too, am a Roman!"--and then he looked
on the power that held sway over the Tarpeian Rock and the halls of the
old "Sanctus Senatus," and asked himself, "By what right does it hold
these?" He knew full well that in the popular belief all those hardy
and virtuous old Romans whose deeds of heroism so transported him were
burning in hell for the crime of having been born before Christ; and he
asked himself, as he looked on the horrible and unnatural luxury
and vice which defiled the Papal chair and ran riot through every
ecclesiastical order, whether such men, without faith, without
conscience, and without even decency, were indeed the only authorized
successors of Christ and his Apostles?
To us, of course, from our modern stand-point, the question has an easy
solution,--but not so in those days, when the Christianity of the known
world was in the Romish Church, and when the choice seemed to be between
that and infidelity. Not yet had Luther flared aloft the bold, cheery
torch which showed the faithful how to disentangle Christianity from
Ecclesiasticism. Luther in those days was a star lying low in the gray
horizon of a yet unawakened dawn.
All through Italy at this time there was the restless throbbing and
pulsating, the aimless outreach of the popular heart, which marks
the decline of one cycle of religious faith and calls for some great
awakening and renewal. Savonarola, the priest and prophet of this dumb
desire, was beginning to heave a great heart of conflict towards that
mighty struggle with the vices and immoralities of his time in which he
was yet to sink a martyr; and even now his course was beginning to be
obstructed by the full energy of the whole aroused serpent brood which
hissed and knotted in the holy places of Rome.
Here, then, was our Agostino, with a nature intensely fervent and
poetic, every fibre of whose soul and nervous system had been from
childhood skilfully woven and intertwined with the ritual and faith of
his fathers, yearning towards the grave of his mother, yearning towards
the legends of saints and angels with which she had lulled his cradle
slumbers and sanctified his childhood's pillow, and yet burning with the
indignation of a whole line of old Roman ancestors against an injustice
and oppression wrought under the full approbation of the head of that
religion. Half his nature was all the while battling the other half.
Would he be Roman, or would he be Christian? All the Roman in him said
"No!" when he thought of submission to the patent and open injustice and
fiendish tyranny which had disinherited him, slain his kindred, and held
its impure reign by torture and by blood. He looked on the splendid
snow-crowned mountains whose old silver senate engirdles Rome with an
eternal and silent majesty of presence, and he thought how often in
ancient times they had been a shelter to free blood that would not
endure oppression; and so gathering to his banner the crushed and
scattered retainers of his father's house, and offering refuge and
protection to multitudes of others whom the crimes and rapacities of the
Borgias had stripped of possessions and means of support, he fled to
a fastness in the mountains between Rome and Naples, and became an
independent chieftain, living by his sword.
The rapacity, cruelty, and misgovernment of the various regular
authorities of Italy at this time made brigandage a respectable and
honored institution in the eyes of the people, though it was ostensibly
banned both by Pope and Prince. Besides, in the multitude of contending
factions which were every day wrangling for supremacy, it soon became
apparent, even to the ruling authorities, that a band of fighting-men
under a gallant leader, advantageously posted in the mountains and
understanding all their passes, was a power of no small importance to
be employed on one side or the other; and therefore it happened,
that, though nominally outlawed or excommunicated, they were secretly
protected on both sides, with a view to securing, their assistance in
critical turns of affairs.
Among the common people of the towns and villages their relations were
of the most comfortable kind, their depredations being chiefly confined
to the rich and prosperous, who, as they wrung their wealth out of the
people, were not considered particular objects of compassion when the
same kind of high-handed treatment was extended toward themselves.
The most spirited and brave of the young peasantry, if they wished to
secure the smiles of the girls of their neighborhood, and win hearts
past redemption, found no surer avenue to favor than in joining the
brigands. The leaders of these bands sometimes piqued themselves on
elegant tastes and accomplishments; and one of them is said to have sent
to the poet Tasso, in his misfortunes and exile, an offer of honorable
asylum and protection in his mountain-fortress.
Agostino Sarelli saw himself, in fact, a powerful chief; and there were
times when the splendid scenery of his mountain-fastness, its inspiring
air, its wild eagle-like grandeur, independence, and security, gave him
a proud contentment, and he looked at his sword and loved it as a bride.
But then again there were moods in which he felt all that yearning and
disquiet of soul which the man of wide and tender moral organization
must feel who has had his faith shaken in the religion of his fathers.
To such a man the quarrel with his childhood's faith is a never-ending
anguish; especially is it so with a religion so objective, so pictorial,
and so interwoven with the whole physical and nervous nature of man, as
that which grew up and flowered in modern Italy.
Agostino was like a man who lives in an eternal struggle of
self-justification,--his reason forever going over and over with its
plea before his regretful and never-satisfied heart, which was drawn
every hour of the day by some chain of memory towards the faith whose
visible administrators he detested with the whole force of his moral
being. When the vesper-bell, with its plaintive call, rose amid the
purple shadows of the olive-silvered mountains,--when the distant voices
of chanting priest and choir reached him solemnly from afar,--when
he looked into a church with its cloudy pictures of angels, and its
window-panes flaming with venerable forms of saints and martyrs,--it
roused a yearning anguish, a pain and conflict, which all the efforts
of his reason could not subdue. How to be a Christian and yet defy the
authorized Head of the Christian Church, or how to be a Christian
and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds as Christ's
representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which his sword
could not divide. He dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not
pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous
despair every fragment of a religious belief which seemed to live in his
heart only to torture him. He had heard priests scoff over the wafer
they consecrated,--he had known them to mingle poison for rivals in the
sacramental wine,--and yet God had kept silence and not struck them
dead; and like the Psalmist of old he said, "Verily, I have cleansed my
heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. Is there a God that
judgeth in the earth?"
The first time he saw Agnes bending like a flower in the slanting
evening sunbeams by the old gate of Sorrento, while he stood looking
down the kneeling street and striving to hold his own soul in the
sarcastic calm of utter indifference, he felt himself struck to the
heart by an influence he could not define. The sight of that young face,
with its clear, beautiful lines, and its tender fervor, recalled a
thousand influences of the happiest and purest hours of his life, and
drew him with an attraction he vainly strove to hide under an air of
mocking gallantry.
When she looked him in the face with such grave, surprised eyes of
innocent confidence, and promised to pray for him, he felt a remorseful
tenderness as if he had profaned a shrine. All that was passionate,
poetic, and romantic in his nature was awakened to blend itself in a
strange mingling of despairing sadness and of tender veneration about
this sweet image of perfect purity and faith. Never does love strike so
deep and immediate a root as in a sorrowful and desolated nature;
there it has nothing to dispute the soil, and soon fills it with its
interlacing fibres.
In this case it was not merely Agnes that he sighed for, but she stood
to him as the fair symbol of that life-peace, that rest of soul which he
had lost, it seemed to him, forever.
"Behold this pure, believing child," he said to himself,--"a true member
of that blessed Church to which thou art a rebel! How peacefully this
lamb walketh the old ways trodden by saints and martyrs, while thou
art an infidel and unbeliever!" And then a stern voice within him
answered,--"What then? Is the Holy Ghost indeed alone dispensed through
the medium of Alexander and his scarlet crew of cardinals? Hath the
power to bind and loose in Christ's Church been indeed given to whoever
can buy it with the wages of robbery and oppression? Why does every
prayer and pious word of the faithful reproach me? Why is God silent? Or
is there any God? Oh, Agnes, Agnes! dear lily! fair lamb! lead a sinner
into the green pastures where thou restest!"
So wrestled the strong nature, tempest-tossed in its strength,--so slept
the trustful, blessed in its trust,--then in Italy, as now in all lands.