BY LAND AND SEA.
At night the Prior sent for him. Dino's hearing was dulled by fatigue
and fasting: he did not understand at first what was said. But,
by-and-bye, he knew that he was ordered to go into the guest-room, where
the Prior awaited his coming. The command gave Dino an additional pang:
the guest-room was for strangers, not for one who had been as a child of
the house. But he lifted himself up feebly from the cold stones, and
followed the lay-brother, who had brought the message, to the appointed
place.
The Prior was an austere man, but not devoid of compassion, nor even of
sympathy. He received Dino with no relaxation of his rather grim
features, but told him to eat and drink before speaking. "I will not
talk to you fasting," he said; and Dino felt conscious of some touch of
compassion in the old man's eyes as he looked at him.
Dino sat, therefore, and tried to eat and drink, but the effort was
almost in vain. When he had swallowed a few mouthfuls of bread and water
mixed with a little wine, which was all that he could touch, he stood up
in token that he was ready for the Prior's questions; and Father
Cristoforo, who had meanwhile been walking up and down the room with a
restless air, at once stopped short and began to speak.
Let it be remembered that Dino felt towards this rugged-faced,
stern-voiced priest as loving as a son feels towards a wise father. His
affections were strong; and he had few objects on which to expend them.
The Prior's anger meant to him not merely the displeasure of one in
authority, but the loss of a love which had shielded and enveloped him
ever since he came to the monastery-school when he was ten years old. He
seemed to have an absolute need of it; without it, life was impossible
to go on.
Father Cristoforo was not without visitings of the same sort of feeling;
but he allowed no trace of such soft-heartedness to appear as he put
Dino through a searching examination concerning the way in which he had
spent his time in England. Dino answered his questions fully and
clearly: he had nothing that he wished to hide. Even the Prior could not
accuse him of a wish to excuse himself. He told the story of his
interview with Hugo, of the dinner, of Hugo's attack upon him, and of
his sojourn in the hospital, where Brian had sought him out and
convinced him (without knowing that he was doing so) of his innocence
with respect to Hugo's plot. Then came the story of his intercourse with
Brian, his discovery that Brian's happiness hinged upon his love for
Elizabeth Murray, and his attempts to unravel the very tangled skein of
his friend's fortunes. Mr. Brett's opinion of the case, Brian's letter
to Mrs. Luttrell, Dino's own visit to Scotland, with its varied effects,
including the final destruction of the papers--all this was quietly and
fully detailed, with an occasional interruption only from Padre
Cristoforo in the shape of a question or a muttered comment. And when
the whole story was told the Prior spoke.
Everything that Dino had done was, of course, wrong. He ought never to
have seen Hugo, or dined with him: he ought to have gone to Father
Connolly, the priest to whose care he had been recommended, as soon as
he came out of hospital: he ought never to have interfered in Brian's
love affairs, nor gone to Scotland, nor sought to impose conditions on
Mrs. Luttrell, nor, in short, done any of the thousand and one things
that he had done. As for the destruction of the papers, it was a point
on which he (Father Cristoforo) hardly dared, he said, with a shrug of
his shoulders, to touch. The base ingratitude, the unfaithfulness to the
interests of the Church, the presumption, the pride, the wilfulness,
manifested in that action, transcended all his powers of reprobation.
The matter must be referred to a higher authority than his. And so
forth. And every word he said was like a dagger planted in Dino's
breast.
As for his desire to be a monk, the Prior repudiated the notion with
contempt. Dino Vasari a monk, after this lapse from obedience and
humility? He was not fit to do the humblest work of the lowest servant
of those who lived by the altar. He had not even shown common penitence
for his sin. Let him do that: let him humble himself: let him sit in
dust and ashes, metaphorically speaking: and then, by-and-bye, the
Church might open her arms to him, and listen to the voice of his
prayer. But now--Father Cristoforo declined even to hear any formal
confession: his pupil must wait and prepare himself, before he was fit
for the sacrament of penance.
To Dino, this was a hard sentence. He did not know that the Prior was
secretly much better satisfied with his submissive state of mind than he
chose to allow, or that he had made up his mind to relax his severity on
the morrow. Just for this one night the Prior had resolved to be stern
and harsh. "I will make him eat dust," he said to himself, out of his
real vexation and disappointment, as he looked vengefully at Dino, who
was lying face downwards on the ground, weeping with all the
self-abandonment of his nature. "He must never rebel again." The Prior
knew that his measures were generally effectual: he meant to take strong
ones now.
"There is something more in it that I can understand," he murmured to
himself, presently, after he had taken a few turns up and down the room.
He halted beside Dino's prostrate form, and looked down upon it with a
hidden gentleness shining out of his deep-set eyes. But he would not
speak gently. "You have not told me all," he said. "Rise: let me see
your face."
Dino struggled to his knees, and, after a moment's hesitation, dropped
his hands to his sides.
"What else have you to tell me?" said the priest, fixing his eyes on the
young man's face, as if he could read the secrets of his soul.
"I have told you all that I did," stammered Dino.
"But not all that you thought."
There was a short silence. Then Dino spoke again, in short-broken
sentences, which at times the Prior could scarcely hear.
"Reverend Father, there is one thought, one feeling. I do not know what
it is. I am haunted by a face which never leaves me. And yet I saw it
twice only: once in a picture and once in life; but it comes between me
and my prayers. I cannot forget her."
"Whose face was this?" asked the Prior, with the subtle change of eye
and lip which showed that Dino's answer had fulfilled his expectations.
"Her name?"
But the name that Dino murmured was not one that Padre Cristoforo had
expected to hear from him.
"Elizabeth Murray!" he repeated. "The woman that Brian Luttrell
loves--for whose sake you gave up your inheritance--that you might not
turn her out. The mystery is solved. I see the motive now. You love this
woman."
"And if I have loved her, if I do love her," said Dino, passionately,
his whole face lighting up with impetuous feeling, and his hands
trembling as they clasped each other, "it is no sin to love."
The Prior gave him a long, steady gaze. "You have sacrificed your faith
to your love," he said, "and that is a sin. You have forgotten your
obedience to the Church for a woman's sake--and that is a sin. Lastly,
you come here professing a monk's vocation, yet acknowledging--with
reluctance--that this woman's face comes between you and your prayers. I
do not say that this is a sin, but I say that you had better leave us
to-morrow, for you have proved yourself unfit for the life that we lead
at San Stefano. Go back to Scotland and marry. Or, if you cannot do
that, we will give you money, and start you in some professional career;
your aims are too low, your will is too weak, for us."
Again the Prior was not quite in earnest. He wanted to try the strength
of his pupil's resolve. But when Dino said, "I will not leave you, I
will tend the vines and the goats at your door, but I will never go
away," the priest felt a revival of all the old tenderness which he had
been used to lavish silently on the brown-eyed boy who had come to him
from old Assunta.
"I will not go!" cried Dino. "I have no one in the world but you. Ah, my
father, will you never forgive me?"
"It is not my forgiveness you need," said the Prior, shortly. "But come,
the hour is late. We will give you shelter for the night, at least."
"Let me go to the chapel first," pleaded Dino, in a voice which had
suddenly grown faint. "I dared not enter it this morning, but now let me
pray there for a little while. I must ask forgiveness there."
"Pray there if you choose," said the Prior; "and pray for the penitence
which you have yet to learn. When that is won, then talk of
forgiveness."
He coldly withdrew the hand that Dino tried to kiss; he left the room
without uttering one word of comfort or encouragement. It was good for
his pupil, he thought, to be driven well-nigh to despair.
Dino, left to himself, remained for a few minutes in the posture in
which the Prior had left him; then rose and made his way, slowly and
feebly, to the little monastery chapel, where a solitary lamp swung
before the altar, and a flood of moonlight fell through the coloured
panes of the clerestory windows. Dino stood passive in that flood of
moonlight, almost forgetting why he had come. His brain was dizzy, his
heart was sick. His mind was distracted with the thought of a guilt
which he did not feel to be his own, of sin for which his conscience did
not smite him. For, with a strange commingling of clear-sightedness and
submission to authority, he still believed that he had done perfectly
right in giving up his claim to the Scotch estate, and yet, with all his
heart, desired to feel that he had done wrong. And when the words with
which Father Cristoforo had reproached him came back to his mind, his
burden seemed greater than he could bear. With a moan of pain he sank
down close beside the altar-steps. And there, through the midnight
hours, he lay alone and wrestled with himself.
It was no use. Everything fell from him in that hour except that faith
and that love which had been the controlling powers of his life. He had
loved Brian as a brother; and he had done well: he had loved
Elizabeth--though he had not known that the dreaming fancies which had
lately centred round her deserved the name which the Prior had given to
them--and he had not done ill; and it was right that he should give to
them, what might, perhaps, avail to make their lives a little
happier--at any rate all that he had to give. The Prior had said that he
was wrong. And would the good God, whom he had always loved and
worshipped from the days of his earliest boyhood, would the Good God
condemn him, too! He did not think so. He was not sorry for what he had
done at all.
No, he did not repent.
But how would it fare with him next day if he told the Prior this, the
inmost conviction of his heart? He would be told again that he was not
fit to be a monk. And the desire to be a monk--curious as it may seem to
us--had grown up with Dino as a beautiful ideal. Was he now to be thrust
out into the world--the world where men stole and lied and stabbed each
other in the dark, all for the sake of a few acres of land or a handful
of gold pieces--and denied the hard, ascetic, yet tranquil and
finely-ordered life which he had hoped to lead, when he put on his
monkish robe, for the remainder of his days?
Dino was an enthusiast: he might, perhaps, have been disenchanted if he
had lived as one of themselves amongst the brethren who seemed to him so
enviable; but just now his whole being rose in revolt against a decision
which deprived him of all that he had been taught to consider blessed.
Then a strange revulsion of feeling came. There were good men in the
world, he remembered, as well as bad: there were beautiful women; there
was art, and music, and much that makes life seem worth living. Why,
after all, if the monks rejected him, should he not go to the world and
take his pleasure there like other men? And there came a vision of
Elizabeth, with her pale face turned to him in pity, and her hand
beckoning him to follow her. Then, after a little interval, he came to
himself, and knew that his mind had wandered; and so, in order to steady
his thoughts, he began to speak aloud, and a novice, who had been sent
to say a certain number of prayers at that hour in church by way of
penance, started from a fitful slumber on his knees, and heard the words
that Dino said. They sounded strange to the young novice: he repeated
them next day with a sense that he might be uttering blasphemy, and was
very much astonished when the Prior drew his hand across his eyes as if
to wipe away a tear, and did not seem horrified in the very least. And
this was what Dino said:--
"Wrong! Wrong! All wrong! And yet it seemed right to love God's
creatures.... Perhaps I loved them too much. So I am punished.... But,
after all, He knows: He understands. If they put me out of His church,
perhaps He will let me serve Him somewhere--somehow--I don't know where:
He knows. Oh, my God, if I have loved another more than Thee, forgive
me ... and let me rest ... for I am tired--tired--tired----"
The voice sank into an inarticulate murmur, in which the novice,
frightened and perplexed, could not distinguish words. Then there was
silence. One little sigh escaped those lips, and that was all. The
novice turned and fled, terrified at those words of prayer, which seemed
to him so different from any that he had ever heard--so different that
they must be wrong!
At four in the morning the monks came in to chant their morning prayer.
One by one they dropped into their places, scarcely noticing the
prostrate figure before the altar-steps. It was usual enough for one of
their number, or even a stranger staying in the monastery, to humiliate
himself in that manner as a public penance. The Prior only gave a little
start, as if an electric shock passed through his frame, when, on taking
his seat in the choir, his eye fell upon that motionless form. But he
did not leave his place until the last prayer had been said, the last
psalm chanted. Then he rose and walked deliberately to the place where
Dino lay, and laid his hand upon his head.
"My son!" he said, gently. There was a great fear in his face, a tremor
of startled emotion in his voice. "Dino, my beloved! I pardon thee."
But Dino did not hear. His prayer had been granted him; he was at rest.
God had been more merciful than man. The Prior's pardon came too late.
* * * * *
And far away, on a southern sea, where each great wave threatened to
engulf the tiny boat which seemed like a child's toy thrown upon the
waters, three men were struggling for dear life--for the life that Dino
Vasari had been so ready to lay down--toiling, with broken oars, and
roughly-fashioned sails, and ragged streamers as signals of distress, to
win their way back to solid land, and live once more with their fellows
the common but precious life of common men.
They had narrowly escaped death by fire, and were fast losing hope of
ultimate rescue. For five days they had been tossing on the waves of the
Southern Atlantic, and they had seen as yet no sign of land; no friendly
sail bearing down upon them to bring relief. Their stock of food was
scanty, the water supply had now entirely failed. The tortures of a
raging thirst under a sultry sky had begun: the men's lips were black
and swollen, their bloodshot eyes searched the horizon in anguished,
fruitless yearning. There was no cloud in all the great expanse of blue:
there was nothing to be seen between sea and sky but this one frail boat
with its three occupants. Another and a larger boat had set out with
them, but they had lost sight of it in the night. There had been five
men in this little cockle-shell when they left the ship; but one of them
had lost his senses and jumped over-board, drowning before their very
eyes; and one, a mere lad, had died on the second day from injuries
received on board the burning vessel. And of the three who were left, it
seemed as if one, at least, would speedily succumb to the exposure and
privations which they had been driven to endure.
This man lay prostrate at the bottom of the boat. He could hold out no
longer. His half-closed eyes, his open mouth and swollen features showed
the suffering which had brought him to this pass. Another man sat bowed
together in a kind of torpor. A third, the oldest and most experienced
of the party, kept his hand upon the tiller; but there was a sullen
hopelessness in his air, a nerveless dejection in the pose of his limbs,
which showed that he had neither strength nor inclination to fight much
longer against fate.
It was at nine o'clock on the fifth day of their perilous voyage, that
the steersman lifted up his eyes, and saw a faint trail of smoke on the
horizon. He uttered a hoarse, inarticulate cry, and rose up, pointing
with one shaking finger to the distant sign. "A steamer!" He could say
nothing more, but the word was enough. It called back life even to the
dull eyes of the man who had lain down to die. And he who was sitting
with his head bowed wearily upon his knees, looked up with a quick,
sudden flicker of hope which seemed likely enough to be extinguished as
soon as it was evident.
For it was probable that the steamer would merely cross the line of
vision and disappear, without approaching them near enough to be of any
use. Eagerly they watched. They strained their eyes to see it: they
spent their strength in rigging up a tattered garment or two to serve as
a signal of distress. Then, they waited through hours of sickening,
terrible suspense. And the steamer loomed into sight: nearer it came and
nearer. They were upon its track: surely succour was nigh at hand.
And succour came. The great vessel slackened its pace: it came to a
standstill and waited, heaving to and fro upon the waters, as if it were
a live thing with a beating and compassionate heart. The two men in the
boat, standing up and faintly endeavouring to raise their voices, saw
that a great crowd of heads was turned towards them from the sides of
the vessel, that a boat was lowered and pushed off. The plashing of
oars, the sound of a cheer, came to the ears of the seafarers. The old
sailor muttered something that sounded like "Thank God!" and his
companion burst into tears, but the man at the bottom of the boat lay
still: they had not been able to make him hear or understand. The
officer in the boat from the steamer stood up as it approached, and to
him the old man addressed himself as soon as he could speak.
"We're the second mate and bo'sun of the _Falcon_, sir, and one steerage
passenger. Destroyed by fire five days ago; and we've been in this here
cockle-shell ever since." But his voice was so husky and dry that he was
almost unintelligible. "Mates, for the love of Heaven, give us summat to
drink," cried the other man, as he was lifted into the boat. And in a
few minutes they were speeding back to the steamer, and the sailors were
trying to pour a few drops of brandy and water down the parched throat
of the one man who seemed to be beyond speech and movement.
The mate was able to give a concise account of the perils of the last
few days when he arrived on board the _Arizona_; but there was little to
relate. The story of a fire, of a hurried escape, of the severance of
the boats, and the agonies of thirst endured by the survivors had
nothing in it that was particularly new. The captain dismissed the men
good-humouredly to the care of cook and steward: it was only the
steerage passenger who required to be put under the doctor's care. It
seemed that he had been hurt by the falling of a spar, and severely
scorched in trying to save a child who was in imminent danger; and,
though he had at first been the most cheery and hopeful of the party,
his strength had soon failed, and he had lain half or wholly unconscious
for the greater part of the last two or three days.
There was one passenger on board the _Arizona_ who listened to all these
details with a keener interest than that shown by any other listener. He
went down and talked to the men himself as soon as he had the chance and
asked their names. One of the officers came with him, and paid an almost
equally keen attention to the replies.
"Mine's Thomas Jackson, sir; and the bo'sun's name it is Fall--Andrew
Fall. And the passenger, sir? Steerage he was: he was called Mackay."
"No, he warn't," said the boatswain, in a gruff tone. "Saving your
presence, sir, his name was Smith."
"Mackay," said the mate, with equal positiveness. "And a fine fellow he
was, too, and one of the best for cheering of us up with his stories and
songs; and not above a bit of a prayer, too, when the worst came to the
worst. I heard him myself."
"No sign of your friend here, Mr. Heron, I'm afraid," whispered the
ship's officer.
"I am afraid not. Was there a passenger on board the _Falcon_ called
Stretton."
"No, sir. I'm sure o' that."
"Or--Luttrell?"
Percival Heron knew well enough that no such name had been found amongst
the list of passengers; but he had a vague notion that Brian might have
resumed his former appellation for some reason or other after he came on
board. Thomas Jackson considered the subject for a few minutes.
"I ain't rightly sure, sir. Seems to me there was a gent of that name,
or something like it, on board: but if so, he was amongst those in the
other boat."
"I should like to see this man Mackay--or Smith," said Percival.
The berth in which the steerage passenger lay was pointed out to him: he
looked at the face upon the pillow, and shook his head. A rough,
reddened, blistered face it was, with dirt grained into the pores and
matting the hair and beard: not in the least like the countenance of the
man whom he had come to seek.
"We may fall in with the other boat," suggested the officer.
But though the steamer went out of her course in search of it, and a
careful watch was kept throughout the day and night, the other boat
could not be seen.