"Sub tutela Michaelis,
Pax in terra, pax in coelis."[B]
[Footnote B:
"'Neath Saint Michael's watch is given
Peace on earth and peace in heaven."]
In such talk and work the day passed away to Agnes; but we will not say
that she did not often fall into deep musings on the mysterious visitor
of the night before. Often while the good monk was busy at his drawing,
the distaff would droop over her knee and her large dark eyes become
intently fixed on the ground, as if she were pondering some absorbing
subject.
Little could her literal, hard-working grandmother, or her artistic,
simple-minded uncle, or the dreamy Mother Theresa, or her austere
confessor, know of the strange forcing process which they were all
together uniting to carry on in the mind of this sensitive young girl.
Absolutely secluded by her grandmother's watchful care from any actual
knowledge and experience of real life, she had no practical tests by
which to correct the dreams of that inner world in which she delighted
to live and move, and which was peopled with martyrs, saints, and
angels, whose deeds were possible or probable only in the most exalted
regions of devout poetry.
So she gave her heart at once and without reserve to an enthusiastic
desire for the salvation of the stranger, whom Heaven, she believed, had
directed to seek her intercessions; and when the spindle drooped from
her hand, and her eyes became fixed on vacancy, she found herself
wondering who he might really be, and longing to know yet a little more
of him.
Towards the latter part of the afternoon, a hasty messenger came to
summon her uncle to administer the last rites to a man who had just
fallen from a building, and who, it was feared, might breathe his last
unshriven.
"Dear daughter, I must hasten and carry Christ to this poor sinner,"
said the monk, hastily putting all his sketches and pencils into her
lap. "Have a care of these till I return,--that is my good little one!"
Agnes carefully arranged the sketches and put them into the book, and
then, kneeling before the shrine, began prayers for the soul of the
dying man.
She prayed long and fervently, and so absorbed did she become, that she
neither saw nor heard anything that passed around her.
It was, therefore, with a start of surprise, as she rose from prayer,
that she saw the cavalier sitting on one end of the marble sarcophagus,
with an air so composed and melancholy that he might have been taken for
one of the marble knights that sometimes are found on tombs.
"You are surprised to see me, dear Agnes," he said, with a calm, slow
utterance, like a man who has assumed a position he means fully to
justify; "but I have watched day and night, ever since I saw you, to
find one moment to speak with you alone."
"My Lord," said Agnes, "I humbly wait your pleasure. Anything that a
poor maiden may rightly do I will endeavor, in all loving duty."
"Whom do you take me for, Agnes, that you speak thus?" said the
cavalier, smiling sadly.
"Are you not the brother of our gracious King?" said Agnes.
"No, dear maiden; and if the kind promise you lately made me is founded
on this mistake, it may be retracted."
"No, my Lord," said Agnes,--"though I now know not who you are, yet if
in any strait or need you seek such poor prayers as mine, God forbid I
should refuse them!"
"I am, indeed, in strait and need, Agnes; the sun does not shine on a
more desolate man than I am,--one more utterly alone in the world; there
is no one left to love me. Agnes, can you not love me a little?--let it
be ever so little, it shall content me."
It was the first time that words of this purport had ever been addressed
to Agnes; but they were said so simply, so sadly, so tenderly, that they
somehow seemed to her the most natural and proper things in the world
to be said; and this poor handsome knight, who looked so earnest and
sorrowful,--how could she help answering, "Yes"? From her cradle she had
always loved everybody and every thing, and why should an exception be
made in behalf of a very handsome, very strong, yet very gentle and
submissive human being, who came and knocked so humbly at the door
of her heart? Neither Mary nor the saints had taught her to be
hard-hearted.
"Yes, my Lord," she said, "you may believe that I will love and pray for
you; but now you must leave me, and not come here any more,--because
grandmamma would not be willing that I should talk with you, and it
would be wrong to disobey her, she is so very good to me."
"But, dear Agnes," began the cavalier, approaching her, "I have many
things to say to you,--I have much to tell you."
"But I know grandmamma would not be willing," said Agnes; "indeed, you
must not come here any more."
"Well, then," said the stranger, "at least you will meet me at some
time,--tell me only where."
"I cannot,--indeed, I cannot," said Agnes, distressed and embarrassed.
"Even now, if grandmamma knew you were here, she would be so angry."
"But how can you pray for me, when you know nothing of me?"
"The dear Lord knoweth you," said Agnes; "and when I speak of you, He
will know what you need."
"Ah, dear child, how fervent is your faith! Alas for me, I have lost the
power of prayer! I have lost the believing heart my mother gave me,--my
dear mother who is now in heaven."
"Ah, how can that be?" said Agnes. "Who could lose faith in so dear a
Lord as ours, and so loving a mother?"
"Agnes, dear little lamb, you know nothing of the world; and I should be
most wicked to disturb your lovely peace of soul with any sinful doubts.
Oh, Agnes, Agnes, I am most miserable, most unworthy!"
"Dear Sir, should you not cleanse your soul by the holy sacrament of
confession, and receive the living Christ within you? For He says,
'Without me ye can do nothing.'"
"Oh, Agnes, sacrament and prayer are not for such as me! It is only
through your pure prayers I can hope for grace."
"Dear Sir, I have an uncle, a most holy man, and gentle as a lamb. He is
of the convent San Marco in Florence, where there is a most holy prophet
risen up."
"Savonarola?" said the cavalier, with flashing eyes.
"Yes, that is he. You should hear my uncle talk of him, and how blessed
his preaching has been to many souls. Dear Sir, come some time to my
uncle."
At this moment the sound of Elsie's voice was heard ascending the path
to the gorge outside, talking with Father Antonio, who was returning.
Both started, and Agnes looked alarmed.
"Fear nothing, sweet lamb," said the cavalier; "I am gone."
He kneeled and kissed the hand of Agnes, and disappeared at one bound
over the parapet on the side opposite that which they were approaching.
Agnes hastily composed herself, struggling with that half-guilty
feeling which is apt to weigh on a conscientious nature that has been
unwittingly drawn to act a part which would be disapproved by those
whose good opinion it habitually seeks. The interview had but the more
increased her curiosity to know the history of this handsome stranger.
Who, then, could he be? What were his troubles? She wished the interview
could have been long enough to satisfy her mind on these points. From
the richness of his dress, from his air and manner, from the poetry and
the jewel that accompanied it, she felt satisfied, that, if not what she
supposed, he was at least nobly born, and had shone in some splendid
sphere whose habits and ways were far beyond her simple experiences. She
felt towards him somewhat of the awe which a person of her condition in
life naturally felt toward that brilliant aristocracy which in those
days assumed the state of princes, and the members of which were
supposed to look down on common mortals from as great a height as the
stars regard the humblest flowers of the field.
"How strange," she thought, "that he should think so much of me! What
can he see in me? And how can it be that a great lord, who speaks so
gently and is so reverential to a poor girl, and asks prayers so humbly,
can be so wicked and unbelieving as he says he is? Dear God, it cannot
be that he is an unbeliever; the great Enemy has been permitted to try
him, to suggest doubts to him, as he has to holy saints before now. How
beautifully he spoke about his mother!--tears glittered in his eyes
then,--ah, there must be grace there after all!"
"Well, my little heart," said Elsie, interrupting her reveries, "have
you had a pleasant day?"
"Delightful, grandmamma," said Agnes, blushing deeply with
consciousness.
"Well," said Elsie, with satisfaction, "one thing I know,--I've
frightened off that old hawk of a cavalier with his hooked nose. I
haven't seen so much as the tip of his shoe-tie to-day. Yesterday he
made himself very busy around our stall; but I made him understand that
you never would come there again till the coast was clear."
The monk was busily retouching the sketch of the Virgin of the
Annunciation. He looked up, and saw Agnes standing gazing towards the
setting sun, the pale olive of her cheek deepening into a crimson
flush. His head was too full of his own work to give much heed to the
conversation that had passed, but, looking at the glowing face, he said
to himself,--
"Truly, sometimes she might pass for the rose of Sharon as well as the
lily of the valley!"
The moon that evening rose an hour later than the night before, yet
found Agnes still on her knees before the sacred shrine, while Elsie,
tired, grumbled at the draft on her sleeping-time.
"Enough is as good as a feast," she remarked between her teeth; still
she had, after all, too much secret reverence for her grandchild's piety
openly to interrupt her. But in those days, as now, there were the
material and the spiritual, the souls who looked only on things that
could be seen, touched, and tasted, and souls who looked on the things
that were invisible.
Agnes was pouring out her soul in that kind of yearning, passionate
prayer possible to intensely sympathetic people, in which the
interests and wants of another seem to annihilate for a time personal
consciousness, and make the whole of one's being seem to dissolve in an
intense solicitude for something beyond one's self. In such hours prayer
ceases to be an act of the will, and resembles more some overpowering
influence which floods the soul from without, bearing all its faculties
away on its resistless tide.
Brought up from infancy to feel herself in a constant circle of
invisible spiritual agencies, Agnes received this wave of intense
feeling as an impulse inspired and breathed into her by some celestial
spirit, that thus she should be made an interceding medium for a soul in
some unknown strait or peril. For her faith taught her to believe in an
infinite struggle of intercession in which all the Church Visible and
Invisible were together engaged, and which bound them in living bonds of
sympathy to an interceding Redeemer, so that there was no want or woe
of human life that had not somewhere its sympathetic heart, and its
never-ceasing prayer before the throne of Eternal Love. Whatever may be
thought of the actual truth of this belief, it certainly was far more
consoling than that intense individualism of modern philosophy which
places every soul alone in its life-battle,--scarce even giving it a God
to lean upon.