THE PICTURE OF SAINT ANTHONY.
Magdalene knelt in prayer at the tomb of her brother. She too celebrated
the anniversary of this sad day, when the blood of her beloved brother
had been shed, and shed on her account. At one blow, she had lost
brother and betrothed; for the hand that killed her brother could not
lead her to the marriage altar, and yet both brother and betrothed had
loved her. For this twofold love she had exchanged her father's hatred,
for the father saw in his daughter only the murderer of his son. And
what was the maiden's prayer? Both were dead, and prayer could not bring
them back. Her happiness for this world was over, and she had no
suspicion of the hand that had destroyed it.
Deep stillness reigned throughout the church. Any other maiden would
have been afraid to kneel here. The moon shone through the window, and
lighted up the carving on the altar, the figure of the martyr, that
bound to a tree and pierced through with arrows, writhed in his pain;
lighted up, too, the dragon trampled under foot by the victorious
archangel, the heavy candelabra, with their wax candles burned down, and
finally the altar picture itself, with the figure of the Saint, with the
monsters and the seductive woman. The moonlight crept in farther, and
lighted up the marble slab under which her brother rested--a prostrate
figure, with hands folded on the breast. In the tower hooted the owls,
and the death-bird screamed. In the garden outside, the two bears
growled to show that they were still on watch. From the castle hall,
from time to time, sounded the noise of the drunken revellers. Magdalene
would have gladly entered a convent, where her broken heart could have
found most peace, but her father would not listen to it. He wanted to
marry her, but no suitor came; the young nobility shunned the castle,
they pitied the maiden for her sad fate, but they shrunk before the evil
nature of her father. The mourning bride and raging father-in-law alike
repelled them, and the more mournful the maiden, the more raging became
Grazian Likovay. Amid all terrors for the maiden, the most frightful
were these wild banquets. It was from these that she sought refuge in
the darkness of the church. She knew well that such a revel was nothing
but a wild chorus of blasphemy. A hundred throats at once derided
Heaven, the future state, and the departed souls,--and this was the way
in which the dead brother's memory was celebrated. She tried with her
prayers to crowd out the drunken yells on their upward path; while the
revellers wandered to the cellars, and their wild cries sounded on the
air as if they came from the very bowels of the earth. The maiden
trembled as if in fever. The moonlight had left the windows; the church
now lay in darkness: only high up on the tower the moon yet shone on the
lonely bell. She gazed upwards. Suddenly it seemed to her as if the bell
were in motion. Was it an hallucination? Did her dream make visions so
real? The bell rang! Then it tolled as for the welfare of a dying soul.
And yet the bell had no rope, and there was no one to pull it if it had.
In her astonishment new marvels followed. The darkness in the church
began to give way to a twilight; 'twas the twilight that comes in
dreams. The altar picture shone; around the brow of the saint gleamed an
aureole, while the form of the seductive woman grew black. Before this
marvel, the maiden sank trembling on her knees. "O God, my Lord!" she
murmured. The last notes of the bell were dying away, and at the same
moment dropped down with a rolling sound the picture of Saint Anthony
of Padua with all its terrifying adjuncts, and in the space thus left
vacant stood a living figure. Again it was Anthony of Padua in monk's
cowl, barefooted, with tonsured head, a lighted torch in his hand. The
maiden in terror clasped both hands to her breast. Did this vision bring
death for her? Would that it might be so! The living figure stepped down
from the frame of the altar picture, and striding over books and stools
came nearer. With a gentle cry of terror the maiden sprang up, stretched
out both hands in entreaty, and turned away her face. She heard her
name, "Magdalene." Everything swam around her,--she fell in a swoon to
the ground. When she recovered consciousness, she saw those eyes beaming
upon her, whose glow was more wonderful than that of the sun. Perhaps
dreams come in a swoon. Dreams are deceivers; who knows how many worlds
her soul had wandered through in this short dream, how many eternities
she had lived through; she feared the phantom no more. With his name on
her lips she awoke, "Tihamer." To her he was always only "Tihamer."
"Have you come down from Heaven to me?" The young monk shook his head
sadly. He might with assurance have said that he came down from the
realms of the dead, so pallid was his countenance, so cold his hands.
The wax candle that he had brought with him now stood in a candlestick
on the altar and lighted up their faces. The young man spoke in a
subdued and gentle voice. "Be not astounded, I am no marvel, nor ghost,
nor spirit from the other world. I am a living, miserable man. The rumor
of my death was false. It was not my head that the Turks cut off in
prison, but my servant's, who had changed clothes with me."
"And this dress of yours?" whispered Magdalene, touching his rough
monk's cowl.
"This is my mourning garb for you, and for the whole world lost to me.
My name is Father Peter. I belong to the order of Jesuits. No longer
your beloved and betrothed--no longer the hope of your future, nor your
support in misfortune. No longer your defender against men, but only
your mediator between Heaven and earth, Father Peter."
The maiden knelt before him and fervidly kissed his hand.
"Father!"
The youth sighed deeply.
"You could not belong to me, so I give you to the Lord, you could not be
my bride, so you shall be Heaven's bride. I am come to make smooth the
way, to prepare the way whither you long to go."
"To a convent? Then you know! Is it true, you have talked with me in my
dreams?"
"Not in your dreams. I will not deceive you. Sound reason has brought me
to the knowledge that after this staggering blow that has fallen on your
heart, you must long to enter a convent. Your father will not allow it;
he intends to marry you to the Pole Berezowsky."
"I do not know him at all."
"I know him; this bridegroom intended for you is an ugly decrepit old
drunkard, who has already buried six wives, and furthermore is a
Socinian."
"What! deny his God!"
"Denies the Trinity, believes Christ only a good man, and the Holy Ghost
only a white dove; nothing more."
"But you will free me from him, won't you?" entreated the maiden,
clasping the young man's knees.
"With your assent."
"How could you get here? Whence did you come?"
"Truly, I have taken my way through the lower regions to come to you; a
long underground passage, that men worse than the devil planned for the
destruction of mankind, and that is still filled with evidences of their
deeds of terror. It is frightful to wander there. The secret of this
hidden way, I learned from an old yellowed book, which had made ten wise
men fools, and whose secret was finally revealed by a Fool. This book
too was a work of the Devil, but the real Hell and the genuine Devil,
Fate has shown me in another form. The inexorable rules of our order
compel me to serve as instructor and confessor in the house of that
woman, who, in my opinion, is worse than Belial and all his demons. I am
at the castle of the Lady of Madocsany."
The maiden put her hand on her heart and caught her breath.
"This is my Hell and my Devil; day after day to see the woman whom I
have hated since our first acquaintance. Offensive is the woman, however
beautiful she may be, who is ever eager to disclose to a man the
feelings of her heart, which ought to be a secret to divine, a prize to
win, a treasure to guard for their possessor. Still more ought this
woman to have concealed her secret, for every one of her thoughts was
inspired by sin; her husband still lived. How she became a widow was a
burden on her conscience. How she treated me--may she answer for it to
God! Her secrets told in confession rest in my breast under the seal of
the sacrament. I must in God's name absolve her from sins that my human
heart cannot forgive. Day after day must I look upon that face whose
accursed smile destroyed our fortunes. I must lend an ear to her
diabolical words of enticement, which she whispers to me under the
mantle of confession. Is not that worse than Hell?"
The maiden pressed his hand, and said in soothing tones, "You are right;
yours is the greater suffering. I will not complain."
"Your sufferings too are well known to me. This demon entertains me
daily with bad news about you. She knows everything that happens in your
house, and she takes special delight when she can distress me with such
tales. But let us not waste our time in complaining. We must part. I
have a long way to go underground and must arrive while it is still
dark, so no one can mark the entrance by which I go. Answer me one
question. Do you wish to go into a convent?"
"It is my one wish."
"It shall be fulfilled. I must first tell your decision to the Abbess of
a convent, so that when I take you away through the underground passage
to the Madocsany Castle, a nun may be waiting for you there with a
closed carriage. Great prudence and careful preparations are necessary.
We must agree upon the day for meeting here again."
"Next Sunday."
"Well, then, any Sunday after midnight. I cannot get away earlier, for
it is so late before the spoiled child who is entrusted to my care falls
asleep, and the Fool who keeps vigils with me becomes drunk."
"But tell me," asked the maiden, "How could you guess that you would
find me here at this hour? Did vision tell you?"
"Even if I deceive the whole world, I will tell you only the truth. I
have had no visions; neither ecstacy nor second-sight revealed this to
me. I had certainty. To-day is the anniversary of your brother's death,
and to-night it is celebrated in your castle with a carouse. You could
not remain in the house, where every nook and corner was filled with
their disgusting gluttony. Here only, could you find protection--at your
brother's grave, where you could pray through the frightful night. You
must pray, first for the soul of your brother, and then for his
murderer's--the whole litany from beginning to end. Finally, I decided
that if I did not find you here, I would pass through the church door
into the castle. Many buffoons are there now, disguised in monk's cowl,
and it would not have been difficult for me to join them and look for
you."
The young man saw a look of terror on Magdalene's face, and she seized
him by the hand.
"What is the matter?" he asked.
She said nothing; she only thought what if her beloved had been torn to
pieces by the bears in his attempt to pass to the castle. But she would
not say this to him, lest she waken his fears for her, a weak woman; she
must always pass to the church through such perils.
"I was thinking," she said, with a constrained, distressed smile, "what
if you had found the door locked when you tried to go out of the
church?"
"I knew for a fact that the door of the church is never locked. Your
father has given orders that it shall always remain open. Every corner
of this church has its sad history, but none more sad than the history
of the door."
"You know it?"
"I heard it from the tormentor of my soul. It will be better for you not
to know it; you have enough in your misfortune."
"I beg of you, tell me this story. The knowledge that another has
suffered still more gives me consolation. Who was it?"
"Your older sister, Sophie."
"I remember her; she was tall and beautiful, with large dark eyes. How
often I stroked her beautiful rosy cheeks, when she took me in her lap,
for I was still a child. And then I remember when they laid her in her
coffin, I stroked her cheeks again, but they were marble-white and
cold."
"There she rests," said the young man, pointing to the wall, where two
marble tablets were in sight, one large, one small; on one was a large
cross, on the other a small one; then the date. On the smaller tablet
one year more than on the larger, and that was all the inscription.
"Why is there neither name nor inscription?" asked Magdalene, stunned.
"There are two of them, mother and child."
"And why are their names not on the tablets?"
"They had no names."
"I do not understand you."
"You ought not to. It is a sad story. They too loved one another, more
passionately than we. They too suffered, still more than we. They too
were disturbed by your father in their love. Shame was to him preferable
to a son-in-law. His daughter died the day her child was born, and was
buried here; a year later the child followed; and when they brought her
here to bury her beside her mother and opened the church door, your
father stumbled over the body of his daughter; the unhappy girl had
been buried in a trance, had wakened, struggled to the church door,
found it locked, and so perished pitiably at its threshold."
"Frightful!" stammered the maiden, shuddering, and glancing with a look
of terror at the two tablets.
"That is why there are no names inscribed. Since then, Grazian Likovay
never has this church door locked."
"Let us hurry away from here," said the maiden, trembling. "Will you
come here next Sunday about midnight?"
"I will come; but you must hurry away now."
They parted with a pressure of the hand.
Father Peter had to pass through the hiding-place behind the altar
picture, which with all its demons resumed its place. For some time the
face of Saint Anthony was surrounded with a halo of light from the torch
of the departing monk. The small bell in the tower rang again, for it
was connected by hidden clock-work with the secret passage-way.
Formerly, when the castle had been held by the Hussites, this bell rung,
by its secret clock-work, had given warning when any one was approaching
from Madocsany. When the bell stopped ringing, the altar picture was
again in darkness. It was two minutes past midnight; outside the cock
crowed. The maiden, as she went toward the church door, looked timidly
before and behind to see if her sister Sophie were present; outside a
still greater terror waited. One bear lay across the threshold asleep.
She needed only to summon all her courage and climb over him; but the
other was awake, grimly gnawing a bone that he could not crush in his
teeth. "Help me, God," sighed the maiden, and ran past the creature,
throwing her honey-cakes as she went. The wild beasts let her pass
unharmed, but it would have been better for her had they torn her to
pieces, then would she have been a beautiful martyr and saint in
Paradise.